Saturday, January 31, 2009

The Real 'Inconvenient Truth'

  1. Global Warming Rope-A-Dope.
  2. The Real 'Inconvenient Truth'
  3. Still waiting for greenhouse.
  4. Are climate skeptics right?
  5. This Green believes nuclear, not renewables are a much better use of the land.
  6. If the polar ice caps melted, how much would the oceans rise?

Steve,

I think there many reasons to phase out fossil fuels but I tell you truthfully that global warming is not one of them.   You asked how an educated person like myself does not believe in global warming, but I know a lot more about this issue than most people.   I do believe in global warming, but the notion that it is significant enough to cause disaster is wrong.   Right now the increased CO2 is helping to feed the world and a 1 degree increase in temperature over the next hundred years will be beneficial to mankind.

What is amazing is the alarmism when fossil fuels are on the way out anyway.   We have way less than a hundred years of oil reserves unless you start getting it from shale which is much more expensive.   Nuclear fusion will be a reality by 2035. Green (algae) oil will become a reality as well as hybrid cars everywhere, and cheaper solar and wind power.

When the cost of something goes up, the free market is very clever at finding alternatives. When there is money to be made or saved, people lay awake at night thinking about how something can be done better.

Schwarzenegger's and Obama's goal of 80% reduction in fossil fuel usage by 2020 is not remotely realistic. I hate to think of the money they will waste. Government has thrown money at energy for decades and not come up with much.   They will pay for their programs with increased taxes on fossil fuels, which will hurt the economy and poor people, but it will be the free market that will adapt to the rising costs and find a way to change.

Best wishes,

John Coffey 

    funding international abortions

    President Obama on Friday is expected to lift a ban on federal funding for international groups that promote or perform abortions, reversing a policy of his predecessor, George W. Bush.

    http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/01/23/obama-lift-ban-overseas-abortion-funding/

    So why are we funding international abortions? What right does the government have to steal from you and me to fund foreign organizations?

    Tuesday, January 27, 2009

    Free Market

    "Certainly President Obama seems supremely confident that the federal government, in his own capable hands, can tackle everything ....

    ... They noticed the waste and the ineffectiveness of huge government programs, but above all, they were chastened by the law of unintended consequences ...."

    -- Free Market

    Saturday, January 24, 2009

    Obama Takes Stimulus to the People

    By John Coffey

    Obama Takes Stimulus to the People
    Read the article here.   The video is worth watching.

    I think that the following principles are either self evident or can be backed by evidence...
    1. Debt public and private is the main reasons why are in the current economic mess that we are in.
    2. The Community Reinvestment Act, championed by Democrats, required lenders to lend to people who were not credit worthy.   Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, also championed by Democrats, bought up those loans and sold them as trillions of dollars worth of securities with the implied backing of the federal government.   When those securities lost some of their value due to loans going bad, businesses and banks who had invested in those securities faced financial crisis.
    3. The government already has a 500 billion dollar annual deficit with a ten trillion dollar national debt piling up. Yet the government suddenly decides that it can double that already massive deficit in the name of economic stimulus.
    4. In your own life, you can not borrow massive amounts of money, year after year, decade after decade, without going bankrupt.   Why should the federal government or the national economy be any different?
    5. We need economic growth for the benefit of our people and to grow our way out of the current financial downturn.
    6. Taxes discourage economic growth because they take away incentive. Milton Friedman showed that throughout the word, the GDP of almost every country was inversely proportional to how much each country taxed its citizens.
    7. However, that is not even our biggest problem right now...
    8. The government has to get its money from somewhere.   It either taxes it, prints it, or borrows it.   It cannot produce wealth out of thin air.
    9. Government spending takes resources from the economy, such as labor, material, credit and capital, and spends those resources on questionable projects.   You can know for certain that some of these projects are going to be pork barrel and wasteful spending.   The government takes productive assets and resources and turns them into unproductive assets.
    10. A recent Harvard study showed that economic growth is inversely proportional to how much the government spends.
    11. Obama is trying to spend us into prosperity.   This isn't so much a stimulus package as it is a Democrat wish list of all the projects they would like to fund.
    12. How would this work in your own life if you tried to spend your way into prosperity when you were already massively in debt?
    13. Over the last ten years, federal government spending has gone up from around 19% of the economy to around 28% of the economy.   I have seen figures where if you add in state and local government spending, the entire government is spending nearly 50% of the economy.
    14. Government got us in this mess.   More government is not going to solve the problem.   It is going to make things worse.
    15. This is not the way to grow the economy.   We should be doing the opposite of what we are doing now.   We should cut government spending and not increase it.