It’s a nice gesture, but a drop in the barrel in terms of savings. We need to be much more radical.
Category Archives: Business
The Dead Green Treaty
…stinks up the room in Cancun. Which makes the economy-killing legislation passed by the morons in California (including moron-in-chief Schwarzenegger) even more pointless.
[Update a few minutes later]
An excerpt:
Our genius environmentalists came up with the idea that in order to make the treaty more palatable to US public opinion and therefore to the Senate, the US would assume an open-ended and eternal obligation to pay tens of billions of dollars a year to various developing world governments, however corrupt, incompetent, dictatorial and unfriendly these might be. Iran, Cuba, and North Korea would get money just like Yemen, Syria and Sudan. In exchange, these countries along with India and China would accept restrictions on their carbon output that are significantly less drastic than those to be imposed on the US.
Who could possibly object to a smart plan like this? What US Senator wouldn’t love to defend a vote to force taxpayers to subsidize Iran while giving China permanent business advantages over the US? Surely Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh would find nothing to attack here. Getting two thirds of the Senate to ratify a no-brainer like this would be a cakewalk.
This is the fruit of the gigantic brains of the Great Gurus of Green. This is the bright shining idea at the core of the UN process: that US opposition to Kyoto could be overcome by requiring the US to pay tens of billions of dollars in Green Danegeld to the third world every year. And the people who thought of this had Big Degrees from Name Schools! We know, because they keep telling us, that they are smarter than the rest of us and they understand complex systems better than we do. These are the geniuses to whom we are to entrust ever greater control over ever larger swathes of the global economy because, after all, they see so clearly and so far.
The world’s in the very best of hands.
Grow The Pie
Apparently, the maximum revenue from income taxation is 19% of GDP, regardless of tax rate. The implication is that a) this should be the maximum size of government spending as well and b) that we should have rates in place that maximize economic growth. But that doesn’t satisfy the class-envy warfare mentality of the left, including the president.
“Who The Hell Do You Think You Are?”
Talking truth to tyrannical fecklessness among the Eurocrats. It sure looks like the beginning of the end for the European project. Good riddance.
[Update a few minutes later]
The European Parliament is not about freedom.
The Set-Aside Boondoggle
How much longer can we afford this nonsense?
A One-Term President
Obama’s poll numbers aren’t looking very good. This was interesting:
Just one group has stuck with Obama through it all. In ’08, he won 58 percent of people with graduate degrees. Now, he’s at 59 percent. It appears that academic types will be with Obama always, but they’re not enough.
They, of course, will claim that this is evidence of how uneducated and stupid the populace is, to no longer recognize the brilliance of The One. I see it as evidence of the worthlessness of most graduate degrees, and much of academia. Let’s pop that bubble, so they can experience the economic disaster that the rest of us have, as a result of their collectivist policies.
It’s Black Friday
At Amazon
The Pilgrims
…and property rights. How our ancestors became prosperous.
Plus, three centuries of Thansgiving.
And here’s the recipe for my Thanksgiving dressing (probably too late for you to procure ingredients, though, sorry), which I’ll be making today. While watching the Lions embarrass themselves. Again.
[Friday morning update]
The lost lesson of Thanksgiving, from John Stossel.
Time To End The Education Bubble
Should we make college more expensive? I agree with Glenn’s reader. Ending subsidies would actually reduce costs, and focus academics on the people who should really be in college. But it’s going to be very hard to break the back of the politician/media/academia industrial complex. But if any time is one to do it, it’s one of fiscal austerity on the part of the government. If we can defund CPB/NPR, that would be an indication that it’s time to go after this.
The Green-Energy Bubble
…is losing air. Too bad this didn’t happen a couple years ago, when the Democrats got elected on that kind of economic lunacy. I hope that this will reduce their support in Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, the California electorate remains clueless, as demonstrated by the failure of Prop 23.
And I could never understand why if, as its opponents told us on commercials every five minutes, it was an evil plot by “Texas oil companies,” we never saw or heard any commercials supporting it, paid for by those evil Texas oil companies. But then, logic has never been a California voters’ strong suit, at least not in the past couple decades.