So, what was our energy policy again?

Liz, at Spector Sport, has a post about the effect of higher gas prices that speaks for itself. I've quoted it below, but please go visit Liz's site and read her other stuff. It's good.

I don't know exactly what it is that Liz does for a living, but I gather that it involves traveling around Virginia inspecting grocery stores for some government agency. Anyway, her job puts her in contact with lots of small-business owners, who have interesting stories to tell. This one makes me wonder -- when your party controls the executive and legislative branch, at what point do you have to take responsibility for an energy policy that doesn't address dramatically increasing gas prices?

Not just gas shortages any more

I hear more and more often from the owners of small convenience stores in rural areas that their bread, dairy and/or grocery vendors will no longer drive that far to supply them. The cost of gas and diesel fuel has made it unprofitable to run a refrigerated truck twenty miles out into the boonies to keep a small store stocked.

Some stores simply don't sell bread or milk any more. Some store owners drive to a Costco or Sam's Club once a week and buy at near retail themselves, in order to keep at least a small inventory of dairy products and bread on hand. Others make deals with friends who own stores in larger towns; the friend contracts for enough for both stores, and gets reimbursed by the owner of the more remote store.

One might conclude that buying at a convenience store isn't the wisest way to spend one's money anyway. But many of these stores serve an elderly, poor population that may have no easy way to get into town to the supermarket. Many of them are disabled enough that they couldn't drive even if they could afford a car, and many have no family members living nearby who could help. In some counties, non-emergency transport is available to take people into town to shop, or for doctor's appointments and the like. But this isn't available everywhere, and it often seems as though the most needy areas have the least services of this sort.

So these little convenience stores in the most remote areas provide an important service, and they are having an increasingly difficult time staying stocked. Some of them are just going out of business. I arrived at one store to find that it was closing that same day. The owner had fallen and broken her hip, and while she was more or less ambulatory in terms of taking care of herself, she could no longer drive. Her dairy vendor had long since stopped stocking the store, and her bread vendor had told her the previous month that he couldn't afford to drive out there any more either. She said to me with a pained little laugh, "All these years I've been trying to keep things on hand so the old widows around here could walk to the grocery store. Now I'm just another old widow like them, and I don't know how I'm going to get my food either."

As gas prices continue to rise, I expect to hear more stories like this. Churches and social services will step in to help to some extent, of course, but I worry that the first response will be to move people out of their homes into assisted living, something that costs a whole lot more than keeping a remotely located grocery store stocked.

The Price We Pay (as of August 17, 2005)

According to the Department of Defense, the number of Americans (soldiers and military-related civilians) who have been killed in Iraq as of August 17, 2005 is 1,854. The number of Americans wounded who were able to return to duty within 72 hours is 7,262, and the number of wounded who could not be returned to duty is 6,759 (for a total of 14,021 wounded).

So how much are the lives of the dead soldiers worth today, in cold dollars and cents? By my calculations, approximately $175,000,000.

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In an effort to be transparent, here is the methodology I used to reach that number:

Federal statutes in various places (covering railroad workers, sailors, longshoremen and various other groups) set a death benefit compensation scheme of 50% of wages to the surviving spouse and 16.67% to surviving children, or 66.67% of wages. I therefore assumed that that amount -- 66.67% of wages -- times life expectency, reduced to present value, would roughly approximate what the dead person's life is worth by the standards of their employer, the Federal government. I am not saying that this is how the military death benefits are actually calculated or awarded, just that this is an objective measure that the government uses elsewhere.

In any event, I assumed that the average enlisted soldier serving in Iraq is an E-6 with fewer than 12 years of service, and that the average combat-duty officer is an O-4 with fewer than 12 years of service. My hypothetical enlisted soldier makes between $43,000 and $54,000 (approximately) [link], and the hypothetical officer makes between $69,000 and $95,000 (approximately) [link]. For purposes of my calculations, I chose the midpoint in each hypothetical salary grade, and then averaged the two salaries to get one hypothetical salary amount, $65,250. I then multiplied that number by 2/3, to get $43,717.50.

I then assumed an average life expectency of approximately 77 years (it's actually slightly higher than that). [link] I also assumed that my average soldier was 28 years old when he died, meaning he had a life expectency of 49 additional years. (Various websites have noted that the average age of casualties in Iraq is between 27 and 29. See, for example, this link to a post by war historian James Dunnigan [link].) Multiplying that times $43,717.50, I derived a total life value of $2,010,982.

Because that amount would be paid out as an annuity, I reduced the total down to present value. I assumed that the payments would be indexed for inflation at a 4% inflation rate. Applying the present value calculation, I determined that the net present value for each dead soldier's life would be approximately $95,000. I then multiplied that number by the number of dead to arrive at the amount of $175,000,000.

(Please note that because of the number of assumptions in my analysis, I have rounded some numbers in this description, although all calcuations were done in Excel, so they were correct to whatever number of decimal places were needed.)

Things Previously on My Chest

Judge Roberts...Clearly qualified, not clearly an ideologue. Is he the ideal nominee? No. But the Democrats lost the election, so we should get over ourselves and consider that it might have been worse (and that if Roberts is defeated, it could yet be worse).

NARAL...I understand that they are just playing a part in Roberts saga, but issue ads only work if there's nothing for the opposition to latch onto and make the story about the advocate instead of the message. By overselling their opposition, they gave the right the stick with which they were then bludgeoned.

Cindy Sheehan...Just once, couldn't liberal activists leave well enough alone? The symbolism of a grieving mother keeping a vigil while the President blows by in the limo on the way to a fundraiser is powerful, simple and compelling. Don't try to coopt this quixotic crusade or make it more than it is; the story plays better if she's a burr under the President's saddle instead of face of the antiwar movement. (For one thing, her public statements both before and during this protest suggest she's not the best front person; for another, to build a groundswell against the war, liberals need to build a grassroots coalition of hundreds of thousands of actively engaged citizens, not a cult of one.)

Judy Miller...It's not a free-speech issue. It's a signature example of mainstream journalists becoming part of the story rather than reporting on it. The politics of smear and slime thrive on the supposition that some lofty principle (protection of "confidential" sources) is at stake; the slimers appeal to this so that they won't be outed by a skeptical and independent media. Playing First Amendment martyr belittles actual instances of unjust impositions on a free press by overzealous prosecutors. (Bad facts make bad law, something that President Clinton's arguments on executive privilege made clear. The same is true here.)

Washington press corps...Please please please could you either be skeptical investigators who ferret out and call politicians on the bullshit that they feed you daily or just admit that you're lazy and like going to fancy dinners with important people? I'd prefer the former, but would accept the latter as a fact of life. I just don't like the facade of one cloaking the reality of the other.

Conservative pundits...Dissent is patriotic and is the lifeblood of a vibrant democracy. Slandering dissenters as unpatriotic betrays a shocking ignorance of what this country was founded on, dishonors the ideas that your obsessive flag worship supposedly glorifies, and is a disgrace to everyone who died for the right of each of us to think for ourselves. Furthermore, it betrays a degree of sophomoric insecurity in your positions that would be amusing if it weren't so corrosive.

The Price We Pay (as of August 8, 2005)

According to the Department of Defense, 1,829 Americans (military and DOD civilian) have been killed in Iraq as of August 8, 2005. The number of wounded remains at 13,769.

To put the number of dead in perspective, it equates to two people killed every day that we have been in Iraq. Using a "constant casualty comparitive" of 1.5 to 1 (Vietnam to today), that is the equivalent of 2,743 KIAs during the Vietnam War, which is approximately the number of KIAs in Vietnam as of Spring 1966.

Put another way, it is the same as if, over the course of 843 days, you killed everyone in the town of Helmetta, New Jersey (population: 1,825).

The Price We Pay

The media rarely report the numbers anymore, so let it be me who does.

According to the Department of Defense, as of August 3, 2005, the total number of military deaths in Iraq is 1,816. The number of wounded is 13,769, of whom approximately half (6,661) had wounds that did not permit them to be returned to duty within 72 hours. [link]

Of course, numbers don't really tell the whole story. For that, I recommend an article that was published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, which describes in detail how injured soldiers are treated, and the issues that treatment raises. The article also describes a bi-weekly conference call between surgeons at Walter Reed Medical Center and surgeons in Iraq, in which they review cases over the past two weeks. The excerpted description below is from the biweekly summary on October 21, 2004, but gives an idea of what the injury statistics alone blandly obscure. [If you're squeamish, you might want to skip to the bottom].

Every other Thursday, surgeons at Walter Reed hold War Rounds by telephone conference with surgeons in Baghdad to review the American casualties received in Washington during the previous two weeks. The case list from October 21 provides a picture of the extent of the injuries. There was one gunshot wound, one antitank-mine injury, one grenade injury, three rocket-propelled–grenade injuries, four mortar injuries, eight IED injuries, and seven patients with no cause of injury noted. The least seriously wounded of these patients was a 19-year-old who had sustained soft-tissue injuries to the face and neck from a mine and required an exploration of the left side of the neck. Other cases involved a partial hand amputation; a hip disarticulation on the right, through-knee amputation on the left, and open pelvic débridement; a left nephrectomy and colostomy; an axillary artery and vein reconstruction; and a splenectomy, with repair of a degloving scalp laceration and through-and-through tongue laceration. None of the soldiers were more than 25 years of age. [link]

If you ask me, the last line of the quote says it all.

True Colors

President Bush makes a comment that endorses "intelligent design". [link]

ID, as it's known to supporters, posits that the complexity of natural world is so great that it could not have evolved on its own, but must have resulted from an "intelligent designer". Critics say that ID is merely thinly-veiled creationism that doesn't belong in our children's science classes. Supporters insist it's not about religion, just alternative science.

Not so fast. Upon hearing the President's comment, Stephen Meyer, the director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (The institute is a leader in developing intelligent design), is quoted in the New York Times as saying this: "We interpret this as the president using his bully pulpit to support freedom of inquiry and free speech about the issue of biblical origins."

Question: If ID is about science, what's with the reference to "biblical origins"?

True colors, if you ask me.