Hey - They Moved the Marsh!

News arrived a few days ago (Kennebec Journal, January 29) that the United States Department of Agriculture has changed its plant hardiness map. This is the map of growing zones you see in plant catalogs. It tells you when you can plant certain items, and what sorts of plants can and can't be grown where you live.

The Marsh in Autumn, 2011

Maine - and the rest of the country - are getting warmer. The effect here is as if we had pushed the salt marsh south. There's talk of growing peaches. In Maine, not Georgia. Where I live, our former designation of Zone 5a has been changed to 6a.

I'm not expecting to plant my arica palm outdoors any time soon. But sometimes numbers can help us picture concepts that seem abstract or difficult to imagine. Just in case you were wondering what climate change would actually feel like - this is one concrete measure.

Another set of numbers popped up this week that make a different kind of point.

The Repubs like to whine and wail about the size of the government. I'm going to take them at their word and assume they mean the national government, since state and local governments are up to - well - states and localities. One measurement of government size might be how many people are in the armed forces. It turns out our armed forces have been steadily shrinking, now about half the Cold War size.

(Wikipedia)

It's trickier to measure the Federal Government's other employees - people work under differing statuses and classifications. The Washington Post suggests a formula based on Full-time Equivalents (FTE's) per 100,000 population, to make comparisons possible. It turns out the government is shrinking substantially. Here are the FTE's per 100,000 over the last number of presidents:

Kennedy:          13.3

Johnson:           12.9

Nixon:              14.4

Ford:                13.2

Carter:              12.9

Reagan:            11.9

Bush:                12.3

Clinton:            11.1

Bush:                  9.1

Obama ('10)       8.4 (est)

It seems to me the Democrats have done just fine in shrinking government. This whole exercise begs the question of whether size matters and whether shrinking the government is a good idea, when it can contribute jobs and other boosts to the economy, and when the government can help citizens and residents with health, education, economics, safety, etc. But in this season on increasingly heated politics, I'm already weary of the Republicans beating their chests about big government Democrats - when the facts says otherwise.