Category Archives: Economics

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Obama’s Five-Year Plan

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…for the climate:

Speaking at Georgetown University on Tuesday, President Barack Obama outlined his “new national climate action plan,” which amounts to a federal top-down five-year plan—although he has only four years to implement it. Obama’s plan ambitiously seeks to control nearly every aspect of how Americans produce and consume energy. The goal is to cut the emissions of greenhouse gases and thus stop boosting the temperature of the earth. The actual result will be to infect the economy with the same sort of sclerosis seen in other centrally planned nations.

This is doubly hubristic: that he thinks he knows what’s happening with the climate, and that he thinks he know what best to do about and that it will work.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

A Sweet Deal

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Not for the taxpayers or sugar consumers, though:

That’s right: The federal government protects the sugar industry, lends it money after promising that the loans wouldn’t cost anything to taxpayers, and after all that still ends up having to buy part of its sugar production because borrowers can’t repay the loans. Customers pay higher prices for sugar, and then they pay again when their tax dollars are used to buy over-priced sugar and bad loans. And yet, lawmakers on the Hill continue to support farm interests in spite of the unfairness and inefficiency of the whole system.

This is the opposite of good government.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Food Stamps And Farms

This is long overdue:

The plan being contemplated by Cantor closely tracks an earlier proposal by Indiana Republican Marlin Stutzman. In a press release issued last week, Stutzman pointed out that “Eighty percent of the spending goes toward food stamps” in the original farm bill. He called on the House to “do our work in the full light of day by splitting this bill and having serious debates on both farm and welfare policy.”

It’s a shame that Congress doesn’t seem capable of having a serious debate about anything.