We use only U.S. Gov’t Census Data. Which means it must be true. “For heaven’s sake, gentlemen, at least respect arithmetic.”[1] We tend to think that additional spending by a unit of government adds something that was not there before, when really it just reallocates it. We do the arithmetic and let you compare it between government zones by property addresses anywhere in the United States. “What a lot of trouble to prove in political economy that two and two make four; and if you succeed in doing so, people cry, ‘It is so clear that it is boring.’ Then they vote as if you had never proved anything at all.”[2]
The organizing metaphor of Spending Pressure drawn from the medical world of Blood Pressure is “an important shift” in what economists call “the organizing metaphors of… economic models.”[3]
The implication of your ability to calculate your own residential spending pressure, and to compare it to an alternative address opens to you a previously “complicated and possibly unquantifiable aspect” of your society and personal economy.[4]
So check it out. Run the numbers for your address. Math doesn’t lie.
[1] Frederic Bastiat, What is Seen and What is Not Seen, Sec. 3 “Taxes” (1850).
[2] Id.
[3] Bier and Schinkel, Building Better Ecological Machines: Complexity Theory and Alternative Economic Models, Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 2 (2016), 266-293, at 285.
[4] Id.
