A Political Party of Math Freaks!

In My Humble Opinion
1

That’s what I want! I am willing to forgive them any lack of social skills, shyness and general nerdiness, if only they’ll fix the math in government!

ALL the math! I want to know the REAL cost of things, salaries including benefits, budget amounts, true deficits, actual costs and expenses! No more making a boat full of rice and 8 ‘experts’ amount to $80mil in “aid”.

Surely they can come up with some algorithm that will tell us exactly what the ideal/cost effective, overpaid executive to actual worker ratio should be? I mean they’re real clever, right?

Perhaps they could sort out the tax code. Close loopholes, return ‘fair’ to its function. Make it understandable so Joe Average can do it himself! Maybe even sort out corporate welfare? Devise a litmus test for efficiency of government, don’t meet the bar? Lose funding + one executive!

Tax anyone using ‘user fee’ as a revenue stream, including government agencies, until ‘user fee’ means just that, ONLY the actual costs involved, not some sly profit too. Banks wouldn’t be able to ding you a buck for something that only costs them a nickel to provide! And PayDay loans would have to call their fees interest, which is what it really is!
Who knows, perhaps they could even sort out Wall Street, restore some integrity to the whole mess. Sort of a resetting of all the systems, back to fair and honest!

Maybe even set up an independent agency to ascertain the ‘truthiness’ of any government math or numbers claim. They’d be able to say, “Well, it’s kind of true, but…”

I’d TOTALLY vote for such a party, no matter how awkward their candidate was!

2

I’m not sure what this has to do with math. “Closing loopholes” just means “raising taxes on people I don’t like.” How is math going to figure out which people you like and which people you don’t, because that’s an integral part of determining which tax breaks are shamelessly-exploited loopholes and which ones are giving a hand up to Joe Average.

3

Mathematician (by education anyway) here and I’m seconding Lord Feldon. You are suggesting there is an objective solution to an inherently subjective problem.

“Fair” is entirely subjective. “Closing loopholes” is code for a preferred “fair” but still ultimately subjective allocation of resources. What you want is what people have groused about for centuries, i.e. “I wish government economics better reflected my personal value system”.

There are already various groups and sites that evaluate the relative truthfulness of various claims. People complain about those all the time, precisely because people don’t really want that. What most people really want is a source that matches their own personal biases. Actually, people want for reality to conform to their personal biases, but that fails to happen.

As for making it “understandable”, Joe Average is dumb. What you want is a system that is sufficiently complex and useful for a country of more than 300 million people yet simple enough to understand for people who can’t do basic arithmetic (Joe Average, remember?). While those aren’t theoretically contradictory, it is practically contradictory until/unless the average American gets a lot smarter.

4

I’m available.

5

How about the apportionment conundrum? How do you divide 435 Representatives among 50 states, proportional to population? There are several different algorithms – each one perfectly reasonable – and all of them permit “near-injustices” – e.g. the possibility ofa district with 804,597 citizens getting one Representative, and a nearby district having 804,598 citizens getting two Representatives. Each person in the second district is nearly twice as well represented as each citizen in the first.

So I’m in favor of a new mathematical system of apportionment where each Representative, in the House, has a number of votes, on the House floor, equal to the number of people in his district. (Some Reps would vote the whole was, pro or con, while some others, more sensitive to the desires of the constituents, would divide the votes according to the wishes of the folks back home.)

(Which means that this idea also has intrinsic arithmetical flaws!)