Thank This Pair For Winning Pork Recipe

How much does it cost to buy a vote - legally, that is?

About $14,000, say two economists who examined whether congressional incumbents can “buy” voters’ favor by delivering federal road contracts, jobs programs and other kinds of pork-flavored goodies to their districts.

Need they have asked? Most people already believe that representatives who cart home the pork are paid off by the voters on election day. But surprisingly, political scientists have consistently found little or no relationship between district spending increases and voting behavior.

Until now. Using a different statistical approach and richer data, economists Steven D. Levitt of Harvard University and James M. Snyder Jr. of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said they’ve finally quantified the value of pork and other types of federal spending.

They found that a relatively modest $50 million increase in federal spending in a congressional district produced on average a 2 percent increase in the number of votes won by the incumbent member of the House of Representatives.

Since about 175,000 voters cast ballots in an average House election, that works out to about $14,000 per vote, they reported in their study just published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

They also found that not all pork is created equal. Increases in non-transfer federal spending - juicy road construction contracts, subsidies, job training, education programs and the like - provided big returns to incumbents, while increases in money from transfer programs like Social Security had little effect.

A Newt note: These numbers may be bad news for congressional budget-cutters, who may be slashing their own throats with that budget ax. “Cutting these non-transfer projects - pork projects - should adversely affect incumbents” of both parties, Levitt suggested.

Gay and straight ISOs

Everybody knows that guys generally seek to meet and mate with younger women, while women prefer men who are their own age or older. And that’s what psychologist Andrew F. Hayes of Cornell University found when he examined 1,464 “In Search Of” ads in 29 newspapers in the United States and Canada.

But the surprise came when Hayes analyzed 258 personal ads placed by homosexual men and women: In terms of age, their preferences were remarkably similar to those of straight men and women. Gay men generally sought males younger than themselves, while lesbians preferred women their age or older.

“The marked similarity of age preferences of heterosexuals and homosexuals is striking,” Hayes wrote in a recent Journal of Social Psychology.

These similarities are all the more unusual because sociobiologists contend that heterosexuals’ age preferences are related to reproduction.

So what’s the explanation? Hayes suggests that gay men, perhaps even more than their heterosexual counterparts, value physical attractiveness (gay or straight, men are pigs) and believe young men are cuter than older guys. And “perhaps women, regardless of sexual orientation, simply prefer similarity in age or seek someone of equal maturity,” he said.

The Wiz Poll: God’s alive but Satan’s dead

It’s the Satan credibility gap: While the overwhelming majority of Americans believe in God and in heaven, significantly fewer say they believe in Satan or hell.

A new survey of 1,008 randomly selected adults found that 95 percent of those interviewed said they believed in God, but 65 percent expressed similar confidence in the existence of Satan. And while 89 percent said there’s a Heaven, 70 percent said they believed in Hell.

Why do fewer people believe in Satan and hell? Many, of course, are simply wishin’ and hopin’. But some deeply religious people believe an all-good, all-loving God is incompatible with “a Devil with a pitchfork” tormenting sinners in a blast-furnace hell, said George Gallup Jr., son of the founder of the Gallup Organization and a leading authority on public attitudes toward religion.

Similarly, some New Agers and others view God as a universal spirit and find notions of Satan and hell to be hopelessly primitive and declasse.