House of War

We certainly hope so (from The Financial Times):

Violence in Iraq has fallen at a rate that has surprised military commanders and even one of the architects of the “surge” that boosted US troop numbers in the country this year, according to figures gathered by the US.

The figures show the numbers of suicide attacks, roadside bombings, mortar and other attacks on US forces and on the Iraqi population have more than halved since 30,000 extra troops in June.

The military attributes the decline to the surge, the spread of local ceasefire deals across Iraq, a ceasefire by radical Shia militias and an improvement in the Iraqi security forces.

Jack Keane, the former army general who helped persuade George W. Bush, US president, to increase troop numbers in Iraq, said the decrease in violence was “phenomenal” and had occurred far faster than he had expected.

“When you understand you are dealing with the complexity of a counter-insurgency operation which can take years to resolve, to have this dramatic a success in a short period of time, it’s unprecedented,” he said.

The US military says the number of civilian deaths has also fallen 60 per cent since the surge took effect, with a drop of 75 per cent in Baghdad. According to icasualties.org, the average monthly US death toll dropped from 96 for the first half of 2007 to 66 in the past four months. The average monthly death toll for Iraqi civilians and security forces has dropped from 2,157 to 1,223 in the same period….

1. As Tim Worstall notes, there is one major industrial country that didn’t ratify the Kyoto Protocoll, and one major industrial country that has actually reduced its total emissions. The country is the same in both cases:

Total U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were 7,075.6 million metric tons carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) in 2006, a decrease of 1.5 percent from the 2005 level according to ‘Emissions of Greenhouse Gases in the United States 2006’, a report released today by the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

U.S. GHG emissions per unit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or ‘U.S. GHG-intensity,’ fell from 653 metric tons per million 2000 constant dollars of GDP (MTCO2e/$Million GDP) in 2005 to 625 MTCO2e/$Million GDP in 2006, a decline of 4.2 percent. Since 1990, the annual average decline in GHG-intensity has been 2.0 percent.

2. Staying with the US, the eminent “Masonomist”, Don Bourdreaux of Cafe Hayek, has been examining the most recent iteration of Paul Krugman’s frequent accusation that the average American is not “sharing in the country’s prosperity” and that “whatever good economic news there is hasn’t translated into gains for most working Americans”. In response, Bourdreaux links to a Thomas Sowell piece summarising recent IRS data, stating that,

“People in the bottom fifth of income-tax filers in 1996 saw their incomes rise 91 percent by 2005. The top 1 percent … saw their incomes decline a whopping 26 percent. Meanwhile, the average taxpayers’ real income rose 24 percent between 1996 and 2005.”

Bourdreaux also has a chart, drawn from the IRS data, showing income mobility statistics:

Can’t get any clearer than that, what? I wonder if Krugman will take note…