Life Expectancy!

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Back to Health Care

A good friend of mine, arguing against national health care told me, "Yeah, but I don't want to pay 15% taxes to pay for it." The above chart shows US health care expenditures as a percent of GDP in 2006. Looks to be just over 15%.

National Debt as percentage of GDP

Note: Total debt HAS actually exceeded our gross domestic product in the late WWII years and the early years after the war.

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TAX DAY!

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Hi Folks. Political dialog historically has been driven by folks with specific agendas using things called "Talking Points." Sometimes those "Talking Points" reflect a person's or party's broad view of how to better serve the broader public. More often than not those "Talking Points" are designed to facilitate that person's or party's larger plan to gain political power or defeat their political foes. I watch the TV news programs, read the headlines, blogs, widely distributed e-mails, listen to people around me talk and it seems to me that this public dialog just parrots partisan "Talking Points." Facts seem scarce, which is a shame because they're so readily available. Most public agencies publish raw data and that raw data can be easily verified by second parties. The problem, as I see it, is that this data only finds it's way into public discourse in bits and pieces.

I'd like to see more actual DATA as part of public dialog. People are smarter than media outlets and politicians give them credit, but People need to have more non-biased information to help improve public dialog.

I was never a big fan of Ross Perot's politics, but I loved the way he used simple charts and graphs to convey a message. That's my goal. Present information in an easy to understand way to give us all something more intelligent to talk about. You may agree with me, you may not. That's not the point. Let's all be smarter!