Not debated: these unhappy statistics

After my daughter texted me, “Why is she wearing red?” I tuned into a few minutes of the debate on my iPhone in the dark — being in morning radio I go to bed early. I texted back, “And he’s wearing blue.” To be honest, that was the only surprise the debate offered.

But the two candidates did give watchers a rough view of what sort of America they would like to have or establish. By coincidence, yesterday the FBI issued one very clear picture of the U.S. — its annual report on crime.

Clear and compelling, the reports make a really interesting read (and, by the way, a good primer on how one section of the FBI does its work).

You have to click through a few screens to get to details behind this fact: The 2015 murder rate in the U.S. shot up 10.8 percent from 2014. That’s according to the latest FBI figures, published on the same day as the debate. The rising murder rate occurred as all violent crime rose 3.9 percent. It’s hard to know what to make of this, but the rates of murder and all violent crime, even though up sharply, are still below 2006 levels, the FBI says.

In the late 1960s and until the early 1980s, law and order came into the orbit of many debates, including presidential contests. The violent crime rate has been dropping for many years, though, so maybe people feel safer.

The America we have now has seen nearly 16,000 people murdered last year. The FBI says this translates to 4.9 murders per 100,000 people. In 42 percent of the cases, the victims were killed either by family members or people they knew. Stats show another 10 percent killed by strangers. The relationship is unknown in nearly 48 percent of the cases. In only 60 percent of murders, the circumstances are known. Of these, the FBI says about 40 percent were murdered over arguments or romantic triangles.

The other murder victims often include those left behind to deal with a difficult-to-fathom loss. This morning the Washington Post ran a column about a D.C. mother who, over the years, has lost four sons to shootings.

Murder, gun violence, race, who kills who … it’s all gotten whipped up into a frenzied, often pointless argument, a pitched battle of its own. The main factor in murder seems to be not race, but poverty. That’s why the debates over how to improve the economy matter so much.

And that’s why I was disappointed that neither candidate has a cogent idea for widening the economy. Clinton would raise taxes on the “rich” so they pay their “fair share” of installing solar panels. Trump would in some vague manner force companies to not leave the U.S. and add big tariffs to imported goods. Follow both arguments to their logical endpoints and you reach … well, not growth and not less poverty.

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