Keeping track of the government’s checking account

For those who like to know the details of how much money the US government takes in (and from where) and how much it spends (and on what), the US Treasury publishes a wealth of figures.

In particular you can see the activity in its ‘checking account’ on a daily basis. Thursday, July 28th is the last day for which the figures are available and we are told that the government started the day with about $74 billion, took in $112 billion and spent $132 billion, leaving it at the end of the day with $54 billion.

You can see what is causing concern if you look at the last column that gives the fiscal-year-to-date figures. (Note that in the US, the fiscal year starts on October 1 and ends on September 30 of the following year.) It shows that the government started the fiscal year with $310 billion, and for the year so far had receipts of $9,108 billion and expenditures of $9,364 billion. So we have had a drop of $256 billion in just ten months, an average burn rate of $26 billion per month, which is why we are so close to emptying the account.

But the monthly figures can fluctuate wildly so the average rate is not a good predictor of what will happen in the short term. (Caution: When reading the monthly table, note that for some reason monthly deficits are entered as positive numbers and surpluses as negative.)

The Norwegian government’s reaction to the mass murder

Following the mass killings in Norway that, on a per capita basis, inflicted a death toll that was greater than that of 9/11, the government is treating it as a criminal matter and prime minister Jens Stoltenberg said that “I hope and also believe that the Norway we will see after will be more open, a more tolerant society than what we had before.”

Yes, his response is to want to make the country more open and tolerant.

Oh, those silly Norwegians. Don’t they know that that the proper response to a mass murder is to declare it to be a terrorist act, proclaim a war on terror that involves bombing and invading countries whose populations have the same religion as the killer, harass your own population by subjecting them to all manner of intrusive surveillance to make sure they are not up to no good, suspend constitutional rights by detaining people indefinitely without trial on the flimsiest of suspicions, create kangaroo courts to guarantee convictions and secret prisons overseas, and torture and kill those in custody?

Religious killers

It is interesting how mainstream religions react when one of their followers goes on a murderous rampage because of their religious beliefs. The religions immediately disavow such people because they claim, despite the historical record and the very words in their religious texts, that their religion is one of peace and anyone who commits such atrocities cannot be a true believer.

We have seen this absurd argument advanced repeatedly with members of all religions and the Christian killer in Norway is now being subject to the same shunning by his co-religionists, as The Daily Show illustrates.

It is part of the general pattern of whining as a response to criticisms of your views.

The logic of science-9: Can scientific theories be proven true?

(For other posts in this series, see here.)

In mathematics, the standard method of proving something is to start with the axioms and then apply the rules of logic to arrive at a theorem. In science, the parallel exercise is to start with a basic theory that consists of a set of fundamental entities and the laws or principles that are assumed to apply to them (all of which serve as the scientific analogues of axioms) and then apply the rules of logic and the techniques of mathematics to arrive at conclusions. For example, in physics one might start with the Schrodinger equation and the laws of electrodynamics and a system consisting of a proton and electron having specific properties (mass, electric charge, and so on) and use mathematics to arrive at properties of the hydrogen atom, such as its energy levels, emission and absorption spectra, chemical properties, etc. In biology, one might start with the theory of evolution by natural selection and see how it applies to a given set of entities such as genes, cells, or larger organisms.< [Read more…]

The Adventures of Dr. Orly Taitz Esquire, Queen of the Nutters

I know everyone has been curious about what Orly Taitz, our favorite lawyer/dentist/performance artist, whose obsession with Obama’s birth certificate has provided many hours of hilarity, has been up to recently.

First up, for some bizarre reason, she now refers to herself as “Dr. Orly Taitz Esquire” everywhere. Maybe she is unaware of the origins and meanings of the word ‘esquire’ and thinks it gives her a certain cachet.

You would have thought that the release of Obama’s long form birth certificate would have ended her quest. You would be wrong. She is nothing if not dogged. She is now demanding the right to personally examine the certificate, no doubt to use her sharp forensic skills to figure out how it was forged.

She also now claims that Obama is using a fake social security number and she is suing the Social Security Administration for, well, something, that will help her prove it.
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How the US government’s finances work

I have been on a crash course to try and understand the arcane details of what options are available if the current debt ceiling is reached with no action taken to raise it and the balance in the government’s account actually becomes zero. I thought I would share what I have learned so far.

We tend to think of the US government as having a checking account, just like many of us, and of the debt ceiling like a loan given to us by a bank. This is mostly true, except in one significant way that I will get to below. This informative article by John Carney says that the government does have something that looks like a checking account in which all the money it receives continuously (tax receipts, air transport security fees, the postal service, Medicare premiums, etc.) is deposited and from which all its payments (federal employee salaries, income tax refunds, NASA, interest on our debt, unemployment insurance benefits and paying defense contracts) goes out. To get an idea of the scale of transactions in that account, at the beginning of last Friday, the account had $83 billion and during the day it received $7 billion in deposits and paid out $13 billion in withdrawals, leaving it at the end of the day with $77 billion. When the debt ceiling is raised, the balance of money available for use in that account is effectively increased by that amount.
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The pathetic cosmological argument for god

It has become increasingly clear that cosmology has become the last refuge of those religious people eager to find some place where god can still have done something while remaining undetectable. But those arguments are clearly pretty desperate.

Jason Rosenhouse provides an excellent summary of the debate over cosmological arguments and concludes:

If the cosmological argument is the best theology has to offer then we atheists do not need to worry that we have overlooked a good argument for God’s existence.
…
As for the cosmological argument itself, I make no apology for being dismissive. Depending on what version you are considering, you can expect to find concepts like causality or probability being used in domains where they do not clearly apply, or dubious arguments for why an actual infinity cannot exist, or highly questionable premises about the beginnings of the universe or about how everything that began to exist must have had a cause, or groundless invocations of the principle of sufficient reason. You inevitably come so perilously close to assuming what you are trying to prove that you may as well just assume God exists and be done with it.

That’s my reaction to proponents of the cosmological arguments as well. They work so hard at finding implausible reasoning to support their pre-ordained conclusion that they might as well just say that believe in god because they want to or need to, even if it is unsupported by evidence.

How yogis ‘levitate’

Hindu mystics have long been claiming that they can, by sheer will and/or the intervention of god, levitate off the ground. Here is one way it is done.

A good rule of thumb is that if something violates the laws of science, it is not a miracle, it is not by ‘harnessing the energy field’ or some such Deepak Chopraesque mumbo-jumbo, and it is not due to a god. It is merely a trick. The only question to be explored is how the trick is carried out.