One of the benefits of having a background in science is that it tends to enhance your BS detector. One can take information and make a try at assessing the veracity of it — is it consistent with things that I know to be true? Does it follow valid models of how things behave? You can’t accept or reject all information this way, because some of it will be outside of your experience or ability, but it’s a first cut at the problem. One of the major stumbling blocks is that “things I know to be true” can’t be “things I want to be true;” we have to keep ideology out of the process.

Take as an example the ongoing political unpleasantness (in many cases, this phrase is redundant) regarding budgets. I keep hearing that reducing the budget is reeeeaaaally important, and moves are being taken to reduce spending. But if moves are being taken that don’t actually reduce the deficit, our model breaks down — either the proponents have some other agenda, or they’re bad at math, or stupid, or some combination of those things.

We find out that cutting spending on poison control centers will actually cost money. I don’t see what the possible hidden agenda is there; this is just plain stupid. Rachel Maddow points out (at about 19:00; the segment starts at about 17:30) a dollar spent trying to find tax cheats nets more than ten dollars in revenue; as long as a dollar spent results in more than a dollar’s worth of revenue, you should be increasing the budget, because it pays for itself! I don’t see how the standard GOP line of loving America plays here. Regardless of where you’ve drawn the line of what the tax rate actually is, cheating on your taxes is not what I would call patriotic. And going after high-income people who are cheating is where the money is, so proposing cuts means its more important to let tax cheats go, which goes along the lines of letting them pay fewer taxes in the first place. Jon Stewart reminds us of the hypocrisy of calling a ~$50k salary too large, making the de-facto 10-20% salary cuts justifiable, while claiming that $250k is not a lot of money when faced with a 3% tax increase. Something is not adding up.

On the topic of Wisconsin teacher salaries, I’ve seen it compared to the state average salary. Once again, let’s use the BS meter. Different jobs have different requirements, and as we require more in the way of qualification, the pay generally goes up. Part of that is simple supply and demand. To be a teacher, you are generally required to have at least a Bachelor’s degree. The most recent statistics I could find were from the 2000 census, when less than 25% of adult Wisconsinites had college degrees. So why wouldn’t a person with a college degree be expected to earn more than the state average? Bachelor’s degree holders earned a median salary of just above $40k back then; if we allow just a 2% per year increase for inflation, that brings us to $50k for this year. Teachers make, on average, about what you’d expect someone of their training to make, without allowing for the ones who have even higher education levels, who might be expected to make even more money. They make more than average, because your average Wisconsinite doesn’t have a college degree.