Numbers of the Week: Featuring numbers of the weak…and of the strong

If mathematics is the universal language, here are a few numbers that should communicate volumes to all:

2000
That’s the approximate number of employees in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. And according to the Washington Post‘s lead story today, that means more people are now doing counter-terror work for our Central Intelligence Agency than there are as members of al Qaeda. How’s that for a tenth anniversary message about America’s response to the 9/11 attacks? Personally, I think it is just great and an appropriate use of U.S. national security resources, these couple of thousand of people will do vastly more to contain the terror threat than most of the hundreds of thousands we deployed in old-style land ground wars in the Middle East.

2000
As it happens, 2000 is also the estimated number of militants and civilians killed by U.S. drone attacks. The use of drones along with the application of intelligence assets above are among the ways America is better learning how to contain the terror threat. Of course, the civilian death toll, the violation of the air space of sovereign nations and the moral implications of rich nations being able to wage war against poor ones without putting the lives of their own people at risk are all questions hanging in the air like the drone that circled above Osama bin Laden’s residence in the hours before he died.

9.1
That, of course, is the current jobless rate in the United State, an ominous figure as we enter this Labor Day weekend. But much worse are numbers like…

16.7 and 16.4
Those respectively are the official numbers regarding unemployed blacks and unemployed young people in America. In cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Milwaukee, old hubs of the industrial Midwest, the official numbers are above 25 percent. And of course, being official numbers, we know they are wrong. They don’t include those who have stopped looking for jobs and dropped out of the labor force altogether. They don’t include the under-employed. The real numbers are much higher. In fact they are so much higher that they are not actually numbers any more. They are a social crisis, a breakdown that is tearing apart the fabric of America, crushing hopes and inviting backlash of a type we haven’t seen in decades. Which leads us to…

46.5
Which is the gut-wrenchingly high … appalling … failure-of-our-system type …. percentage of black young people who were out of work in August. And all these unemployment numbers lead us in turn to…

0 and 0
Which is both the number of net new jobs created in August … and also happens to be Barack Obama’s percentage chances of re-election if these job numbers do not improve measurably over the next 12 months. Having said that, it’s always good to have a Plan B in mind. Which explains, I suppose, why White House chief of staff Bill Daley reportedly arranged a below-the-radar retreat in June for his senior team at Fort McNair with historian Michael Beschloss as a guest speaker to help answer the one question on everyone’s mind: "How does a U.S. President win re-election with the country suffering unacceptably high rates of unemployment?"

51 and counting
That’s number of months since George W. Bush’s EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson said that existing Federal smog standards "do not adequately protect the public." It’s "and counting" because today President Obama put a stop — until at least after the 2012 elections — to the EPA’s plan to issue new ozone standards despite the fact that his own EPA team had been working on them intensively for over two years now. The EPA has said (in each of the past four years) that a new smog standard would provide between $13 billion and $100 billion in health benefits at a cost of $19 billion to $90 billion. Further, the pushback leaves the U.S. again lagging on a global environmental regulatory issue — ozone — gaining in importance almost everywhere else. It is also a sign that the President (see the above numbers) is starting to see everything to through the lens of the above job numbers (and his poll numbers that are directly linked to them.) For their part, Republicans on the Hill and corporate voices up and down K Street that have been hammering home the point about potential job losses associated with the possible new regulations were heard cheering. Congressman Fred Upton, the House’s energy honcho calling it a "welcome breakthrough."