Americans Spend Less On Groceries

Lam Thuy Vo, writing for NPR, noted that Americans spend less money on groceries today than they spent 30 years ago. In 1982, citizens spent more than 12% of their money on groceries, compared to less than 9% today.  Why the decrease in spending?  Walter Falcon, a Stanford economist, attributes the trend to a “major restructuring in poultry, pork, and beef industries that has allowed efficiencies and brought down the cost.”  

Most notably, the cost of pork chops, chicken legs, butter, lettuce, and steak – adjusted for inflation – all fell by more than 30%.  For instance in 1982, a pound of pork chops (in 2012 dollars) cost Americans $6.00, but today, the price is only $3.72 per pound.  At the grocery store Americans also spend their money in a similar fashion, with two exceptions.  As to be expected, the share of money going towards meat goods fell from 31.3% in 1982 to 21.5% today, and while citizens spent 11.6% of their funds on processed foods and sweets in 1982, today that percentage has almost doubled to 22.9%. 

Interactive Maps Available on NPR Website

U.S. Foreclosure Rates

The NPR website now has interactive maps that allow you to see national and state-wide trends for foreclosure rates, unemployment rates, and household income. The most recent data relates to the foreclosure rates, which are from March of this year.

County foreclosure rates lower than 1 in every 150,000 properties are considered low, moderate is up to 1 in every 700, and high is over 1 in every 700. The highest foreclosure rates are in the Southwest, California, Florida, and Michigan. It is hard to define trends using this map considering that many counties have no data available, especially in the Midwest.

U.S. Unemployment Rates

Data for unemployment rates across the U.S. was taken from December of 2010. Rates are broken down into less than 5%, 5-10%, 10-15%, and more than 15%. The areas with the highest unemployment rates seem to be scattered across the West and and along the East coast.

Median Household Income

The data for this map is also from 2010. Income was divided into 5 different levels based on percentiles. Most of the wealthy families appear to by clustered on the East coast, in the West, and scattered through some states in the Midwest. High concentrations of lower-income families can be found in the South, in parts of the Midwest and in parts of Texas and New Mexico.

How Much Does Government Fund NPR?

In light of last night's unjust firing of liberal commentator Juan Williams at NPR (FoxNews), it is appropriate to examine just how many public dollars NPR is soaking up. At first glance, it seems a modest 5.8% of funding comes from the government (see graph below taken from the NPR website):



If we dig a bit deeper into the pie, we find more public funding. The CPB or Corporation for Public Broadcasting funds 10.1% of NPR. In turn, the CPB gets roughly 15% of its funding from federal governments and 25% from state and local governments (NPR funding report). That translates into 40% of CPB funding from the government. Forty percent of the 10.1% translates into an additional four percent of NPR's total pie coming from government sources.

But public funding doesn't stop there. Consider the "University" slice: certainly huge amounts of public money go to fund our public universities to directly provide education for its students. Since it is impossible to break down what percentage of "University" money is considered public, how about NPR simply returns the money back to the universities to help lower tuition or build buildings? There is certainly no need for one public entity to fund another.

Thus if NPR wants to completely public defund itself, NPR needs to eliminate:

5.8% in direct governmental funding
4.0% in governmental funding through CPB
13.6% in university funding
-------
23.4% in total public funding

In an era of neverending waste, we call upon all levels of government to defund NPR and put it towards reducing debt.