25....31...42...

The 9% Congress

   According to the latest Gallop findings, 25% of Americans consider themselves to be Republicians, 31% Democrats, and 42% Independents. Perhaps this trend signals that Political Parties are finally heading to the trash dump of really bad ideas.
   Don’t you just love percentages? Sometimes I view percentages like Will Rogers viewed statistics, you know, “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics (percentages)” and just like statistics, percentages are about as subjective as you can get when defining Human endeavors. For example, how many times have we all scoured over our favorite baseball player’s batting percentages only to speculate with cynical wisdom, about the chances of our employment survival with a 323 average of performance success? And how about the chances of rain percentages that the weather guessers are always laying on us? I mean, is it really possible to get 60% wetter if you are caught in a 90% chance of rain rather than a 30% chance. 

   I have a remarkable and very unscientific theory about things like this based upon a lifetime of observations while usually sipping away on an ice-cold brewski, and it goes like this. Compensation (money, etc.) is usually inversely proportional to the importance of the job or position. Just think about it. The President of the US of A makes considerable less money than a tobacco-chewing and mediocre big leaguer while a really important job, like garbage collector, barely makes enough jack to buy cigarettes while trying to support a family. I think we all can validate my theory many times over.
    In an odd sort of way, this brings me to a recent Rasmussen poll that confirms what most of us already knew and that is about 9% of Americans think the highly compensated members of the United States Congress are doing a good or excellent job. When I saw the percentages listed in this poll, I was immediately drawn to the 9 % number. What attracted my attention was not the confirmation of my own feelings about what the number represents, but rather the glaring 9% number sitting there all by itself.

    Let me explain, or pontificate if you prefer. The Gallop research data reports that the American electorate has come to be divided along political party lines by the following percentages: 31% Democrat, 25% Republican and 42% Independent. Well I’m not a rocket scientist but I can calculate that 25 plus 31 plus 42 equals 98% of the electorate. So what happened to the remaining 2% of the American electorate that the poll failed to address?

   Well Gallop may not know who you are, but you 2% out there know who you are, and so do I. I have always been a little dismayed and a little envious of this 2% because they are the ones who never seem to go along with the rest of us because they don’t give a damn about what’s going on around them or what other people think about them for that matter. But the 2% is probably a polling error because both you and I know that the percentage of people who don't give a damn about anything is more like 10%, not 2%.

   Thinking people really don't know how to address this 10% because we are also told that some 47% of the people are also on the Government dole. How this 47% figures into the 25, 31, 42 numbers is no doubt well beyond human cognitive capabilities.
   What I'm thinking here is that the 10% are the ones who say out loud “I don’t want to work, just want to bang on the drum all day.” This of course brings us back to that glaring 9% number that is close enough to the 10% number to be “within the margin of error”.
   So it occurred to me that the “don’t give a damn” 10% are the very same ones who think that the highly compensated members of Congress are doing a good or excellent job because they too (the highly compensated members of Congress) Don’t want to work, they just want to bang on the political drum all day.