Your tax dollars at work: “The National Institutes of Health spent $314,613 over two years on a study that determined that family violence increases about three times as much on the Fourth of July as it does after the local NFL team suffers an ‘upset’ loss,” reports CNSNews.com.
The project began in July 2008 and is scheduled to end in June 2011, but all the money was disbursed in the first two years.
The study compared data from the National Incidence Based Reporting System, a database of police reports of domestic violence, to the results of NFL games “because of the bond people form with their local team, the regular wagering that takes place on NFL games and the detailed statistics generated by the games,” according to CNSNews.
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It found that while an upset loss (defined as a loss where the team was expected to win by four or more points) by the home team correlated with “a roughly 10% increase in the number of police reports of at-home male-on-female intimate partner violence,” holidays tended to correlate with much higher levels of violence. New Year’s Day saw the greatest increase in violence (31 percent), followed by Memorial Day (30 percent), Independence Day (29 percent), New Year’s Eve (22 percent), Thanksgiving (20 percent), and Christmas (18 percent). Hot weather also contributes to domestic violence, said the study, which found an eight-percent increase in such violence on days where the temperature exceeds 80 degrees.
Asked by CNSNews to justify the unconstitutional expenditure of hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars at a time when the economy was in the tank and the national debt skyrocketed to over $13 trillion, Dr. Rosalind King of the NIH said, “The medical care, mental health services, and lost productivity (e.g., time away from work) cost of intimate partner violence is estimated to be in excess of $8.3 billion. It is impossible to estimate the costs in terms of suffering and loss of life that intimate partner violence exacts. However, if the grant yields information leading to a reduction in just a small fraction of intimate partner violence, it will have more than paid for itself.” That’s easy to say when you’re spending other people’s money.
The lingering question: If the government paid for this study, what policies is it likely to implement in response to the results?
First, it could ban upset losses by NFL teams. A team expected to win by at least four points must be allowed to win; or point spreads must be outlawed so no one knows which games are upsets; or all games must end in ties (which would fit in well with the prevailing politically correct paradigm that won’t let kids’ soccer games keep score for fear someone’s self-esteem would suffer). Better yet, sports-bar owners could lobby for legislation requiring all men with domestic partners to watch football games in sports bars and remain there for a “cooling off” period after any losses — legislation that might very well be supported by a significant percentage of the male population, particularly if it included appropriate subsidies for beer and wings.
Second, it could repeal all national holidays, the greatest occasions for domestic violence. Trouble is, this would keep the government operating more days a year, and neither government employees nor productive Americans want that to happen.
Third — and here’s where this study stands the greatest chance of being employed for nefarious purposes — the government could enact cap-and-trade and other anti-climate-change legislation. After all, if hot weather means more domestic violence, what better way to prevent such violence than to put a halt to “global warming”?
If these policies (some admittedly tongue-in-cheek) seem that they would do more harm than good, just remember what your friendly NIH bureaucrat had to say: If even a small fraction of domestic violence can be prevented by these measures, they will more than pay for themselves. Then ask her to buy you a new car with improved safety features out of her own pocket.
