"Mitt Romney's Thinking of a Number", But At Least He Thinks

"Chris Kelly lives near Los Angeles, and writes for television." So says his bio on the Huffington Post, anyway. And if these are the kinds of credentials needed to write for HuffPo, it's no wonder that they end up with drivel of the kind they do.

Drivel, in this case, refers to his post "Mitt Romney is Thinking of a Number". Romney says that he wants to spend 4% of GDP on the military.

Forget the fact that Kelly doesn't know the difference between a paradox and an infinite sequence.[*] I just want to point out his logic for disliking the number 4%:

Now, you probably thought the way to come up with a figure to spend on defense was to consider either:

a) What you could afford
b) A threat

or

c) The cost of some weapon you wanted to buy

Which is why you don't work in a think tank.

The way you figure out what to spend on defense is to think of a number. In this case, four.

Now, I have to ask, have you ever heard of a liberal politician using this kind of logic to decide what to spend to stop global warming, or to expand the S-CHIP legislation to people who make 300% of the poverty line, or to provide additional Medicare / Medicaid / Social Security / whatever benefits?

Didn't think so.

And forget the fact that there may be very good reasons for that number. Kelly doesn't even ask why Romney might think that 4% is a good number. Kelly fails to mention that the Heritage Foundation report that he belittles shows that military spending in the cold war averaged about 7.5% of GDP. No, he'd rather just bash Romney for not explicitly doing something that liberals never do anyway.

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[*] Paradox vs. Infinite Sequences: Kelly ends the post by attempting to appeal to infinite regression under the heading "Romney's Paradox":

Let's say President Romney gets to the end of the fiscal year, looks at the GDP and realizes that he hasn't spent enough money on freedom. He immediately writes a check for another nuclear zeppelin. But when you calculate GDP, you include government spending. So the price of the zeppelin raises the GDP. And now Romney has to buy something else. Perhaps a tarp. But that raises the GDP, too.

When Romney adds 4% to the GDP, it goes up 4%, and then he has to add .4% to that, and it goes up again, and then he has to add .04%. And so on, forever, without reaching his goal.

But this isn't a paradox, and (with a hat tip to my anonymous commenter) it isn't an infinite regression. A paradox is like "square circle" or "good Chris Kelly post". Infinite regression is like a child asking "but why?" every time you give an answer.

Kelly's formulation of Romney's problem is just a basic mathematical equation (though I can't do the notation here): it's GDP times the sum of .04*(1/10^x) over all integers x. It would take someone who remembers college-level math better than I do to solve it, but the equation is easily solved.

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