The federal budget for fiscal year 2021 was $6.8 trillion, and revenue was only $4.05 trillion. That added nearly $3 trillion to the $29 trillion national debt.
Congress just passed an infrastructure bill with bipartisan support of $1 trillion. And the House recently passed the Democrats' sweeping $1.9 trillion budget reconciliation package, which still needs Senate approval. Both of these spending packages will add nearly $3 trillion more to the national debt.
A meme on Facebook asked that we consider how long 1 trillion seconds is. One million seconds equals: 16.67 billion minutes; 277.8 million hours; 11.6 million days; and 23,800 years, counting leap years.
Then, it said, think about money. So, what can $1 trillion buy? 1 million houses that cost $1,000,000; 2.86 million houses at $350,000; 16.7 million cars that cost $60,000; 40 billion hours of labor at $25/hour, or a year’s wages for 19,200 people at $25/hour.
At the rate that the Democrats are spending money we don’t have, pretty soon, we will be talking about real money.
At some time, we must address this gargantuan debt, and start spending only what we collect, and that spending must include paying down the debt.
* * *
A recent emailed video contained a presentation from several years ago by Jorgen Peder Steffensen, Professor of Physics - Ice, Climate and Earth, at the Niels Bohr Institute.
In the presentation, Steffensen said that the NorthGRIP (Northern Greenland Ice Project) was reopened to drill the last few meters through the ice sheet to the rock beneath the ice station.
“The ice core, over 3 kilometers in length, has been hauled up to the surface piece by piece, and holds important data on the history of the climate of the Earth,” he said. “It bears the fingerprints of climactic conditions for more than 120,000 years.”
Steffensen used a chart showing the temperature changes in the ice core over a period of 8,000 years. The temperature changes are shown on a chart using 4 gradations, top to bottom, with 4.0 being the warmest, and 0.0 being the coldest. Remember, ice forms at 0 degrees Celsius and 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
The warmest temperatures are 3.7 on the 4-gradation scale starting 7,500 years ago, lasting until about 4,800 years ago. At that time a long period of cooling began, ending roughly 2.6 gradations cooler 2,100 years ago. The temperature at that time was at 1.1 on the scale.
Then a warming period occurred, during which the temperature rose to about 2.5 on the scale about 1,000 years ago, which Steffensen identified as the Medieval Warm Period. That temperature was about 1.0 gradation warmer on average than today.
Other core samples from elsewhere in Greenland confirm that the Little Ice Age ended 140 or so years ago, Steffensen said, the coldest point in the last 10,000 years, at 0.6, near the bottom of the scale.
So, the warmest temperatures detected by NorthGRIP were 3.7 on the scale, and the coolest temperatures were 0.6 on the scale, a difference of 3.1 units on the 4-gradation scale.
Steffensen said, “I agree completely that we have had a global temperature increase in the 20th Century. But an increase from what?”
The answer: From the Little Ice Age’s 0.6 mark. From there to today’s 1.5 mark is an increase of 0.9, which is less than the rise during the Medieval Warm Period.
NorthGRIP showed that Earth was much warmer 8,000 years ago than it is today, and a good bit warmer during the Medieval Warm Period about a thousand years ago than today.
While Earth’s temperature has been rising since the start of the 20th Century, this warming follows the coldest temperatures in 8,000 years. And a warming period is a natural occurrence after a cooling period.
Perhaps the visions of climate catastrophe we see all around us are not really warranted.
* * *
The Washington Post reported last week on a report released by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA). The report, the Global State of Democracy 2021, listed “back-sliding democracies,” and for the first time, the United States is on that list.
The Post quoted from the report: “The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale.”
The organization bases its analysis of about 160 countries, looking at 50 years of democratic indicators.
“The study, which analyzed trends from 2020 and 2021, found that more than a quarter of the world’s population now lives in democratically backsliding countries,” The Post wrote, “which International IDEA defines as nations seeing a gradual decline in the quality of their democracy.”
The International IDEA report said, “The world is becoming more authoritarian as non-democratic regimes become even more brazen in their repression and many democratic governments suffer from backsliding by adopting their tactics of restricting free speech and weakening the rule of law, exacerbated by what threatens to become a ‘new normal’ of Covid-19 restrictions.”
Along with the other disturbing news we are dealing with, this is especially disturbing for those of us living in the “land of the free.”
No comments:
Post a Comment