July 2005 ·
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Harper’s Index
Estimated amount spent lobbying Congress last year: $3,000,000,0001
Number of former members of Congress or federal-agency heads who are now lobbyists: 2402
Total value of congressional earmarks to appropriations bills last year: $32,700,000,0003
Factor by which this exceeded the amount in 1998: 34
Minimum amount that members of Congress have paid their own relatives since 2001: $3,000,0005
Number of Americans who spend more than a quarter of their income on health care: 14,300,0006
Estimated amount that illegal immigrants pay into Social Security each year: $6,400,000,0007
Average percentage of the U.K. population that Britons believe to be immigrants: 218
Actual percentage: 89
Amount slated to be spent by 2007 to build a theme park in honor of Charles Dickens: £62,000,00010
Number of free copies of Don Quixote being distributed by the Venezuelan government this year: 1,000,00011
Tons of CO2 emissions that would be replaced each year by a proposed windmill project on Long Island: 235,00012
Tons produced each year by a single jumbo jet making a round-trip trans-Atlantic flight daily: 210,00013
Minimum number of ExxonMobil-funded groups that have disputed mainstream scientific findings on climate change: 3114
Percentage of U.S. auto travel that occurs on two-lane roads: 2815
Percentage of traffic fatalities that do: 5216
Mass, in tons, of a comet that NASA plans to ram with a spacecraft on the Fourth of July: 1,000,000,00017
Total cost of the mission, called “Deep Impact”: $330,000,00018
Year that the first planet outside our solar system was discovered: 199519
Number discovered since then: 14520
Date on which the proposed EU constitution was taken into space: 4/15/0521
Portion of the German Catholic Church’s income that derives from a government tax on members: 1/222
Total value of bets taken by a U.K. bookmaker this spring on the identity of the new pope: £50,00023
Number of the fifteen previous Pope Benedicts who were eventually deposed: 424
Number of U.S. public-school districts that have adopted a class in which the Bible is the primary textbook: 30125
Percentage of Bill Frist’s medical-school class that sent him a letter accusing him of misusing his degree: 1826
Rank, in the current line of succession to the U.S. Presidency, of the first non-Christian: 1627
Number of America’s nine “Founding Fathers” who denied the divinity of Jesus: 728
Minimum number of illegitimate children had by the nine: 929
Chance that a woman in one of the U.S. military’s three service academies claims to have been sexually harassed: 1 in 230
Number of national parliaments that have a greater percentage of female members than the U.S. Congress: 7131
Number of Saudi men who were imprisoned and flogged for “behaving like women” at a party in March: 10032
Price for a set of six Harley Davidson‒brand votive candles: $19.9533
Price, from a Florida company, for an RV that protects riders from biological and chemical attack: $1,200,00034
Percentage of the 651 fatal or wounding terrorist attacks worldwide last year that took place in Iraq: 3235
Percentage that took place in India: 4436
Average number of Americans injured on amusement-park rides each year: 7,90037
Chance that a four-to-six-year-old U.S. boy plays video games every day: 1 in 438
Number of previous baseball seasons that Washington, D.C., fielded a professional team: 8939
Chances that it had a losing record: 4 in 540
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AUGUST 2008 THE WRECKING CREW
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