You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
9 applications
There have been at least nine applications for trademarks incorporating racially charged words and symbols filed since a June 19 Supreme Court ruling that tossed out a federal law prohibiting them. Most of those are related to the N-word. [Reuters]
36.2 days
Median amount of time a U.S. state could run government operations with their 2016 levels of money reserves. This is down from 2007’s mark of 41.3 days, and 2017 could see the median decline to 27.5 days of rainy-day fund runway. [Pew Charitable Trusts]
$37 in gross profit
Middlemen called pharmacy-benefit managers hugely profit from the sale of brand name drugs. According to a consulting group, a brand-name drug with a $300 list price may deliver $37 to third parties, with pharmacy-benefit managers getting $18 of it. [The Wall Street Journal]
32,000
The subways in New York City are in a state of dire disrepair after decades of governors ignored or deferred maintenance on the system. Now mayor Bill de Blasio is suggesting the city increase the upper-most tax rate by about a half-point to generate $800 million a year to fix the subways. There are about 32,000 New Yorkers who are either single individuals who make more than $500,000 per year or part of a married couple who make more than $1,000,000 annually. Their city tax rate would go from 3.9 percent to 4.4 percent. [Bloomberg]
$10 million
Just when he was finally getting out, Jay Cutler keeps being pulled back into the NFL. With the Dolphins confronting the loss of their starting quarterback Ryan Tannehill to knee surgery, the ex-Bears quarterback and recent Fox Sports hire signed a $10 million one-year deal with Miami. [ESPN]
184 million
Number of farms in China with cropland, compared to 1.6 million in the United States. That abundance of small suppliers means that China is particularly vulnerable to food fraud, for instance when lower-quality meats are passed off as the real deal. This has led to some serious tech solutions to confront the problem. [Bloomberg]
If you see a significant digit in the wild, send it to @WaltHickey.