Is Abortion Rare?

From a 2012 New York Times editorial page blog , entitled "Is Abortion Rare?":

"In a given year, 2 percent of American women between the ages of 15 and 44 have an abortion. That means 98 percent of them do not."  To the blogger, this implied that abortion is rare.

Hmm--what kind of logic is that?  At 2 percent per year, over the 29 year span cited, this would imply that the probability of a given woman having an abortion in her lifetime would be 

 That is a remarkably high number.
$\mathrm{<br>}$ An even better perspective on the frequency of abortion is to simply compare annual abortion rates and birth rates.  In 2008, the latest year I found both numbers for, there were 4.2 million births in the U.S.  How many abortions?  According to the Guttmacher Institute, (and several right-to-life pages give similar numbers), 1.2 million.  That implies that 1.2/5.2=22% of all pregnancies are aborted.  That's 2 out of 9, almost 1 in 4.

An informal survey of my generally well-informed and well-educated friends, on both sides of the issue of whether or not abortion should be legal, finds that 100% of them are appalled by these numbers.

All agree: abortion is much too common in our society.  It is anything but rare.

Offshore Bank Accounts and the U.S. Debt

Did you notice this news item a few weeks ago?  The ICIJ obtained and released records of off-shore, secret, bank accounts of 250,000 organizations and individuals.  That there are substantial sums in such banks is known by anyone who has read spy novels.  But the real surprise is the amount of money represented:  at least 21 trillion dollars.

Numbers like $21 trillion are very hard to grasp without something to compare them to.  In this case, a good comparison is to the public debt of the United States.  For everyone knows that the U.S. is in hock for an unconscionable sum that will be impossible to pay off in anyone's lifetime.  What is the size of the U.S. debt?  As of April 2013, it is $11.9 trillion.

The staggering truth behind these numbers is that a relatively small number of people and organizations are so wealthy as to have (formerly) hidden money representing about twice the total public debt of the United States.

It is fashionable to present the public debt on a per-capita basis, $38,000 each.  This number is meant to frighten, but it is clearly deceptive.  For a relatively small number of people have more than enough hidden assets to repay that debt in full.  Any kind of progressive weighting of the debt will substantially lower the debt figure for the average person.

The final conclusions?  1) Our national debt, while serious, is a solvable problem.  2) We have an insanely inequitable distribution of wealth.

The Price of Gasoline

The fixation of modern American society on the price of gasoline at the pump is amusing.  The local newspaper  frequently runs front page stories when the price of a gallon of gas changes by more than a few cents. Gasbuddy.com tracks gas prices to 4 significant digits, as if my transportation decisions would be altered were the price to change from $3.362/gal to $3.363/gal.  Republicans and Democrats alike seem to agree-the price of gas is TOO HIGH!  The President should do something about it!

So, how expensive is gasoline?  One way to quantify this question is to compare the cost of gas to the total cost of operating a typical car, which is:   59.6 cents/mile as of 2012, according to the American Automobile Association.  That's a shocking number--can it be right?  Does it really cost me 6 bucks to drive across town?

Well, the AAA probably knows what it's talking about, but the AAA is not an unbiased observer so perhaps that number is exaggerated.  We can however check to see if that number is reasonable if we remember that the IRS is evil.  We can all agree on that.  Since the IRS is evil, and since automobile travel is deductible for business expenses, volunteer work, etc.,  it follows that the IRS would never exaggerate its reimbursement rate for automobile usage.  We can therefore take the IRS mileage reimbursement rate to be a lower limit on the average cost per mile of operating a typical vehicle.  What is the IRS rate?  56.5 cents per mile for business expenses! Surprisingly--suspiciously--close to the AAA number.

The next thing number we need in order to figure out how expensive gasoline is is the "gas mileage" of the average vehicle.  Data from the Federal Highway Administration for cars extrapolate to 23.3 mpg for 2013.  (23.0 mpg in 2010, with a trend of 0.1 mpg/year to get 23.3 mpg in 2013).

Now we can get an idea of what fraction of the cost of car ownership goes to gas.  At 23.3 mpg, and $3.36/gal, it costs 14 cents/mile for gas.  What!?!  Compared to the total cost of ~56 cents/mile, that means the cost of gas is only 25%,  1/4, of the cost of driving a car.  If the price of gas doubled--a hypothetical event that the newspapers would no doubt describe in the most apocalyptic of terms-- the cost of owning a car would increase by only 1/4.

Gasoline is dirt cheap.

This reminds me of an old Bloom County strip.  "Louise, dump the milk.  The cat drinks unleaded from now on!"