News by the Numbers - July 2008

• 10 years of scholarly studies "have shown that states that sent a higher fraction of convicts to prison had lower rates of crime, even after controlling for all of the other ways -- poverty, urbanization, and the proportion of young men in the population -- that the states differed. A high risk of punishment reduces crime. Deterrence works," according to social scientist James Q. Wilson.
• 22 of the top 50 songs on Billboard’s Top 20 between February 29 and June 5 contained sexualized content, going beyond simple love songs to discuss sexual attraction and arousal, according to the Culture and Media Institute. Of these 22 songs, 13 or 26% were so explicit they deserve to be called sexually degrading – they reduce women to sexual objects and men to sexual predators.
• Over 33% of the workforce was unemployed during the Great Depression. The national jobless rate today is 5.5 percent (between 4 percent and 5 percent in many states)
• 41% of Americans want Congress to repeal the corn ethanol mandate entirely, while 35% want Congress to repeal the law it passed just last December, which will double it, according to a Wilson Research Strategies poll.
• 49% of Exxon Mobile’s first-quarter gross income this year went to pay worldwide taxes. That’s $9.3 billion in in the first quarter.
• 50 miles off the coast of Florida, Communist Cuba is working with China and others to drill for natural gas and oil while Congress has prohibited America from drilling in the area.
• 51% of voters said Barack Obama was more likely to raise taxes, while only 33% said John McCain, according to a recent Rasmussen poll.
• 57% of Americans support drilling for more oil in offshore fields and in wilderness areas, according to the latest Gallup poll.
• 60% of Americans agreed with the statement that tax hikes hurt the economy. Nearly half of Democrats agreed, as did 60% of Independents, 57% of African-Americans, and a whopping 70% of voters under 30, according to a Rasmussen poll.
  
• 75% of adults would support the next President if he were to do all in his Constitutional power to ensure that federal obscenity laws are enforced vigorously, according to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive in April 2008.
• 81% of Americans, Republican, Democrat and Independents, believe that the nation’s moral state is “getting worse,” according to a recent Gallop poll.
• Over 80% of the nation's population growth results from immigration and births to immigrants. In California, immigration accounts for virtually 100% of the population growth, according to Californians for Population Stabilization.
• 90% of homeless and runaway children live apart from their fathers, according to government statistics.
• Over 1 million green cards are issued per year, far in excess of the 226,000 family cap and the 140,000 employment-based cap, according to Congressman Steve King (R-IA), Ranking Member of the Immigration Subcommittee.
$12 million was donated to the ACLU by leftist Billionaire George Soros towards their $335 million fund raising campaign
• Over $100 billion annually is spent for social-welfare services to families without fathers.
  
• 600 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas resources and 100 billion barrels of oil are estimated to lie in America's deep ocean energy reserves, according to Americans for American Energy.