Yesterday, tens of thousands of people across the United States and the world marched in support of scientific research at the March for Science. This march took place almost exactly a month after President Trump revealed his budget request to Congress. Trump’s budget included startling cuts to nearly all scientific research agencies including the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH is the largest biomedical research organization in the world. NIH directly employs over 5,000 of the world’s smartest biomedical researchers, and through scientific grants, is the backbone for biomedical research across the country. The graph on the left shows the operating budget of the NIH from 1994 to today (inflation adjusted), including the effect of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and Trump’s proposed $6+ billion cut. The negative consequences of Trump’s proposal are frankly hard to overstate. To start, there would be no funding available for new grants in fiscal year 2018. No money would be allocated to study healthcare quality. And a program vital to fostering international collaboration would be eliminated. As Kathy Hudson, a former deputy director at NIH put it to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “The nation would lose research and researchers in a way that would not be recoverable.”
Tag: Trump
Find the Phony
It’s time to play a fun and challenging new game called Find the Phony where we all try to guess which unemployment data is phony. Is it Option A courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or Option B courtesy of Trump et al? Feel free to post your answers in the comments.
Crime
Donald Trump ran for president promising a return to law and order, a pledge which was supported largely by falsehoods. As president, he has repeated these claims, stating that the murder rate in America is the highest it’s been in the past 45-47 years. In fact, the murder rate has been consistently low since the early 2000’s, and crime rates overall have been steadily declining since the early 1990’s. The graph on the left shows the percent change in rates for murder, all violent crime, and all property crime from 1970 to 2015 (the last year complete data is available). To show how much lower the current rates are compared to the highest levels of the past 45 years, the graph also projects these highest levels out to 2015 for easy visual comparison. In order for today’s rates to reach those historic highs, and for Trump’s claim about murder in America to be correct, an entire sold-out audience at the Hollywood Bowl would need to be murdered (over 17,000 people). To match the highest rates of all violent crime, the entire population of Dallas would need to be assaulted (over 1,200,000 people), and to match the highest property crime rate, the entire population of New Jersey would need to be robbed (over 9,000,000 people).
Travel Ban
A mere seven days into his presidency, Donald Trump signed an executive order banning immigration and travel from seven majority-Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. Although the executive order is currently being contested in court, it is still on the books and is continuing to affect the lives of those seeking refuge and immigration. Trump claims this executive order was intended to protect the nation, but it would likely hurt Americans overall. The graph on the left shows the effect of an immigration ban on these same countries had it been implemented in 2000, before the September 11th attacks. This immigration ban would have blocked three terrorism events which injured a total of thirty people and killed zero. It would have also blocked immigration for over 5000 doctors, each one of whom does 17 times more to improve the lives of Americans every year than all the terrorists cost put together! For a comparison, this is like trying to stop your teenage neighbor from setting off a single M80 firework by hitting him with not one, but two Tomahawk cruise missiles!
Unemployment
As a candidate and as president, Donald Trump has made wildly exaggerated claims about unemployment in America. The graph on the left shows the unemployment rate since 2001 and, for a broader measure of those seeking work, the graph also shows the rate of unemployment plus underemployment*. As of last month, these two rates are 4.7% and 9.2% respectively. Trump, on the other hand, has claimed rates ranging from 20% to 42%. By this degree of exaggeration, Trump would claim that the average height of an American male (about 5′ 10″ in reality) is over 18 feet tall! And that’s giving Trump the benefit of the doubt that he includes underemployment. If his claims are about only unemployment, it’s as if Trump is claiming the average American male is over 36 feet tall!
* The unemployment plus underemployment rate is the broadest unemployment measure. It includes those who are unemployed, those who are so economically discouraged that they have stopped seeking employment, and those working part-time who wish they were working full-time.
Data on the Rocks 