The Unbroken Window

A minimum wage worker in the U.S. working for an entire year would earn in wages alone 50% more than the average income of a “representative” world citizen.

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The US has more area dedicated to lawns than it does to any single farm crop – about 50 thousand square miles. That’s about 32 million acres, or an amount of land roughly 38% of the size of all land managed by the National Park Service.

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Automobile accidents are among the most serious causes of death in America today, though the hazards have been deceasing. For example, in 2008, there were 37,261 traffic fatalities in the U.S. With a population of roughly 310 million people, this means that in any given year one in nearly 10,000 people will die in an [...]

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The minimum wage in Luxembourg is €1758 per month. This is about $2,500 US dollars per month. In other words, the minimum wage in Luxembourg amounts to an annual salary of $30,000.  That must explain why they are the world leaders in this category.

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The current unemployment rate in Spain is … 21%. In Norway? 3.4%

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Last year at about this time I first heard a public service announcement claiming that 1 in 8 Americans were hungry. I protested at the time that this was an unrealistically large number. And no, that was not an attempt to disparage the poor or to lessen the potential severity of what poverty is like. [...]

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How’s this for a howler. Government K12 schools spend about twice per student per year than the average American health care expenditures.

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According to the National Research Council of Canada: LEED buildings used 18-39% less energy per floor area than their conventional counterparts.  However, 28-35% of LEED buildings used more energy than their conventional counterparts. I am sure that LEED building standards are favored by the construction and contractor lobbies as such standards raisethe cost of construction. By the [...]

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EMF-22 climate models are used to estimate the social cost of carbon … out to the year 2300.

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From tomorrow’s WSJ, the line of the month: When it was first conceived, the shuttle was supposed to be a kind of space truck, going into orbit 50 to 75 times a year and carrying large payloads at a cost of $54 million a launch in 2011 dollars. It didn’t work out that way. The [...]

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