Below is just a snippet of an article that came out in the past few days.They did a phone survey of 1368 people and think that is a good enough sample to declare that 81% of Americans feel one way or another about anything?? I don't care what the topic is but come on....do they not realize that some people believe everything they read. Maybe it's the fact that I am tired and don't feel well but this just seems ridiculous to me.


"More than 80 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, the highest such number since the early 1990s, according to a new survey. The CBS News-New York Times poll released Thursday showed 81 percent of respondents said they believed "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track." That was up from 69 percent a year ago, and 35 percent in early 2002.

The nationwide telephone survey of 1,368 adults was conducted from March 28 to April 2."

Well, let me include myself in that figure.

Don't get me wrong, I believe this is the greatest nation on earth for many reasons.

Probably the main reason I think we'ere off track is government spending.
Our new prescription drug program is already overspent: Social Security will be unfunded in just a few years, +9 Trillion in debt to name a few.

Somehow some people think we can afford a national healthcare system- some candidates even running on the promise.
No, this is not a Democrat bash. Republicans lead everyoneone in pork spending.

We're on a spending freefall and nobody "up there" thinks this country should live within its means. Government could cut itself in half and function within the constitution. Let's rasie taxes and feed that big Washingtom machine.

In the mean time wait for hydrogen fuel and do little to nothing else.

-Steve

Efficient drivers do it better.
1003 miles a tank personal record. 74MPG calculated. HCH1 CVT

My argument isn't actually with the topic but how small the sample size is yet how large of a populous it represents. Can they truly say that 81% of America feels one way or the other about something based on about 1300 people's response? P)ersonally I don't think so based on the small sample size.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/bu...l?ref=business
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I agree that is a small sampling, but reading the details in other polls over the years, I think it is a pretty typical size. They never provide details like location, age, sex which certainly would make major differences in the results. I would expect the margin of error on this poll to be +/- 5%.

One of the several things I remember from my Stats class is it's easy to manipulate the data to show it how you want it to look. That's why I don't trust polls like that.

Yes they can. Statistically it is correct, so long as they take care to spread the sample across the entire spectrum of the population. Which I'm sure they have done.

Hot Georgia brought up spending (BTW, your avatar makes me grin every time I see it). The USA has a military-industrial complex that wants to be fed. Without the Commies, how else to you keep the money rolling in, except to conduct illegal wars and sell fear and terror to the public? Standard health care and helping other people and nations is a drop in the bucket compared to what's spent on "threat".

Sure mathematically it may be correct but is it a true representation? I don't think so. How about we let 1386 people vote for the president and no one else get to vote..... I think you'd have a lot of angry people who didn't think they got represented correctly.

Thank you, America, for your participation in Census 2000.
The population of the U.S. on April 1, 2000 was 281,421,906. 1386\281,421,906 = .000004% approx. Yea that's representative.

Spinner, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
More than 20% of GDP is spent on Social Security,
About 19% on military
Medicare 13%
Around 11% in government administrative cost.

That leaves around 37% left over.

We annually pay more than $3,000,000,000 on interest alone on our national debt- mostly to countries who doesn't like us. Then we have to pay down the 9,000,000,000,000 principal.

We consume more foreign oil than domestic- again from most countries who don't like us.
While we "invest" around .8% GDP in energy.

Efficient drivers do it better.
1003 miles a tank personal record. 74MPG calculated. HCH1 CVT

Actually we let 538 people vote every 4 years for president. (Electorial College)

Yes, there were quite a few angry people! (2000 election)



Disclaimer - No I'm not a Democrat, or Republican, or Independent. (there are more than 2 parties in this country...)