Anti-Climacus

LINK: I read this criticism of Sarah Vowell's NYT column on Homeland Security Dept. funding per state with some interest, though it seems to me to miss the most obvious criticism to make of the per-person numbers Vowell uses: New York has a lot more people than Wyoming does. So Wyomingians get about seven times as much money per person, but New York has forty times (or so) more people: New York still gets more money. And given facts like the placement of nuclear weapons in Wyoming and the fact that there's probably a floor one has to hit to have anything resembling a HS apparatus in place, this is maybe not unreasonable. It may well turn out that more money needs to be spent on particular threats--but then again, it may turn out that this number is just something like block grants distributed to states and doesn't include aggregate federal spending, or something like that. Anyway, just another example of the need to be wary about numbers.