My question is what exactly is / does "federal spending" mean ? Is it the cost of infrastructure just to run the elections, since these figures are just for presidential election years ? Need more information. On the other hand, it shows that the costs have only doubled in 20 years, which ain't bad all things considered. That is the only conclusion I can draw from this chart without knowing what exactly it represents.
Well, "ain't bad" in absolute terms perhaps, but doesn't give any thought to how appropriate the level was in 2000. Why are we using this much resource to for this contest? Could it be better spent? What do the people funding that level of spending hope to get out of it?
To add to the previous post, the key to winning elections in Canada often depends on the non-monetized resources the candidate can mobilize. So if the candidate has lots of high energy volunteers who are willing to go door to door, leave pamphlets, discuss election issues with folks, etc., the the voting outcome improves.
Is it too dangerous in the USA to go door to door during an election because of the gun situation? Or does that simply depend on the specific neighbourhood?
no or i'm not aware of campaigners (or census workers) getting shot
addressing suicide and gang violence would probably go a long way toward that issue
To add to the previous post, the key to winning elections in Canada often depends on the non-monetized resources the candidate can mobilize. So if the candidate has lots of high energy volunteers who are willing to go door to door, leave pamphlets, discuss election issues with folks, etc., the the voting outcome improves.
Is it too dangerous in the USA to go door to door during an election because of the gun situation? Or does that simply depend on the specific neighbourhood?
Typically, well-run campaigns flush with money will already have used data analysis to pinpoint which households are going to be friendly to their door-knockers. It would cost too much time and money to knock blindly. But yeah, AFAICT high energy volunteers can make a huge difference in the US as well. The energy and commitment of Obama supporters was amazing in 2008.
To respond to your questions about gun violence in America, I suggest you check out this story from The Guardian. It has some interesting case studies focusing on particular cities like St. Louis.
I'm pretty sure I've posted this piece in the RP Forum before. It's fascinating.
By Aliza Aufrichtig, Lois Beckett, Jan Diehm and Jamiles Lartey
... Half of America's gun homicides in 2015 were clustered in just 127 cities and towns, according to a new geographic analysis by the Guardian, even though they contain less than a quarter of the nationâs population.
Even within those cities, violence is further concentrated in the tiny neighborhood areas that saw two or more gun homicide incidents in a single year.
Four and a half million Americans live in areas of these cities with the highest numbers of gun homicide, which are marked by intense poverty, low levels of education, and racial segregation. Geographically, these neighborhood areas are small: a total of about 1,200 neighborhood census tracts, which, laid side by side, would fit into an area just 42 miles wide by 42 miles long.
The problem they face is devastating. Though these neighborhood areas contain just 1.5% of the countryâs population, they saw 26% of Americaâs total gun homicides.
Gun control advocates say it is unacceptable that Americans overall are "25 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than people in other developed countries". People who live in these neighborhood areas face an average gun homicide rate about 400 times higher than the rate across those high-income countries.
Americaâs gun policy debate is usually driven by high-profile mass shootings that seem to strike at random, and it focuses on sweeping federal gun control or mental health policies. But much of Americaâs gun homicide problem happens in a relatively small number of predictable places, often driven by predictable groups of high-risk people, and its burden is anything but random.
The concentration of gun homicides in certain census tracts mirrors what criminologists have discovered when they look at crime patterns within individual cities: roughly 1.5% of street segments in cities see about 25% of crime incidents, a trend dubbed âthe law of crime concentrationâ.
The Guardianâs new geographic analysis is the first time that gun homicides nationwide have been mapped down to the census tract level, researchers said. This new approach was made possible with the geocoded data collected since 2014 by the not-for-profit Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings and gun deaths using media reports. The FBIâs national crime data only provides gun murder statistics down to the city level, which masks the clustering of violence within neighborhoods.
...
Like income inequality, murder inequality in America is stark
Gun violence is a regressive tax that falls heaviest on neighborhoods already struggling with poverty, unemployment, and failing schools. The unequal burden of violence is also marked by intense racial disparities.
âItâs not about race, per se, itâs about how other conditions are racialized, are racially inequitable,â said Lauren Krivo, a Rutgers University sociologist who studies the geography of race and crime.
Most people donât understand âhow few predominantly white communities have conditions that are anywhere near the levels of disadvantage that are common in non-white communities, and particularly black communities,â she said.
...
Dramatic racial disparities in homicide have persisted for decades
Within most high-gun homicide cities, victims of gun murder are overwhelmingly black men. This dramatic disparity has persisted for decades, even as cities have seen sharp increases and decreases in murder rates, according to FBI gun murder data.
...
Since 1993, the peak of the gun violence epidemic of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the nationâs overall gun homicide rate has fallen nearly 50%, according to national estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Overall, the country is much safer than in the 1990s, though polls show most Americans remain unaware of that trend. For African Americans, too, the overall gun homicide rate fell by about half between 1993 and 2010, according to national CDC estimates.
Examining gun murder trends across individual cities, and going back to 1975, shows a more complex picture. New York City has become radically safer for all residents since the early 1990s, and continues to see decreases in violence. In other cities, including St Louis and Baltimore, the number of black men murdered with guns in recent years is close to the early 1990s.
Not just neighborhoods but people
Looking at the risk of gun homicide in terms of sweeping racial demographics, or even in terms of individual neighborhood census tracts, still obscures the real concentration of violence, crime experts said â and that further concentration is crucial to understanding how to save lives.
Even within high-poverty areas that struggle with many kinds of disadvantage, the majority of residents have nothing to do with gun violence.
Within neighborhood areas, the risk of violence is further clustered within specific social networks of high-risk people. Sometimes these are people whom police identify as gang members; sometimes they are not.
In Chicago, analysts working with police department data found that, over a six-year period, 70% of nonfatal shootings and 46% of gun homicides happened within a sprawling social network that included just 6% of Chicagoâs total population.
Similar analyses in Oakland and New Orleans found even smaller percentages of residents driving the majority of the violence. In Oakland, analysts found that networks of just 1,000 to 1,200 high-risk people, about .3% of Oaklandâs population, were involved in about 60% of the cityâs murders. In New Orleans, just 600 to 700 people, less than 1% of the cityâs population, were involved in more than 50% of fatal incidents.
âIn what we think of as the âmost dangerous placesâ, very, very few people are actually at any meaningful risk for violent offending,â said David Kennedy, a researcher and advocate at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who has worked on violence prevention strategies in cities nationwide. âMost of the folks in those places are in no way a part of the problem.â
Both liberals and conservatives argue that the root causes of gun violence are extremely broad social trends. For conservatives, itâs âabout things like cultures of violence, toxic family dynamics in minority communities, the failure of governmental approachesâ, Kennedy said. For liberals, itâs historic oppression, racism, lack of opportunity, and the broad availability of guns.
As a result, both liberals and conservatives argue that fixing violence requires interventions that are âvery enormous and very often essentially out of reachâ, Kennedy said. âWeâre talking about making changes that, as a practical matter, weâre not very good at: changing, in a broad way, gender in society, changing, in a broad way, social patterns or racism or bias. Fixing the schools. Thatâs very difficult stuff.â
But neither partisan analysis really lined up with the data on Americaâs murder concentration, Kennedy said. If single parent families, or poverty, or easy gun availability were the main drivers of gun violence, âthat should result in vastly more violence that there isâ.
Instead, some researchers argue, the concentration of gun violence in America more closely resembles the spread of a contagious disease. Inequity and poverty are risk factors. But violence itself may spread from person to person like a virus, meaning that particular networks of people, not whole neighborhoods or demographic groups, are most at risk.
In different times and places, violence in America has spread like a wave through different ethnic and racial groups, said Dr Gary Slutkin, a Chicago epidemiologist who has championed a public health model for preventing violence. In the 1920s, violence was concentrated among Irish American and Italian American populations, he said. In recent decades, itâs been more concentrated among African Americans. âThere is nothing innate,â he said. âAll people and peoples are susceptible.â
The racial and geographic disparities in Americaâs gun homicide problem are clear. They are also often overstated, both by some political opponents of gun control and by white supremacists.
One false meme that spread online after Trayvon Martinâs death said: âThe United States ranks 3rd in Murders throughout the World. But if you take out Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC and New Orleans, the United States is 4th from the Bottom for Murders. These 4 Cities also have the toughest Gun Control Laws in the United States. All 4 are also controlled by Democrats.â
These murder numbers are completely inaccurate â and so is the broader concept behind them.
While half of Americaâs gun homicides were clustered in 127 cities, the other half were spread across the country. In many of the roughly 3,300 other cities that saw a gun homicide in 2015, the violence was less intense. 58% of cities that saw a gun homicide in 2015 saw just a single one, and 95% of them saw fewer than ten.
The toll of these more scattered gun homicides adds up. Even excluding the 127 highest homicide cities, Americaâs gun homicide rate would still be many times higher than recent rates in Europe.
While violence in Chicago perpetually makes headlines, some of the census tracts with the greatest burden of violence are at the margins of cities that are not known for their gun homicide problem â islands of extreme deprivation in otherwise wealthy, placid towns.
Location: Half inch above the K/T boundary Gender:
Posted:
Oct 4, 2020 - 9:06pm
westslope wrote:
To add to the previous post, the key to winning elections in Canada often depends on the non-monetized resources the candidate can mobilize. So if the candidate has lots of high energy volunteers who are willing to go door to door, leave pamphlets, discuss election issues with folks, etc., the the voting outcome improves.
Is it too dangerous in the USA to go door to door during an election because of the gun situation? Or does that simply depend on the specific neighbourhood?
To add to the previous post, the key to winning elections in Canada often depends on the non-monetized resources the candidate can mobilize. So if the candidate has lots of high energy volunteers who are willing to go door to door, leave pamphlets, discuss election issues with folks, etc., the voting outcome improves.
Is it too dangerous in the USA to go door to door during an election because of the gun situation? Or does that simply depend on the specific neighbourhood?
Canadian jurisdictions impose election expense limits by riding and party, and provide subsidies to political parties based on the popular vote received. Third party sponsors must register and are limited in what they can spend (typically on advertising). That means that union and corporate donations are regulated and restricted.
Seems to work well overall, to the point that I don't bother paying much attention.
Would such measures be perceived as an egregious affront to freedom in the USA?
My question is what exactly is / does "federal spending" mean ? Is it the cost of infrastructure just to run the elections, since these figures are just for presidential election years ? Need more information. On the other hand, it shows that the costs have only doubled in 20 years, which ain't bad all things considered. That is the only conclusion I can draw from this chart without knowing what exactly it represents.
Kurt, it's the total cost of the election and is being driven by the Democrats this year more than the Republicans. It's not government spending. LINK
This really needs to be talked about more. The tremendous waste for a sham of an election process brought to you by the duopoly. This should be put in the same context of discussion as defense spending.
My question is what exactly is / does "federal spending" mean ? Is it the cost of infrastructure just to run the elections, since these figures are just for presidential election years ? Need more information. On the other hand, it shows that the costs have only doubled in 20 years, which ain't bad all things considered. That is the only conclusion I can draw from this chart without knowing what exactly it represents.
This really needs to be talked about more. The tremendous waste for a sham of an election process brought to you by the duopoly. This should be put in the same context of discussion as defense spending.
Interesting parallel SirD. The USA came out of the implosion of the Soviet Union smelling like roses and then quickly squandered the peace dividend that should have lasted much longer than Bill Clinton's time in office. It is a real shame that more Americans do not understand why the the former European colonial powers collapsed, or seem to blithely believe that America the Great is immune from what befell former empires throughout human history.
The chart that R_P posted presumably includes all spending by governments federal and local as well as partisan political spending. It would be interesting to see a current break down. From numbers I have seen in the past, partisan political spending constitutes the big growing component.
The real shame is that most of this money is not being used to educate Americans about policy options but is being used for partisan cheerleading purposes.
Frankly, I have no idea how you fix the current US presidential system with its 18th century paternalistic checks and balances and condescending protections such as the electoral college without major constitutional reforms.
Combining the head of state and the head of government in the same individual is fraught with risk. It is a system designed to propagate the mindless patriotic nonsense that burdens political discussions in the USA.
Is early 21st century USA capable of deep, constitutional reforms?
This really needs to be talked about more. The tremendous waste for a sham of an election process brought to you by the duopoly. This should be put in the same context of discussion as defense spending.
