The PIIGS who fell to earth.
Category Archives: Economics
The Democrat War On Science
Expect this to be a recurring theme. The latest incident:
Needless to say, there is something ugly and hypocritical about glorifying the absolute authority of scientists and sanctimoniously preening about your bravery in “restoring” that authority — and then ignoring the scientists when politically expedient.
But it is bordering on the grotesque to handpick scientists to give you an opinion and then lie about what they actually said and implement a policy they don’t endorse. (According to the Journal, the Interior Department has apologized to the scientists. But the administration refuses to publicly acknowledge it did anything wrong.)
Of course it does. Not just hypocrites, but incompetent ones, who are compounding the damage to the Gulf economy from the oil leak by wiping out the local oil industry. Oh, and speaking of incompetence, how about this?
Against Governor Jindal’s wishes the federal government blocked oil-sucking barges today because they needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board and were having trouble contacting the owners.
We don’t have elections often enough.
Explaining Health Care Costs
The Next President?
First fix New Jersey, then…?
Sorry, It’s Not The Manhattan Project
…or Apollo. I suffered through the president’s speech so you don’t have to.
The most egregious part of it was when he compared energy independence to Apollo. Here’s my response from the campaign:
He’s never met a problem that, in his mind, the “full power of the government” can’t solve.
It’s an understandable appeal, but it betrays a certain lack of understanding of the problem to think that we will solve it with a crash federal program, at least if it’s one modelled on Apollo.
Putting a man on the moon was a remarkable achievement, but it was a straightforward well-defined engineering challenge, and a problem susceptible to having huge bales of money thrown at it, which is exactly how it was done. At its height, the Apollo program consumed four percent of the federal budget (NASA is currently much less than one percent, and has been for many years). Considering how much larger the federal budget is today, with the addition and growth of many federal programs over the past forty years makes the amount of money spent on the endeavor even more remarkable.
But most of the other problems for which people have pled for a solution, using Apollo as an example, were, and are, less amenable to being solved by a massive public expenditure. We may in fact cure cancer, and have made great strides over the past four decades in doing so, but it’s a different kind of problem, involving science and research on the most complex machine ever built — the human body. It isn’t a problem for which one can simply set a goal and time table and put the engineers to work on it, as Apollo was. Similarly, ending world hunger and achieving world peace are socio-political problems, not technological ones (though technology has made great strides in improving food production, which makes the problem easier to solve for governments that are competent and not corrupt). So most of the uses of the phrase never really made much sense, often being non sequiturs.
It’s important to understand that landing a man on the moon (or developing atomic weaponry as in the Manhattan Project — another example used by proponents of a new federal energy program) was a technological achievement. Achieving “energy independence,” or ending the use of fossil fuels, are economic ones. And the former is not necessarily even a desirable goal, if by that one means only getting energy from domestic sources. Energy is, and should remain, part of the global economy and trade system if we want to continue to keep prices as low as possible and continue to provide economic growth.
Nothing has changed. My commentary remains true today.
[Wednesday morning update]
If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we stop the leak, Mr. President? That’s a much better Apollo analogy.
The IPCC “Consensus”
Yes, I know. I’m shocked, too.
If You Like Your Plan
You can keep it. Unless we don’t like your plan:
Internal White House documents reveal that 51% of employers may have to relinquish their current health care coverage by 2013 due to ObamaCare. That numbers soars to 66% for small-business employers.
Were people really stupid enough to believe his lies during the campaign?
On the plus side, “repeal the bill” will have a lot more resonance this fall.
[Sunday morning update]
The good news just keeps on coming:
This year Ms. Watts estimates that changes made in response to the health law will add an extra 2 to 3 percent in cost increases, pressuring employers to engage in even more cost-sharing with employees — whether through higher premiums, co-payments or other out-of-pocket costs.
Mr. Weaver also reports increased interest by employers in high-deductible insurance plans. “They’ve been effective in managing costs,” he said.
You know, someone just a little smarter than Nancy Pelosi (i.e., almost everyone) would have been able to figure out what was in the bill without having to pass it.
What Is Old
…is new again. In doing some research, I was reading the old Agnew Space Task Group report, and I came across this paragraph:
The Space Task Group is convinced that a decision to phase out manned space flight operations, although painful, is the only way to achieve significant reductions in NASA budgets over the long term. At any level of mission activity, a continuing program of manned space flight, following use of launch vehicles and spacecraft purchased as part of Apollo, would require continued production of hardware, continued operation of extensive test, launch support and mission control facilities, and the maintenance of highly skilled teams of engineers, technicians, managers, and support personnel. Stretch-out of mission or production schedules, which can initially reduce total annual costs, would result in higher unit costs. More importantly, very low-level operations are highly wasteful of the skilled manpower required to carry out these operations and would risk deterioration of safety and reliability throughout the manned program. At some low level of activity, the viability at [sic] the program is in question. It is our belief that the interests of this Nation would not be served by a manned space flight program conducted at such levels.
Hello? Shuttle extenders?
They’re talking to you.
In Which A Congressman Is An Idiot
Yeah, I know, dog bites man, but I still enjoyed this exchange with Bernanke:
The entire premise of his question is absurd. The budget for FY2010 exceeds $3.8 trillion, which means that we don’t have to eliminate “half the ledger sheet” in order to close a $1.3 trillion deficit. We only need to eliminate a third of the ledger sheet. That $3.8 trillion, by the way, is $1.1 trillion more than the last budget from a Republican Congress, FY2007. If we returned to the FY2007 budget, we’d be almost all of the way there just by eliminating all of the spending increases inserted after Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid took charge of the budgeting process.
Oh, but that would be the end of the world as we know it.
My Sidebar For Popular Mechanics
…didn’t run, so I’ll run it here.
In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Andy Pasztor
Mr. Musk notes in an email:
“I definitely didn’t tell Pasztor that our LES would cost $1B. He is off by a factor of ten! All I told him is that there is no way it would cost us more than $1B to demonstrate crew transport. That includes development, testing and certification to the most stringent NASA standards of everything needed for a seven-crew vehicle. I’ve also said that our price per person would be $20M, assuming the seven-person configuration and minimum of four flights per year. This compares to $30B for Ares I/Orion and a per person cost of ~$250M.”
In a follow up, he noted that the billion (if it goes that high) will include two abort flight tests (one on the pad, one high altitude) and a demonstration flight to and from ISS. Sounds like a bargain to me.