Stuff your data processor when you enter the crack world forum politic.
When Democratic candidates run for office, they always stand strong in opposition to cuts
in education. My community newspaper in Roseville Minnesota just ran a voter’s guide where readers can discover where the candidates stand on several issues.
I discovered that my local Democratic State Representative is opposed to cuts in funding to K-12 and to higher education. She must really care about children’s education right? Want to read more?
Which countries are the most religious? — Here is a ranking of the importance of religion to the residents of many countries of the world. This is based upon a Gallup survey.
The Distribution of World Religions
The most religious countries tend to be either poor, Muslim or both. Your country is probably less religious if it is wealthy and European. Gallup just did a survey in 114 countries and found that religion pays an important part of the lives of most people in the world. I have taken their survey and worked with information from the CIA Factbook that I have listed on my “The Types of World Governments” post and came up with the table listed at the bottom of this page.
As everybody already knows, the American Stock market crashed in November of 2008. It hit bottom early in 2009 and then rebounded. As you can see from the stock chart below, the Dow Jones has nearly doubled from its lows and moved past the 11000 point level.
However if we look at this index over the last 12 years, we can see that the djia was above the 9000 level in 1998. This means that there has been only a 2000 point gain, or only a total of 22% increase during the last 12 year period.
This makes me wonder whether the strategy of buying and holding conservative American stocks is dead. We probably won’t have another 1929 stock market crash ahead of us, but is there any reason to think that we can make a reasonable rate of return by buying and holding the stocks of the dow jones industrial average?
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Congratulations Americans; you and I have just made history! We have run up our debt to such a level that the bond market is starting to quake! For the first time several large corporations can borrow money from bond investors at a lower rate than the Federal Government can. Want to read more?
Here is a piechart of the total spending in health care in the United States in 2008. Tell me specifically; how would you go about cutting health care costs? It’s a tough problem ain’t it? Want to read more?
Here are some rankings of the States by several different factors. These are the statistics that I could dig up as of March 2010.
When comparing liberal states with conservative states you will notice that:
With more than one in five Japanese 65 or older, the government is encouraging citizens like Tsuneko Hariki of Kamikatsu to work well past traditional retirement age.
Low birth rates have many negative effects on a country’s economy. This is true even in over-populated countries—the birth rate of a country is obviously related to the problem of over-population, but each of the two problems also need to be considered separately.
Here is some data about retirement from the Economist Magazine via Greg Mankiw’s blog along with the birthrates from the CIA Factbook.
The replacement rate for a population with no growth is about 2.33 children per woman (although that is a vague and changing number). Want to read more?
The CIA Factbook created a “field guide” to Government Types. This guide lists various forms of governments that have either been implemented somewhere, or have been thought up by some influential philosopher.
I copied the CIA Factbook information below, along with a list of countries and their style of government.
Can Democracy work everywhere?
A couple of things popped out at me when I looked at the definitions and the list of countries. First of all, just because a country is called by a nice name such as; republic or parliamentary democracy doesn’t mean that they have created utopia. Countries like Yemen or the Congo would be better classified as Oligarchies. Want to read more?
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