In his letter, “November Election showed voting still counts,” rebutting my earlier letter, Correspondent of the Day Brian Glass rightly points out that “voting for the House of Delegates is by district, not statewide.” However, Glass’s letter misses the point: Gerrymandering ensures that, while all votes are equal, some votes…
On Nov. 7, Ralph Northam defeated Ed Gillespie by 233,444 votes, or 8.93 percent. The Democratic tidal wave also reshaped the House of Delegates. There, Democrats gained 15 seats and now have 49 seats to the GOP’s 51. The conventional wisdom is that Democrats won a resounding victory. But was…
The number 538 is so culturally relevant that Nate Silver, perhaps the best-known statistician of our era, named his website after it. Let’s examine 538, and its component parts. This is the number of votes in the Electoral College. It is the result of an equation: 435 + 100 +…
Every election cycle, there are some stories that never change. One of the most commonly reported stories is that America’s voter turnout rate is terrible. It’s so bad that every four years, despite choosing who the most powerful man in the world will be, a bit more than half of…
Runners do not “suddenly appear,” as T.M. Sammons claims in the letter, “Runners should stick to the park.” Consider the velocity at which runners and drivers travel. A driver will be traveling at speeds up to 45 mph on public roads, perhaps greater if the driver is speeding. A very…
Dennis’ Rudzinski’s letter, “Congress should heed Mellon’s Lessons,” argued that lower taxes increase revenue. He points to Warren G. Harding slashing income taxes on the wealthy as evidence. However, Rudzinski ignores many parallels between today and the 1920s. In 1929, the Great Crash occurred. The 1920s, much like the 2000s,…
In the Declaration of Independence, our Founding Fathers declared that all Americans, indeed all of humanity, have inalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The recent wrangling over the proposed health care bill is sorrowfully ignorant of this central tenet to the American cause. These inalienable rights,…
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the United States spends 15.3 percent of its gross domestic product on health care, or $6,714 per capita annually. Compare that to the United Kingdom, which spends 8.4 percent of GDP ($2,784 per capita), or Canada, which spends 10 percent of GDP ($3,672…