Are they overdoing it? Jimmy Pethokoukis thinks so. The best way to get out of debt is to grow our way out, with less regulation and lower tax rates, but entitlements have to be reformed, and soon.
[Update a while later]
Bad link. Fixed now, sorry.
Category Archives: Economics
How Dare You?!
Daniel Hannan has a good piece on the NHS:
The elision of the “hardworking doctors and nurses” with the state monopoly that employs them is what allows opponents of reform to shout down any criticism. People who complain are treated, not as wronged consumers, but as pests. People who argue that there might be a better way of organising the system are treated, not as proponents of a different view, but as enemies.
Any organisation that is spared criticism becomes, over time, inefficient, insensitive, intolerant. It has happened to the United Nations. It has happened to the mega-charities. It happened, for a long time, to the European Union (though not over the past five years). The more lofty the ideal, the more reluctant people are to look at the grubby reality.
We can’t let that happen here. I’m sure that many of the people behind this legislative atrocity would love to jail its critics, if they could.
It’s Panic Time
Thoughts on the current health-care mess from Walter Russell Mead.
Fountain Of Youth
Wow. Looks like they’re going to start human trials of that mouse-rejuvenation treatment next year.
The societal impacts of this would be enormous.
The End Of The Beginning
A brutal but accurate assessment from Bill Whittle.
The ObamaCare Chaos Strategy
We know they always wanted to get to single payer. They’ll do whatever they have to in order to push toward that goal. The question is whether or not the Republicans and voters let them get away with it. Of course, a few lawsuits would help as well.
Discussing ObamaCare
A conversation between Instapundit and Mickey Kaus. Don’t miss Glenn’s rant channeling Mark Levin.
A Good Start
Seventy public-employee unions have been dismantled in Wisconsin. One of the few things that FDR was right about was that they should have never been legal.
Climate Models
They seem to be modeling some other planet:
Christy compared the outputs for the tropical troposphere of 73 models used by the IPCC in its latest report with satellite and weather balloon temperature trends since 1979. “The tropics is so important,” Christy explains in an email message, “because that is where models show the clearest and most distinct signal of greenhouse warming-so that is where the comparison should be made (rather than say for temperatures in North Dakota). Plus, the key cloud and water vapor feedback processes occur in the tropics.”
When it comes to simulating the atmospheric temperature trends of the last 35 years, Christy found, all of the IPCC models are running hotter than the actual climate. The IPCC report admits that “most, though not all, of [the climate models] overestimate the observed warming trend in the tropical troposphere during the satellite period 1979-2012.” To defend himself against any accusations of cherry-picking his data, Christy notes that his “comparisons start in 1979, so these are 35-year time series comparisons”-rather longer than the 15-year periods whose importance the IPCC downplays.
Why the discrepancy between the IPCC and Christy? As Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry notes, data don’t speak for themselves; researchers have to put them into a context. And your choice of context-say, the year you choose to begin with-can influence your conclusions considerably. While there may be nothing technically wrong with the way the IPCC chose to display its comparison between model data and observation data, Curry observes, “it will mislead the public to infer that climate models are better than we thought.” She adds, “What is wrong is the failure of the IPCC to note the failure of nearly all climate model simulations to reproduce a pause of 15-plus years.”
There is too much that they don’t, and at least for now, can’t capture. And it would be economically insane to base policy on them.
Is Safety Stifling Space Development?
In which I’m interviewed by Popular Mechanics about the book. Which can be purchased on the button over to the leftright.
[Update a few minutes later]
I’d forgotten that it was on the right in the new template.