TMQ Animadversion

Gregg Easterbrook has an excellent weekly sports column called "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" here. Through his funny and insightful column about football, Gregg has really enhanced my understanding and enjoyment of the game.

However, he often inserts poorly researched (or poorly thought out) water cooler editorial about current events. Now when I say "poorly researched or thought out" I don't mean it's as dumb as most of what you hear on CNN, but it is often borderline negative information value (i.e. if you read it and think it's true, you are less well informed than if you hadn't read it at all). See for example here.

Now this doesn't detract from my ability to really enjoy his football analysis. His cheering for coaches to make mathematically correct plays (such as punting less on fourth and short), his hatred of the big blitz (though I think the data is more mixed on that) and other fun commentary is great. But I actually wrote in to complain about an item he had in this week's column.

Easterbrook complains that New York State is asking the Federal Government for $6.2 Billion to make up for financial shortfalls caused by the total melt down on Wall Street. But in the same article he links to this report, which shows Federal Taxes Paid vs. Federal Benefits Received, when complaining about how much government money Alaska gets per capita. Well where do you think that money comes from? Why look, on page 32 we see that in 2005 alone New York gave the Feds $23.83 Billion more than it got in services. Maybe we can afford a fraction of that to stabilize the economy that provides so much money for the rest of America.