The motivating factor in these cases isn’t so much that cities like Fort Worth and Phoenix have suddenly found the perfect formula for luring away coastal business elites. Rather, it’s that California’s business climate is so toxic that regions hitherto considered commercial backwaters now seem perfectly acceptable, if not preferable. (As far as we know there’s no rush for Vermont CEOs to relocate to Arizona, after all.)
As he notes, Prop 30 may have been the last straw.
It would certainly be cheaper than carbon reduction, but it’s not clear if it would work, or what the other side effects might be. And of course, if it’s even necessary.
But if it really is a problem, schemes like this, or space-based ones, make a lot more sense than screwing up the global economy.
“NASA needs to have more than one half of one percent of the federal budget,” Bingham said at the FAA conference last week, emphasizing he was speaking only for himself. That call has been echoed by others in recent years who have sought to at least double NASA’s share of the federal budget to one percent.
There is no magic “correct” percentage of the federal budget that NASA should get. Traditionally, it used to be about one percent, but the budget hasn’t actually declined that much. It’s now half a percent because of the monstrous budget growth in other areas over the past several years, and NASA didn’t keep up. NASA should get as much budget as it needs to accomplish its assigned tasks, regardless of the budget percentage. Of course, since some of its assigned tasks are wasteful and useless, like Jeff Bingham’s Senate Launch System, it could actually be doing a lot more with the money that it’s being given, if Congress wouldn’t force the agency to waste so much.
The economic illiteracy continues, both at UCS and at Wired. “Fuel efficiency is really what’s going to put more money back in your pocket and put more money back in our communities,” Goldman tells Wired, and Newcomb worries that “very little of the remaining cash goes into the local economy.” Can we please lay aside the primitive superstition that in the developed world in the 21st century there is such a thing as the “local economy”? Let’s say we took the Brooklyn farm coop approach to gas, and a quaint little store on my corner had a oil well in the back, a DIY-refinery in the garage, and a hand-lettered chalkboard outside advertising its artisanal gas. The bearded hipster inside runs the whole thing. Local economy, right? But I assume he lives in a house or an apartment, which is bound to be made of concrete and steel not locally sourced. He probably has a cell phone and a computer and may even shop at Trader Joe’s or Whole Food or — angels and ministers of grace defend us! — Walmart, thus sending the money I spend at his shop far and wide. You know who has a “local economy”? North Koreans and hunter-gatherers. Autarky is no way to live. Somebody should explain comparative advantage and gains from trade to these gentlemen.