Thursday, April 24, 2003 :::
Taranto reports:
Presidential candidate John Kerry says he'll make a campaign issue of Republican plans to spend $200 million to re-elect President Bush. The Massachusetts senator says, as the Boston Globe puts it, that such spending "would confirm the party as the handmaiden to the wealthiest Americans."
I believe the response to that is, "That's all of our donors' contributions combined, Senator." Kerry married into nearly three times that.This is one of the most common perspective errors that drives me the most nuts; it's the comparison of numbers that scale with the U.S. population with those that don't. $200 million only sounds like a lot of money because it would be a lot of money in the hands of one person, as it is with the Senator. From 2% of the U.S. population, that's less than $40 a person. As I say, we see this mistake in many other contexts: when one person dies of something in this country every day, that means it's pretty damn rare, but it won't be spun that way.
::: posted by dWj at 11:19 AM
