No Oil for Pacifists

Don't worry all -- especially MaxedOutMama -- I'm ok. I'm just on a long-term assignment in the Middle East. I'm likely there, with a few trips back to DC, until at least mid December.

I'm temporarily acting as a bureaucrat for a government, managing a staff of 70 plus people, and trying to set policy for the country. In this position, opinion-writing, even in my spare time, would be unwise. And blogging from my hotel, where that same government is paying for my Internet connection, would be foolish (even were I not exhausted after 10 hours at the office). Given that, I've got to take a break from public positions for a bit.

That doesn't mean this blog is dead--just slower.

But I'm fine. Below is a picture of me that will allow the motivated to figure out where I am:



More pictures to come.

I'm back in the Middle East--and may be there for a while. Blogging will be light for some time to come.

You cannot turn on the television without becoming acutely aware that it is National Breast Cancer Awareness month.  Especially on Monday Night -- there is some clown with a pink chin strap grinning for the camera.  'Hi Mom!  National Prostate Cancer Awareness Month was September, but you didn't know that did you? Why is that?

According to the Centers for Disease Control, prostate cancer incidence rates and death rates are higher than breast cancer.  Prostate cancer has the highest incidence rate of all cancers.  Moreover, only lung cancer has a higher death rate than prostate cancer.


So why all the hoopla over breast cancer?

It is more than just hoopla.  It is serious federal tax money.  Federal breast cancer spending is higher than that of any cancer but lung cancer, by a wide margin.  According to the NIH, breast cancer funding for 2010 was $833 million, including $111 million of stimulus funding.  Here are the numbers for the top four cancers:


Federal breast cancer funding is more than double that of prostate cancer, and it has been for a while.  Despite all the cancer funding, incidence rates for all kinds of cancers change by about 2% per year.   Massive spending has failed to do much but stimulate researchers pockets.

Don't get me wrong, I love boobs!  I hate cancer, and well I love my prostate.  It just seems to me the grand standing for breast cancer is all out of proportion with the problem as compared to other cancers, including male-specific prostate cancer.  It's just a bandwagon.

Remember to drop a dime for prostate cancer next September, and spread the word...

Jeff Jacoby in last week's Boston Globe:

The policies of the Chinese government make it possible for Americans to acquire a vast array of products at affordable prices. For that high crime and misdemeanor, the US House of Representatives voted last week to punish China.

The vote on HR 2378, which would authorize punitive tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States -- which include everything from clothing, furniture, and toys to refrigerators, computers, and sporting goods -- was a lopsided 348 to 79. It was accompanied by equally unbalanced congressional rhetoric. "They cheat to steal our jobs," fumed Mike Rogers of Michigan, while California’s Dana Rohrabacher denounced the Chinese as a "clique of gangsters."

From the Senate, where similar legislation is pending, came equally hostile words. "This suckers’ game is never going to stop unless we call their bluff," seethed Charles Schumer of New York. . .

But what exactly is so awful about selling good stuff cheap to tens of millions of US consumers? . . .

Affordable imports are a godsend, not grounds for a trade war. It’s distressing that so many members of Congress have trouble understanding that. Maybe a return to private life would help them figure it out.

Agreed--twice.

(via Carpe Diem)

Supporters of ethanol subsidies, including Barack Obama, insist that increased biofuel production will reduce America's dependence on imported oil. One flaw in this argument is that it ignores the increased costs of energy--in the form of both taxpayer support and higher pump prices. Another error is that the subsidies raise food prices while squandering arable land.

Even ignoring all that, tax-supported ethanol flunks its fans' first premise--of cutting the flow of oil from abroad. As the Manhattan Institute’s Robert Bryce explains:

Despite Billions in Subsidies, Corn Ethanol Has Not Cut U.S. Oil Imports

In the next few weeks, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to rule on a proposal to increase from 10 percent to 15 percent the amount of ethanol that may be blended into gasoline. If the EPA approves the move, the U.S. motor-fuel market would yet again become the victim of misguided federal intervention.

Since the 1970s, Congress has justified subsidies to the corn ethanol industry with the oft-repeated claim that boosting domestic production of ethanol will increase America’s energy security by reducing U.S. oil imports.

That claim has no basis in fact.

Between 1999 and 2009, U.S. ethanol production increased seven-fold, to more than 700,000 barrels per day (bbl/d). During that period, however, oil imports increased by more than 800,000 bbl/d. . . Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration show that oil imports closely track domestic oil consumption. Over the past decade, as oil demand grew, so did imports. When consumption fell, imports did as well. Ethanol production levels had no apparent effect on the volume of oil imports or on consumption.

So despite more than three decades of subsidies costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, the ethanol industry cannot point to any decline in oil imports during the period when it experienced its most rapid growth.

Read the whole thing to see how subsidized ethanol falls short of the promised benefits.

(via Planet Gore)

UPDATE: George Will on Volt subsidies in the November 14th Washington Post.

Following up on a previous post about Chevy's new, heavily-subsidized, electric car, the Volt:

Item: Relying primarily on its battery-powered electric motor, unless the driver draws on the "secondary" gasoline engine, the car must be recharged every 25-50 miles. General Motors presumes that "Chevrolet Volts are likely to be charged off-peak in the evening or overnight when electricity consumption is lower"--and the government-owned automaker claims this would save consumers $1500 per year (see page 9 of the Powerpoint here).

Item: The Chevy's battery can be recharged via a portable 120 Volt unit that plugs into a normal AC outlet (see page 2-3 of the Powerpoint here)--but that takes about 10 hours (see page 7 of the Powerpoint here).

Item: The battery also can be recharged via a 240 Volt home charge unit (see page 2 of the Powerpoint here)--but that requires purchasing the optional unit for $490.

Item: The 240 Volt unit cuts recharging time to only 4 hours (see page 7 of the Powerpoint here)--but that requires instillation by a skilled and licensed electrician, which GM estimates costing an additional $1475.

Item: To be fair, consumers may not pay the full freight for installation--that may be reimbursed in part by state and Federal tax credits.

Conclusion: Reader OBH said in comments on the previous Chevy Volt post:

Beware of technical tricks.

The only -- repeat: only -- way to examine this whole process (and that's IF we [acknowledge] that the carbon footprint is relevant to jack or that other stuff -- a very BIG "if") is to utilize some variety of full-life-cycle accounting.

OBH was talking about actual energy saving and carbon reduction, which drops when one examines electric generation, production inputs and disposal for an electric car's entire inputs and life-cycle. Yet the same is true regarding the Chevy Volt's operating cost as well--it's about $2000 more expensive than claimed. Oh, and those (additional) tax credits for purchasers of faster charger? That may make consumer prices less expensive--but that's still is a cost paid via cross subsidies from taxpayers as a whole to the smug socialists who purchase a Volt as proof they're progressive.

(via Instapundit)

I've previously posted on progressive promotion of collective over individual economic freedom--and on the failed outcome of such experiments.

But lefties' love of the nanny state lives on--and is expanding. Bruce Riggs writes in American Thinker:

The post-Cold War era has seen an unprecedented rise in America of European-bred, radical-Left political thought. The radical Left is defined here as any authoritarian Collectivism in which individual freedom is increasingly subsumed by the dictates of a dominant central government: Communism in particular, but revolutionary Socialism in general under its Fascist, Third Way, or Progressive pseudonyms. Regardless of descriptor, the common denominator is the elimination -- or at least the emasculation -- of Capitalism as the hated engine of disparate wealth distribution.

Today, this Collectivist ideology travels under the sanitized, if disingenuous, banner of "social justice" but remains essentially Marxist nevertheless. As Marx so succinctly put it, "Communism is the elimination of private property." This is an idea that may have been feasible in a tribal world of small, mono-cultural, agrarian communities, but it is completely irrational in today's world. Worse, it's a fatally flawed ideology built on the Left's implicit denial of human nature: man's "out-of-the-herd" evolutionary progress toward individual achievement and self-actualization.

To suppress human nature and human difference is, in essence, the Left's utopian ambition -- an ambition that requires the totalitarian state.

It requires a totalitarian state because it is a delusional quest to return man to an egalitarian herd from which he evolved thousands of years ago. And as the history of the twentieth century shows, humanity rebels against such coerced devolution. Marx's elimination of private property coincidentally strips incentives to produce. The result is social decay to a dismal level of perpetual shortages and shared poverty -- just ask the citizens who stood in the endless bread lines of the former USSR.

Riggs covers two critical points: First, collectivism pre-supposes suffocating totalitarianism. As Dr. Sanity once observed, "capitalism is the best system ever created for generating wealth: It is because capitalism does not need to change human nature to work in the real world."

Second, as Matt Ridley explains in his book The Rational Optimist, the simpler, sustainable life sought by collectivist green actually requires a return to the poorer past. As Ridley said in the Times (London) last spring:

Many of today’s extreme environmentalists . . . maintain that the only sustainable solution is to retreat -- to halt economic growth and enter progressive economic recession.

This means not just that increasing your company’s sales would be a crime, but that the failure to shrink them would be, too. Not only would inventing a new gadget be illegal, but so would failing to abandon existing technologies. Growing more food per acre would become a felony, as would failing to grow less.

Here’s the rub: this future sounds awfully like the feudal past. The Ming and Maoist emperors of China had rules that restricted the growth of businesses, punished innovation and limited the size of families. That, I fear, is the world the pessimists conjure up when they speak of retreat.

Make no mistake: modern man is far better off than its feudal ancestors. "Sustainable production" is another way of forcing everyone to be subsistence farmers.

Put differently, why return to a dictatorial dark age? That's back to the future.

MaxedOutMama on the economy:

[T]otal wages and salaries are much higher than the social benefits paid, but the normalized series above shows that social benefits have constantly risen in proportion to wages paid, and that they started this epic divergence in the 1990s. The narrowing of the gap at the end of the 1990s really represented a demographic bump relating mostly to the Great Depression. There is also a demographic blip from the Spanish flu (1918-1919). So although most of the public believes that Clinton raised taxes and closed the deficit, almost all of the improvement was really demographic.

I've previously noted that much of the case for increased oversight of the financial sector mistakenly presupposes that regulators could have predicted and prevented the credit crunch. In that light, consider this from economist Arnold Kling:

I [learned] something interesting from Doyne Farmer of the Santa Fe Institute, while he was ranting against the state of the art in macroeconomic models. He said that in 2006, the Fed simulated a 20 percent decline in home prices in its model, and the effect was minor.

That sounds highly plausible, of course. But it just adds to my frustration about the infamous Blinder-Zandi black-box simulations purporting to show that the economy would have been much worse without TARP. Such an exercise assumes that we have precise quantitative knowledge of the feedback between real and financial variables. But the exercise that Farmer referred to illustrates just how weak an assumption that is.

On top of that is Megan McArdle's reaction in the Atlantic:

It's fine to say "Our best guess is that TARP and the stimulus did some good. But it's well to remember that our best guess really isn't very good. And putting an exact number on it--"3.1 million jobs created or saved!" creates a dangerous false precision, giving people the illusion that we have good knowledge in a very foggy area.

Indeed, it's worth reflecting on the fact that the simulation the Fed ran--and a million others run by regulators, bankers, and investors--probably made the bubble, and the resulting crash, much worse. People thought they knew something they didn't, and it made them complacent. I doubt the unanticipated results of the stimulus will be so devastating, but it's nonetheless important to guard against hubris.

Now, I supported TARP--until its bailout expanded from banks to automakers and beyond. But presuming complex modeling perfection for political purposes requires regulation proponents to endorse economic evidence and predictability that they reject everywhere else. Such as tax cuts stimulating the economy, and growth being the best anti-poverty program.

Why is it that progressives disbelieve in economics except when bashing banks or "proving" man-made global warming?

Chicago may forever be the "Second City," but Illinois is shooting to the top of a different ranking--top sovereign credit risks.

Illinois already passed California to become the riskiest state. And it topped Iceland (motto: "finances melt faster than ice") and is gaining on Greece. So, Illinois muni bond offerings had to promise greater returns--making the state more like a Third World country:

Illinois, with the lowest credit rating of any state from Moody’s Investors Service, dangled yields higher than Mexico, which defaulted on debt in 1982, and Portugal, which costs more to insure against missed payments.

Why are states such as Illinois flirting with default? Structural budget gaps generated by unfunded pension and health care liabilities. According to a Barrons article from March:

Some 80% of [state] public employees are beneficiaries of defined-benefit plans under which monthly pension payments are guaranteed, no matter how stocks and other volatile assets backing the retirement plans perform. In contrast, most of the taxpayers footing the bill for these public-employee benefits (participants' contributions to these plans are typically modest) have been pushed by their employers into far less munificent defined-contribution plans and suffered the additional indignity of seeing their 401(k) accounts shrivel in the recent bear market in stocks. . .

The prospects are bleak for many state and local governments as a result of all this. According to a survey last month by the Pew Center on the States, a nonpartisan research group, eight states -- Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and West Virginia -- lack funding for more than a third of their pension liabilities. Thirteen others are less than 80% funded.

The Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago "estimates the state’s retirement-related liabilities at $130 billion." All this from "The progressive, Blue state of Illinois which gave you the reformer Barack Obama."

But wait, there's more: it happens that significant portions of recent state borrowing came from sale of "Build America Bonds," a new type of issue created by the President's stimulus package, featuring federally-subsidized interest rates. And that, in turn, could spread risks of state default to all American taxpayers:

Unfortunately, the rising popularity of BABs could make a federal bailout of the states more likely, because there is now a new class of investors (foreigners) who can reasonably claim to have been misled as to who is ultimately responsible for these debt securities. As with regular municipal debt, BABs are not backed by the federal government. Yet these bonds have the "Build America" brand​--and not the moniker that would be more accurate: "Help deeply indebted states borrow more to build more stuff."

Not surprisingly, confusion about who stands behind these obligations has contributed to the program’s popularity. The fact that cash-strapped California has issued 22 percent of all BABs since the program’s inception is one of the more troubling signs supporting the hypothesis that foreign investors view these securities as enjoying an "implied" federal guarantee.

We've seen this movie before--with the tax-funded bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, despite no explicit Federal guarantee.

So be careful: what starts in Illinois doesn't necessarily stay in Illinois--rather, in this Administration, it tends to plague us all.

(via Instapundit, Reason magazine)

Critics complain about a supposedly withering manufacturing base in America. I've previously disputed the point.

In reviewing the data recently, I examined the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Chartbook of International Labor Comparisons, which includes (at Section 5.9, page 44) the global share of manufacturing output in 2007. Contrary to the claims, it shows the United States with 20 percent and China at 12 percent.

I wondered how that would look adjusted for population (also from 2007):


source: NOfP chart based on BLS Chartbook, Sections 5.1, 5.9

Yes, I know that this presentation over-emphasizes the effects of labor over capital. Still, it seems to me the United States has been both strong and productive in the manufacturing sector, which is growing again after the recession. In any event, blaming China won't help U.S. manufacturing.

Count me with National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru on why Mitt Romney won't be my candidate in 2012:

I never liked his Massachusetts health-care plan and said so at the time, but it didn’t render him unacceptable to me. He wasn’t running on a federal version of that plan, which would have rendered him unacceptable in my eyes.

He still isn’t. So what’s changed? Only the political context, which is to say: everything. It seems to me to be pretty important for conservatism that Republicans run on a platform of repeal-and-replace in 2012, and Romney does not seem like a credible carrier of that message. . .

The fact that Romney had supported a state-level policy that resembled Obamacare would still have been a mark against him, in my view, but the issue would not have had the importance it now has.

In my view, then, Romney’s health-care record is and should be a much bigger hurdle for him to overcome this time.

As for who to support, John Hawkins of Right Wing News recently polled conservative bloggers for their 2012 choice (and least favorite). The outcome: Sarah Palin led the pack, with Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie as alternatives; Mike Huckabee got the downcheck.

I was among the bloggers polled. I voted for Mitch Daniels and against Sarah Palin. So other bloggers halfway agree with me.

BTW, no more posts today: Columbus Day!

Another day off.

David Kendall and Jim Kessler of the Third Way organization created a "taxpayer receipt" for an earner at the 2009 median income:


source: Third Way

More evidence that entitlement spending, not the war on terror, is the budget buster.

(via Carpe Diem)

Warren Meyer in Forbes wonders who benefits from Democrat economic policies:

Democrats claim the American manufacturing base is declining in the face of unfair competition from a Chinese government that is unfairly helping its own manufacturers through currency manipulation and export subsidization.

To which I say: So what?

We should be thrilled that the Chinese government and its people see fit to spend their own money to subsidize lower prices for American businesses and consumers. Last week, President Obama put substantial pressure on the Chinese prime minister to revalue Chinese currency, a revaluation that would have the effect of raising prices of all Chinese goods in the United States. What possible sense does such a move make, particularly in a recession? . . .

Christian Broda and John Romalis, a pair of University of Chicago economists, have been doing work on income distribution. A couple of years ago they published a paper that showed how our measures of income inequality may be exaggerated because the metrics assume that both rich and poor experience the same rate of inflation. In fact, the researches found, over the last decade or so the poor have seen much lower rates of inflation than the rich. . . Sadly, prices for low-income Americans could be even lower were it not for past protectionist measures. . .

This means that at the same time Democrats have again raised issues of rising income inequality, they are trying to stop some of the most powerful forces at work mitigating these income differences. There is no question that if Democrats are successful in changing China’s currency policy and/or imposing new tariffs (taxes) on Chinese goods, prices will rise for all Americans, but particularly so for the lower income brackets that are supposedly the Democrats’ constituency.

Agreed on both counts, though the link between income equality and China trade, while logical, is unproven (and the first point undermined somewhat here).

Assistant Village Idiot:

In trying to again refine some empirical values of liberalism, I was again struck by the notion that liberals regard the federal government as the dominant expression of the people much more than other American groups do. Libertarians, and to a lesser extent conservatives, regard the government as a tool for doing the business of keeping everything going smoothly and fairly. It is inanimate. Liberals, especially the Religious Left, see government in anthropomorphic terms. The "Not In Our Name" campaign described a government that speaks on behalf of the people; there is much more concern about how we "appear" to other nations, rather than the practical result of government actions -- to the point that they believe a proper appearance or attitude expressed by our government will solve many of our international problems; the UN, much more loved by liberals than others, is assumed to be the main way for the peoples of the world to work together, with government acting as embodiment of each people. . .

As I noted, this is even more pronounced on the religious left. How "we" treat the poor or the least among us is conceived first as how the government treats them, as if the government were a person. It seems rather Old World -- monarchist, aristocratic, with largely European ideas of the nation-state. . .

All in all, an odd disguised nationalism, that sees government as a person, our representative in the (heh) Family of Nations; a parent who watches over the children and is responsible for them.

Well said; I agree. Still, to the extent government is the expression of the will of the people -- and America uniquely represents a positive force for good -- I can't miss the opportunity to quote from Josh Chafetz's 2003 essay "In My Name":

The rallying cry of those who opposed war in Iraq has been "Not in My Name." They sought to wash their hands of the war, to abdicate moral responsibility for its consequences. Fair enough. But I have been arguing the necessity of this war for some time now. So let me now talk about my moral responsibility.

In my name, statues of a tyrant have been cast down, portraits of a tyrant have been stomped upon, and fear of a tyrant has dissipated. In my name, the courageous men and women of our coalition armed forces have largely been welcomed as liberators, not invaders. In my name, the residents of Baghdad shouted thank yous, "Good, George Bush!" and "Down Saddam!" to coalition troops. In my name, a Baghdad imam told a reporter, "I'm 49, but I never lived a single day. Only now will I start living. That Saddam Hussein is a murderer and a criminal."

In my name, the gates to a children's prison were thrown open, and kids whose only crime was that they refused to join Saddam's youth groups were free to go home to their families. Torture chambers have been discovered and shut down throughout the country. Political prisoners have been freed.

In my name, the al Qaeda-linked group Ansar al-Islam has been wiped from the face of the earth, with the help of our brave Kurdish allies. The Kurds no longer live in fear of being attacked with weapons of mass destruction, and those who have ordered such attacks in the past are either dead or in hiding. In my name, the ones who survive will be brought to justice.

AVI is right that morality resides with the individual, not the state. But, to the extent we put nations and multilateral institutions in the balance, I'll take America any day.

The National Science Foundation is an "independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 'to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense.'" In Fiscal year 2010, its budget was about $6.9 billion. Last year, most of the NSF's awards went to colleges and universities.

This year might be a bit different. NSF has (get these 1984-esque names) a "Directorate for Education and Human Resources," which, in turn, has a Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings (DRL). And, on August 25th, starting August 25th, NSF's DRL awarded grants totaling $700,000 to subsidize The Great Immensity, "a touring play with songs and video that explores our relationship to the environment, with a focus on critical issues of climate change and biodiversity conservation." The awardee, an off-Broadway theater company called The Civilians, describes the show's plot and purpose:

Exploring the environment and the future of our planet.

Polly, a photojournalist, disappears while working in the rainforests of Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal. Phyllis, Polly's twin, embarks on an international search for her lost sister that spans the North American continent, from the tropics to arctic Canada. The play weaves actual interviews with locals from the two regions and some of our nation's top scientists into the twins' story, as the sisters struggle to survive polar bears, tundra buggies, snakes, and a Chinese pimp -- all while grappling with the harsh and seemingly hopeless realities of climate change.

The Great Immensity explores the themes of climate change, deforestation and extinction in two distinct locations: Barro Colorado Island (BCI) in the Panama Canal and the city of Churchill in arctic Canada. Both of these extraordinary places have natural ecosystems already deeply affected by the shift in climate, centers of scientific research, and relationships to global shipping: the Panama Canal and the Port of Churchill. The play takes its name from an enormous Chinese Panamax ship that the authors observed crossing the Panama Canal.

Drawing on interviews with individuals such as botanists, paleontologists, climatologists, indigenous community leaders, Polar Bear Tour guides, and trappers, The Great Immensity gives voice to real people whose stories make the reality of present crisis tangible and viscerally felt, inspiring us all to make the profound changes this moment demands.

Admittedly, based on this summary, The Great Immensity isn't going to make theater-goers forget Tennessee Williams or Sam Shepard, much less any of my favorites from the stage. But, having been outraged about government-funded pointlessly offensive shock-art, I was unsurprised when this Administration attempted to politicize the National Endowment for the Arts. (This isn't because I'm old-fashioned; I prefer modern art: my current favorite is Arman.)

After being caught red-handed at NEA, the Democrats are doing it again, indirectly, via funding for the sciences. Yet, NSF was supposed "to initiate and support specific scientific and engineering activities in connection with matters relating to international cooperation, national security, and the effects of scientific and engineering applications upon society." An off-Broadway play about Polly-the-warming-shill seems beyond the agency's statutory scope, if not blatant propagandizing. Neither comports with Obama's promise to "restore science to its proper place."

Princeton University previously funded The Great Immensity. The NSF award is projected to expand the audience to about 75,000 people. In the midst of a lingering financial meltdown and an expanding Federal budget deficit, is a enviro-pushing play (or a climate change-inspired mission to Mars) the best use of taxpayer money?

(via reader Warren, Wizbang)

As reported in the September 23rd Daily Mail (U.K.):

Three-year-olds being labelled bigots by teachers as 250,000 children accused of racism

Teachers are being forced to report children as young as three to the authorities for using alleged "racist" language, it was claimed last night.

Munira Mirza, a senior advisor to London Mayor Boris Johnson, said schools were being made to spy on nursery age youngsters by the Race Relations Act 2000.

More than a quarter of a million children have been accused of racism since it became law, she said.

Writing in Prospect magazine [subscription-only], she said: "The more we seek to measure racism, the more it seems to grow.

"Teachers are now required to report incidents of racist abuse among children as young as three to local authorities, resulting in a massive increase of cases and reinforcing the perception that we need an army of experts to manage race relations from cradle to grave."

See also the September 28th Daily Mail (U.K.):

Official figures just published show that ten successful legal claims are being mounted every week in schools, with parents and pupils often gaining hefty cash payouts as a result of threats to sue over even the most minor grievances. In one case, a Doncaster pupil was awarded £2,000 after being exposed to bright light during a ­science experiment. In another case, a Surrey pupil was awarded £29,000 after he said he had suffered burns from sitting on a hot radiator.

Altogether, £2.25 million was dished out last year to meet compensation demands in schools -- money that would have been far better spent in the classroom.

(via ShrinkWrapped)

Enviro-zealots have claimed that global warming "will result in the extinction of many species," predicting that as much as 15 to 37% of known plant and animal species will be "committed to extinction" by 2050.

Don't believe 'um:

Conservationists are overestimating the number of species that have been driven to extinction, scientists have said.

A study has found that a third of all mammal species declared extinct in the past few centuries have turned up alive and well.

Some of the more reclusive creatures managed to hide from sight for 80 years only to reappear within four years of being officially named extinct in the wild. . .

Dr Diana Fisher, of the University of Queensland, Australia, compiled a list of all mammals declared extinct since the 16th century or which were flagged up as missing in scientific papers.

"We identified 187 mammal species that have been missing since 1500," she wrote in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"In the complete data-set, 67 species that were once missing have been rediscovered.

More than a third of mammal species that have been classified as extinct or possibly extinct, or flagged as missing, have been rediscovered."

Mammals that suffered from loss of habitat were the most likely to have been declared extinct and then rediscovered, she said.

Species spread out over larger areas were also more likely to be wrongly classified as extinct.

Patience is a virtue. Yet liberals stress that evolution teaches that species adapt--except to global warming. Besides, caving to climate change is standing with . . . Osama bin Laden.

Suggesting again that "climate change can be solved by applying (Jonah) Goldberg's rule: 'Don’t just do something! Stand there.'"

(via Planet Gore, ScienceNOW, Power Line)

The Chevy Volt electric car depends on an abundance of Federal and state subsidies--one of the perils of government ownership of GM Now, the automaker plans to spend additional tax dollars selling the subsidy:

Chevrolet will use this month's World Series to launch ads for the debut of the Volt plug-in hybrid sedan, General Motors Co.'s marketing chief Joel Ewanick said.

The ads will be part of a broad campaign that Chevrolet will initiate during Major League Baseball's fall classic and run throughout autumn, said Ewanick, who spoke on the sidelines Thursday of the Rainbow PUSH auto summit in Detroit. . .

News Corp.'s Fox is carrying the World Series on television. Ewanick . . . said he expected Chevrolet to be one of the largest advertisers during the games. GM also plans to resume advertising during the 2011 Super Bowl.

Each 30 second World Series TV spot will cost between $250-285,000. So, as Henry Payne says, "Government Motors will use taxpayer money to buy premium ad time to pitch a money-losing, taxpayer-subsidized, Washington-approved, green automobile to America’s upper-class green snobs." And that's assuming (dubiously) electric cars really are "green." The next stop for subsidies, btw, is China. All of which is why we need to get the government out of "Government Motors."

Can someone explain how Obama's economic policies benefit average Americans?

UPDATES: below

On September 21st, the U.S. Small Business Association released a report titled The Impact of Regulatory Costs on Small Firms. The SBA estimated the total cost of Federal regulation per household (all figures in 2009 dollars):


source: NOfP chart via SBA report at 46

It's well known that, the "explosion of regulation of everything remotely connected to the use of land, air and water adds to American taxpayers’ daily burdens, increases the cost of doing business, and destroys millions of jobs, sometimes even whole industries." The SBA tabulated the total costs of such environmental regulation. Relying on OMB data, they reported high and low estimates for the cost of green rules passed in the past 10 fiscal years. I've plotted annual costs, based on the average of the estimates, converted to 2008 dollars (conversion factors here):


source: NOfP chart via SBA report at 26

Conclusion: Government regulations are stealth taxes. Some, perhaps most, are worth it. But 11 grand plus per family per year is a lot of money. As is nearly $230 billion annually for green rules that may bring scant benefits, so simply waste tax dollars and destroy jobs. Shouldn't we rethink the regulatory burden from the ground up?

MORE:

The obvious comparison is with the Iraq war, which costs $709 billion to date. By contrast, environmental regulations since the start of FY2002 cost nearly $1500 billion. If Iraq cost too much, environmental rules are twice as expensive.

MORE & MORE:

MaxedOutMama looks at the same study, observing that it finds that the costs of Federal regulation hit "small manufacturing firms" most severely and concluding that "Since we were not reeling around choking on toxic fumes in 2000, I think we can safely cut a lot of this [environmental regulation]."

UPDATE: below

Victor Davis Hanson on The Corner:

Obama continues to attack his opponents as obstructionists without explaining how and why his agenda has made America better in the last two years. We are having no debate on whether the greater good is best served by a larger state or more individual freedom. Democratic congressional candidates are either running against the president or despite him. Very few of their campaign ads say, "I voted for nationalized health care, more stimulus, cash-for-clunkers, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor. Help return me to Congress to finish the job with card check, amnesty, cap-and-trade, and higher taxes on the rich."

I guess they’re using a different playbook: on the national level, compare Republicans to the racist reactionaries of old that opposed abolition and civil rights, and on the local level unearth skeletons and nastiness -- anything, in other words, except debate over the record of 2009-10.

The result is that President Obama, by design and deliberate intent, is proving to be the most polarizing figure in recent memory -- widening the gulf between the parties, trying to rev up a small base by demonizing an oppositional counterpart, creating a them-vs.-us atmosphere among races and ethnic groups, and in the process embarrassing a captive media by proving that the hard Right’s once-shrill prediction that Obama would continue to be the polarizer he had always been, in the Alinsky, Ayers, and Reverend Wright mode, were, well, more or less prescient.

MORE:

Barney Frank has the stones to be one Democrat running on his record, according to Assistant Village Idiot in comments:

Driving through Massachusetts over the weekend, I heard a Barney Frank ad. Priceless. He was criticising Sean Bielat for not supporting the upcoming regulatory reforms of the financial industry, which he assured us would prevent our current meltdown from ever happening again. My wife was asleep in the car, so I didn't shout "You were at Ground Zero causing our current mess, you tax-fattened hyena!"

President Barack Obama, September 9, 2009:

My guiding principle is, and always has been, that consumers do better when there is choice and competition. That's how the market works. . . And without competition, the price of insurance goes up and quality goes down. And it makes it easier for insurance companies to treat their customers badly -- by cherry-picking the healthiest individuals and trying to drop the sickest, by overcharging small businesses who have no leverage, and by jacking up rates.

Wall Street Journal, October 1, 2010:

Financial services provider Principal Financial Group Inc. is exiting the health-insurance business in an early sign of expected consolidation as the impact of the health overhaul becomes clearer.

UnitedHealth Group Inc., the country's largest health insurer by revenues, Thursday agreed to renew the policies of Principal's roughly 840,000 members as contracts expire. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Analysts pointed to the agreement as a sign that big insurers could have a bright future gobbling up smaller firms' membership.

The federal health overhaul passed in March has prompted worries among regulators and industry groups that smaller insurers might have difficulty competing under rules that require insurers pay out between 80% and 85% of premiums on medical care.

New York Times, October 1, 2010:

More insurers are likely to follow Principal’s lead, especially as they try to meet the new rules that require plans to spend at least 80 cents of every dollar they collect in premiums on the welfare of their customers. Many of the big insurers have been lobbying federal officials to forestall or drastically alter those rules.

"It’s just going to drive the little guys out," said Robert Laszewski, a health policy consultant in Alexandria, Va. Smaller players like Principal in states like Iowa, Missouri and elsewhere will not be able to compete because they do not have the resources and economies of scale of players like UnitedHealth, which is among the nation’s largest health insurers.

Mr. Laszewski is worried that the ensuing concentration is likely to lead to higher prices because large players will no longer face the competition from the smaller plans. "It’s just the UnitedHealthcare full employment act," he said.

More evidence that Obamacare is "the worst of all possible worlds."

(via Critical Condition)

From a Boston Globe story on the debate over extending the Bush tax cuts:

In the Senate, at least three moderates -- Ben Nelson of Nebraska; Kent Conrad of North Dakota; and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut -- joined them in saying tax cuts must be extended for everyone.

When asked why his party could not agree on a plan, Senator Chris Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, said simply, "Because we’re Democrats."

(via Washington Examiner)

UPDATE: below

Item: As I've previously detailed, President Obama is a captive of the teachers unions -- he killed school vouchers on their behalf, and plans to increase the regulatory burdens on for-profit colleges. And no wonder: virtually all teacher union campaign contributions go to Democrats.

Item: The stimulus package could have been called the NEA (teachers' union) funding package. The Department of Education controlled the third-largest share of "recovery" funding and, of the 750,000 jobs supposedly "created or saved" by the stimulus, the Education Department claims credit for 400,000, i.e., more than half. Though the Department's own inspector reported the agency never investigated whether state job creation/retention numbers were "reasonably supported."

Item: As reported last week, the increased spending hasn't improved public school education. Yet, President Obama recently proposed "recruiting 10,000 [additional] Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) teachers over the next two years."

Item: As CATO's Andrew Coulson says:

Meanwhile, in America, Earth, Sol-System, public school employment has grown 10 times faster than enrollment for 40 years, while achievement at the end of high school has stagnated in math and declined in science.




source: September 29th CATO at Liberty

So that blather about reducing student-teacher ratios expands employment for teachers, and ups union dues, without improving the quality of education.

Item: The teachers unions continue to resist "merit pay" -- indeed, blaming a recent suicide on the ranking of teacher effectiveness! -- one of the few "reforms" that works.

Conclusion: The Stimulus Package wasn't passed primarily to improve infrastructure or create jobs. It was political payback to what Tom Lehrer once called "the 'ed-biz.'" That may be in the private interest of teachers, unions and Democrats--but not in the public interest. Nor, of course, does it help school children--throwing more money at schools won't help.

MORE:

Item: According to the Washington Post:

After a two-year salary freeze, Fairfax County teachers are lobbying the School Board to spend anticipated federal funds on pay raises instead of hiring hundreds of new instructors. . .

But that plan might clash with both the School Board's plans and the spirit of the Obama administration's $10 billion education jobs bill, which federal officials said was intended to save or create 160,000 teaching jobs.

I'm guessing the Administration won't see any clash at all.

(via Instapundit, Education Week, Maggie's Farm, reader Warren)

No posts today.

From David Kahane’s new book "Rules for Radical Conservatives", quoted on National Review Online:

Principles are what counts. So stop trying to outdo us by rushing to the microphones with a silly plan to solve every social ill this side of halitosis whenever our pet frogs in the media croak about a new "crisis" in the daily news feed. In fact, forget about programs completely. Just say no! And if we call you out and demand to know -- which we will, you can bet on that, it’s part of the playbook -- the details of your "plan," laugh and tell them to shove it and start talking about principles.

To do otherwise is to accept our premises, which means you have already lost. Instead, stick to the big picture: liberty, self-reliance, faith, freedom.

I'm generally optimistic about the future and about long-term conservative prospects. But I was struck by two recent, related observations; first, by the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan:

I see two central reasons for the tea party's rise. The first is the yardstick, and the second is the clock. First, the yardstick. Imagine that over at the 36-inch end you've got pure liberal thinking--more and larger government programs, a bigger government that costs more in the many ways that cost can be calculated. Over at the other end you've got conservative thinking--a government that is growing smaller and less demanding and is less expensive. You assume that when the two major parties are negotiating bills in Washington, they sort of lay down the yardstick and begin negotiations at the 18-inch line. Each party pulls in the direction it wants, and the dominant party moves the government a few inches in their direction.

But if you look at the past half century or so you have to think: How come even when Republicans are in charge, even when they're dominant, government has always gotten larger and more expensive? It's always grown! It's as if something inexorable in our political reality--with those who think in liberal terms dominating the establishment, the media, the academy--has always tilted the starting point in negotiations away from 18 inches, and always toward liberalism, toward the 36-inch point.

Democrats on the Hill or in the White House try to pull it up to 30, Republicans try to pull it back to 25. A deal is struck at 28. Washington Republicans call it victory: "Hey, it coulda been 29!" But regular conservative-minded or Republican voters see yet another loss. They could live with 18. They'd like eight. Instead it's 28.

AEI's Kenneth Green applies that principle to environmental policy:

[L]iberals have out-maneuvered such Republicans for decades. Moderate Republicans "compromise" in incremental steps toward liberal policies, while the liberals depict any "compromise" as being akin to genocide. Faced with such charges, moderate Republicans quickly surrender. . .

I call this the ratchet effect: while the Left claims to want bipartisanship and compromise, the incremental clicks of the ratchet only go in one direction--toward European-style social democracy. . .

Every time [Republicans] have tried to fix the overreach of environmental regulations, the Left and its allies in the environmental movement and mainstream media immediately start screaming bloody murder. The tiniest tweak to an air pollution rule is portrayed as "gutting the Clean Air Act," and will lead to children slowly strangling to death in clouds of filthy air. Still, the "moderate Republicans" who have gone along with the steady ratcheting of environmental regulation were the enablers that have led us where we are today, facing EPA regulation of greenhouse gases that will impose massive costs and burdens on the U.S. economy to control gases that are clearly not hazardous to human health, and that may not even be hazardous to the climate.

I've made a similar point--that, when considering, say, emission standards, liberals "seem convinced the end is near, and zero is the only appropriate ceiling."

Economics is the science of cost vs. benefits--choices must be made. But, as The Barrister at Maggie's Farm observes:

people figure out they can vote themselves things. The US wasn't planned that way, but it's become that way. Progressives call it Progress.

Ah, but that approach can't persist indefinitely--the Meltzer/Richard hypothesis says that spending can't over-take the tax-base.

We're reaching that limit now. As between conservatism and liberalism, which philosophy will survive? And which will prevail on the East and West coasts?

P.J. O'Rourke in the World Affairs Journal:

Whatever else the Tea Party movement believes, it espouses (and evidences) a firm belief in the self-organizing capacities of free individuals.

Unfortunately, we individuals are rarely free in the face of foreign policy. Foreign policy is highly centralized. And the political power that centralizes foreign policy is--when wielded by foreigners--outside the realm of our political influence no matter how popular the Tea Party becomes.

Nor is the past record of decentralization in foreign policy reassuring. It went well when the Soviet Union lost control of Eastern Europe’s foreign policy. It did not go so well when the European colonial powers lost control of the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. And total decentralization of foreign policy meant a nightmare in the former Yugoslavia.

I take the Tea Party point that, politically speaking, control is scary. Out-of-control is also scary. And what’s most scary about foreign policy is how often it’s simply beyond our control.

I talked to a Tea Party supporter with strong libertarian inclinations. "I’m for staying out of other people’s business," she said, and told me she was surprised by Barack Obama’s continuation of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. I’ll bet Barack Obama was surprised too.

(via Assistant Village Idiot, who observes "Eventually nations or institutions are called on to back up their claims, and you'd better have something more than a 'by golly, we can lick 'em' attitude.")

President Obama interviewed in Rolling Stone:

When I talk to Democrats around the country, I tell them, "Guys, wake up here. We have accomplished an incredible amount in the most adverse circumstances imaginable." . . . The Recovery Act alone represented the largest investment in research and development in our history, the largest investment in infrastructure since Dwight Eisenhower, the largest investment in education -- and that was combined, by the way, with the kind of education reform that we hadn't seen in this country in 30 years.

Jonah Goldberg on The Corner:

[T]o listen to the debate this week, you would think this is all a bipartisan problem because Republicans share the blame for refusing to fund schools enough.

There are two problems with this canard. 1) Bush and the GOP congress massively increased education spending and 2) the problems with our education system have almost nothing to do with how much money we spend.

We’re constantly told about all of these countries allegedly beating us in the classroom. Does anyone really think they’re doing better than us because they spend more? Really?

In the last few presidential elections I’ve heard more from Democrats -- by far -- complaining about leaky school roofs, cracking paint, and the need for more computers in the classroom than I’ve heard about the fact it’s easier to find and train a brontosaurus than it is to fire a horrible teacher. Do we really think China and India are spending 20-30K per pupil on their new crop of math whizzes?

In 2008-2009, the District of Columbia spent $1.3 billion dollars on 45,858 students. That is slightly less than the entire GDP of Belize. [NOfP note: it's also, on a per-pupil basis, only slightly less than the annual tuition at Harvard--so why don't we just give First Graders scholarships there?] In 2007, 8 percent of DC eighth graders were able to do math at the eighth grade level. Clearly what’s needed is more money!. . .

And yet when you listen to these endless seminars and interviews on NBC and its various platforms, I never seem to hear Matt Lauer or David Gregory ask "Isn’t the education crisis a failure of liberalism?" After all, liberals insist all social problems can be reduced to root causes. Well, they’ve been in charge of the roots for generations and look at the mess they’ve made. Look at it.

I don't blame the President for sending his children to private school. But I do fault him for killing the vouchers that were kids' only hope.

(via reader Warren)