Numbers are not everybody’s strong suit but surely even politicians have to work within some limits of stretchable honesty when bandying them around.  Alas, no. As President Obama prepares to speak at the climate meeting in Copenhagen, his pledge to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 83 per cent by 2050 achieves new levels of meaninglessness.

The costs of number numbness add up...

Set aside the merits or otherwise of the policy itself.  The point, as columnist George Will explains, is that it is simply unachievable.  On a per capita basis, this would take the United States back to the emissions level that existed in 1875.  Does anybody really believe that any country could manage such reductions?  So why make such a ridiculous commitment in the first place?  Have we really come so low that it is acceptable for elected leaders to toss around worthless platitudes to each other while standing on the world stage?

Barack Obama has already claimed that his $787 billion domestic spending spree will create or ‘save’ millions of jobs.  No one knows how to calculate a ‘saved’ job.  Again, this is meaningless drivel that we are supposed to sit back and take.  Meanwhile, unemployment has risen to 10 per cent, two points higher than the level we were assured it would not surpass if the bill was passed.  More nonsense by numbers.

Congress seems to be gloriously unaware that serious financial consequences will result from borrowing such vast sums.  It controls the purse strings but increasingly it looks as if the purse has given way to a small plastic card with no credit limit.  It’s as if Nancy Pelosi and her cohorts believe money can be printed as quickly as a damaged dollar and inflation can be wished away.  To maintain the self-deception, grown-ups at the Federal Reserve are kept on a tight political leash.

Talking of which, the Washington Post reports that former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s federal bailout chief calculated the TARP figure on the back of an envelope – or more precisely on his Blackberry.  He has admitted that the magic $700 billion figure that the Bush Administration insisted was so vital and urgent to restore Wall Street to health was simply 5 per cent of the total value of U.S. residential and commercial mortgages.  Why 5 per cent?  Well, why not?   “Seven hundred billion was a number out of the air,” Neel Kashkari reportedly confessed. 

Winston Churchill famously said that, “There are lies, damn lies and statistics.”  But with United Nations scientists exposed for falsifying climate data that forms the basis of moves to spend still more billions of dollars of taxpayer money and ratchet up limits on day-to-day freedoms, what figures are there left to believe?

On what basis did President Obama take 3 months to decide to send 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan rather than the requested 40,000?  On security grounds, perhaps we don’t need to know.  But how can we be confident that this is not just some random number too?

Statistics can prove just about anything.  But when numbers mean nothing to the very policymakers who throw them around, the political system is itself delegitimized.  Are these really the best leaders we can find?

President Obama will be chief cheerleader for number numbness in Copenhagen and our supposedly wise and independent journalists will lead the applause.  But when the input is trash, so is the policy output.  Freedom loving citizens around the world will suffer the consequences.

It increasingly looks as if the lunatics really have taken over the asylum.

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