Jonah Goldberg points out the absurdity of it. Here’s a similar piece I wrote a couple years ago on the thirty-ninth anniversary of the first Apollo landing, on why solving the energy problem is completely unlike going to the moon.
Category Archives: Economics
Res Ipsa Loquitur
Well, not entirely. Ed Morrissey has some thoughts.
This is what happens when you put in place either economic incompetents, people who actively want to wreck the economy for their own political ends, or both. There are, after all, people who would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.
[Update a few minutes later]
John Kerry was extolling the stimulus effects of unemployment benefits, as in more money returns to the economy for each dollar paid out to the unemployed. If so, why not simply put us all on unemployment benefits and watch the economy grow?
Or perhaps Kerry could advocate a national boat sales tax to collect the sort of revenue that he so carefully had tried to avoid. Or perhaps he might look carefully at zillionaire family trusts and the billions they divert from the strapped federal Treasury. Or perhaps he could take away the tax deductions on third or fourth homes above a certain square footage, maybe ending the deduction for property taxes on multiple homes?
My point? Why do Democrats always go after the orthodontist, electrical contractor, or insurance agency owner, and never the Buffetts, Kerrys, or Gateses? Bill Gates and Warren Buffett will defer more money from the federal Treasury by avoiding inheritance taxes (to channel their profits into their foundations) than all the billions lost this year by keeping tax cuts for small businesses.
Part of the problem is that these new aristocrats aren’t really liberals.
The Holiday Sales Continue
…over at Amazon
High-Speed Rail
Should China rethink it? Only if they’re smart. Tom Friedman will be very disappointed.
Of course, the more important question is whether or not Congress will cancel the boondoggle before we waste much more money on it.
More On Buffett/Gates
So I was complaining the other day about how Warren Buffett and Bill Gates don’t think were being taxed enough. Peter Foster has the same complaint. Though I’m not sure I’d call Bill Gates a “former capitalist.” It’s not clear to me that he was ever one. Businessmen are not necessarily capitalists (or to be more clear, free marketeers).
Turn Off The Lights In Cancun
The global warming party is over:
Who now remembers Smoot-Hawley, Quemoy and Matsu, and the Teapot Dome? But these were once issues on which the survival of the known world rested. The only global-warming news of this week was the announcement that the House Select Committee on Global Warming would die with the 111th Congress. Mrs. Pelosi established the committee three years ago to beat the eardrums of one and all, a platform for endless argle-bargle about the causes and effects of climate change. The result was the proposed job-killing national energy tax, but with the Republican sweep, there’s no longer an appetite for killing jobs.
Rep. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, the chairman of the doomed committee, organized one final event this week, a splashy daylong exercise in gasbaggery starring the usual suspects assigned to drone on for most of the day about the coming global-warming disasters, the melting of the North Pole and the rising of the seas that would make Denver, Omaha and Kansas City seaside resorts. Wesley Clark was the only former presidential candidate to accept an invitation, and he was a no-show. The star witness of the afternoon session was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an “environmental attorney” who talked about how “clean energy” is nicer than the other kind. Mr. Markey himself, as bored as everyone else, didn’t bother to return after lunch.
The members of the committee can now retire with their scrapbooks of clippings to recall the happy days of hearings about global warming (some of them before “global warming” became “climate change” and “liberals” became “progressives”), about how clean energy could replace smelly oil wells and provide Democrats with the means to enact sweeping climate-change legislation. Who could have foreseen that the only “sweeping” would be the sweeping out of so many Democrats?
Well, actually, absent massive voter fraud, it was pretty much inevitable.
[Afternoon update]
Some interesting climate-related Wikileaks, with a promise of more to come. I wonder how Assange feels about having exposed these corrupt con artists?
Ethanol’s Policy Priviliges
Heading for history’s dustbin? Let’s hope so. Fortunately, all that we need to end them is for Congress to do nothing. Though it would be nice to get rid of the mandates, too. Let the market decide.
Keynesian Economics Is Wrong
Reality Isn’t Negotiable
…but then, the so-called “reality-based community” has never been all that into reality.
[Update a few minutes later]
Raise your own taxes, Fareed, but leave ours alone.
The only reason I watch This Week on Sunday morning, particularly since Christiane Amanpour took over, is to see George Will, who doesn’t appear in any other venue, as far as I know. Well, we had a treat this past week, when instead of her panel (which is always too short anyway) she devoted most of the show to Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who tell us that we’re not being taxed enough. Hey, wrote the feds as big a check as you want, guys, pour more of your own money down the rat hole, and get a receipt. But leave the rest of us out of it.
New Course On Space
A new course has been added to the LaunchSpace catalog. Doesn’t look like it’s worth attending, though — the course instructor probably doesn’t know what he’s talking about.