We are the ADD Generation

Rather than the 'Me Generation', or 'Generation X', I've often thought that we are really the 'ADD Generation', where ADD stands for Attention Deficit Disorder. Our politics is, essentially, media driven, and the mass media have a short attention span with little time for subtlety, or for events that cannot entertain when shown on television.

So there's very little sense of perspective. Dean Baker writes that Robert Novak...

...[t]he Washington Post columnist, dedicated his column today to a $1 million earmark (0.3 cents per person) for a museum dedicated to Woodstock. This may well be a waste of taxpayers' money, but it is wrong to imply that such waste amounts to a big factor in the budget or budget deficit. (For another comparison, the $1 million is approximately equal to what we'll spend in 3 minutes on the Iraq War.)

Indeed. Another case in point: the current issue of the Economist (subscription) talks about the cost of eradicating malaria:

A back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests it would cost about $9 billion a year for two or three decades to make and distribute the necessary vaccines, drugs and equipment.

This sounds like a lot, but take a look at this excerpt from A Subsidy Primer, by Ron Steenblik:

Recently, for example, the Environmental Working Group, an American non-profit organization, counted up all the direct payments made by the U.S. Government to farmers between 1994 and 2005 and found that ten percent of subsidy recipients collected 73 percent of all subsidies, amounting to $120.5 billion.