>>I read in a paper here about a woman who held out the part of her taxes that would go to the war effort. Something like 17%.<<

The woman in question did know how to collect data and make a division though. I am glad Woody Harrelson is not an accountant.

I'd be more tolerant of his analogy between energy and money though, however unorthodox in economics. It was just meant, I believe, as a figure of style to show how much of the political attention is effectively focused on defense in his country. You could take it to say that money talks... And 17.5% that's a good sixth of what the government's business is about.

Woody Harrelson's of the world (ie, generally all Hollywood activists) do a tremendous disservice to the cause they think they are helping. He comes across as cliched, untruthful and loopy.

I started out strongly in favor of attacking Iraq, but have lessened my stance (but not abandoned it) because of good arguments from reasonable, logical people of the left AND right. But just like Newt did and Falwell does to the Right's arguments, people like Woody do to the Left's -- they make it easy to dismiss all of their party's arguments.

I was also struck by the $200 billion we spend on corporate welfare, and the $100 billion we spend on the war on drugs. I mean, I'm pretty adamantly against both those things, but it seems unlikely that those two line items consume the lion's share of discretionary spending. You would think his publicist, or perhaps his editor, would require that he actually check those numbers before publishing them.

Indeed, artists should speak like artists and only mention facts if they have triple-checked them. Yet, we have found morally commendable that many artists took on to express grief for the victims of 911.

I think there is nothing wrong for some artists to express their growing unease at the thought of killing, say, a hundred thousand inocent Irakis (these are the estimates in case of invasion). The other day, I was listening to the radio, and an American journalist who had just come back from Irak was reporting the story of little girls in a primary school in Irak begging her to ask Americans not to kill them...

Now that's "just" a feeling, but there is no reason it'd be intellectually or politically inacceptable to share it. Unless caring for other people than Americans has become considered an act of...

Jean-Philippe,

Nothing wrong with expressing concern for killing lives. Just that Woody has gone much further than that. He's made accusations about the US and Bushes intent that's beyond mere concern for the loss of life.

What the actor's did after 9/11 to raise money on TV was commendable and what they do best: care (there's one very notable exception to this rule about actor's doing well in politics). It's just that they should know their strengths and stick to them -- good advice for us all.

Without regard to the surrounding foreign policy controversy, and without regard to the range of respectable opinion in controversy as to the economic effects of public debt, federal transfer payments to individuals, and state/county/municipal finance/operations, it should be noted that Mr. Harrelson is closer to the truth than any of the discussants in present company.

Confining discussion to federal operations (as most/all discussants in present company have done), and attending to economic "energy" expended (that is, dollarized resources -- manhours, paperclips, cubic yards of concrete -- consumed) in military vs nonmilitary lines of business ... it follows that we should ignore net interest (an artifact of unrelated intertemporal financing decisions) and should ignore transfer payments (an entirely unrelated subject).

On this basis, federal "Defense and International" operations comprise 3.2% of GDP (Federal FY 2001). "Other Federal" expenses are 2.0% of GDP.

Granted, "D&I" includes State Department operations, and a smidge of foreign aid (though most of that is in military buy-offs). It's arguably fair to allot some minor fraction of total intelligence costs to the general/commercial good. Still, military operations clearly account for MORE than 50% of total economic resources absorbed by the federal "enterprise".

Play it back 30 years (or 50 years) and the numbers tilt even more decidedly in Mr. Harrelson's favor.

Source: OMB Historical Table 15.5--Total Government Expenditures by Major Category of Expenditure as Percentages of GDP (FY 1947-2001)
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2003/sheets/hist15z5.xls

Lots more juicy OMB historical spreadsheet data at
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2003/hist.html

I had a discussion with someone who asserted confidently that interest expense on the debt consumed more than 50% of the Federal budget. Sometimes people are curiously free with numbers, as if they were just another rhetorical device, like "the children" or "freeom" or "God".