Just got back from an epic trip riding Red Mountain in Rossland, BC, and snowmobiling in Revelstoke, BC. Check the vibe.
22 February 2006
09 February 2006
Thomas Friedman, again
Response to article Thomas Friedman. He says it so well: Why is it OK to lower taxes to 'encourage spending' and why is it OK to subsidize oil companies? Cheney says we don't need to "inflict pain" but isn't our war in Iraq pretty painful? Isn't the billions of oil profits that go to Saudi Arabia that pays for terrorist activity "pain"? (Note: I copy and pasted most of the article below.)
Full disclosure: I bought a Toyota Tacoma pick up truck that gets 20 mpg on a good day. I can afford the gas. If it came in an ethanol variation I would jump on it. If bio-diesel was reliable at freezing temperatures, I'd jump on it. For me, it's not about the money -- I WANT TO PAY for something other than gas, but there's nothing out there that meets my needs. Something that can go down logging roads, haul kayaks, snowmobiles, etc., but that isn't a 20' land barge that gets 8 mpg... that's a Tacoma. But what incentive is there for Toyota to make an ethanol Tacoma? What incentive is there to make it a bio-diesel, or whatever? None. Because most Americans can still afford $2.50/gallon to get to work everyday and play on the weekends.
Why should the Federal government raise gas taxes by 2-3 dollars? Because you are paying that tax anyway by paying over 500 billion for our military every year. Where do you want your tax dollars going? To the military so we can make the world safe for oil? Notice how the Europeans and Japanese spend a tiny fraction of what we spend on defense. In fact, the US spends as much as THE REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED on defense. That's right. Our defense budget is as large as the defense budget of every other country on Earth. Of course you can look at it over time since the cold war, as a percentage of GDP, etc., but that's not the point is. The point is that the US has the largest, most powerful Military in the world. Therefore US taxpayers are paying to make the world safe for oil -- and dangerous for you and me. We spend billions of dollars to indirectly protect the very regimes whose citizens (and in some cases, governments) seek to destroy us.
So why not reduce our dependency on oil. Perform, as a SECURITY measure, a forcing function (hey, this president gets to do whatever he wants anyway, why not use his powers for good instead of evil) on oil. Raise gas taxes by 2, 3, or 4 dollars. Plow the profits into incremental improvements in our energy dependencies. The easiest thing would be biofuels, especially things like ethanol. Check out this report produced by UT-El Paso about their Chevy Silverado conversion project. I'd get my truck converted but there's nowhere to get E85 outside the cornbelt. With just a little nudge from a fat gas tax, we could get this country off of oil in no time.
And I've got to make this very important point: I don't care about suburbia, or public transit, or any of that crap. America outside of New York City has been designed for use by single-occupant cars. It sucks but it's the way it is. We've got to fight one battle at a time. If you look at it dollar for dollar and life for life, the number one thing we can do to make America better is to stop sending money to the middle east, period. We get some bonus environmental action. But my goal is to be effective. Left wing environmentalists are often members of the liberal elite like myself, and we only know how to preach to the choir. But if you can convince Red State America that by converting their Ford Mega 6000 SUX 4mpg SUV to ethanol, they are saving American lives and making life much harder for terrorists; if you can convince them that 1/5th of every dollar they spend on gas goes straight to Saudi Arabia, where it promptly goes straight to Osama bin Laden and his friends -- THEN you're getting somewhere. Even better, if you can tell him (and I mean HIM intentionally) that by buying ethanol or whatever bio-fuel that you're buying America and you're supporting American farmers and all that baseball-apple pie shit, well, you've scored another point.
begin Friedman article:
"I think — the president and I believe very deeply that, obviously, the government has got a role to play here in terms of supporting research into new technologies and encouraging the development of new methods of generating energy. ... But we also are big believers in the market, and that we need to be careful about having government come in, for example, and tell people how to live their lives. ... This notion that we have to 'impose pain,' some kind of government mandate, I think we would resist. The marketplace does work out there."
What is he talking about? The global oil market is anything but free. It's controlled by the world's largest cartel — OPEC — which sets output, and thereby prices, according to the needs of some of the worst regimes in the world. By doing nothing, we are letting their needs determine the price and their treasuries reap all the profits.
Also, why does Mr. Cheney have no problem influencing the market by lowering taxes to get consumers to spend, but he rejects raising gasoline taxes to get consumers to save energy — a fundamental national interest.
Don't take it from me. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard, who recently retired as chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 3 about his New Year's resolutions: "Everyone hates taxes, but the government needs to fund its operations, and some taxes can actually do some good in the process. I will tell the American people that a higher tax on gasoline is better at encouraging conservation than are heavy-handed [mileage standards]. It would not only encourage people to buy more fuel-efficient cars, but it would encourage them to drive less."
Mr. Cheney, we are told, is a "tough guy." Really? Well, how tough is this: We have a small gasoline tax, but Europe and Japan tax their gasoline by $2 and $3 a gallon, or more. They use those taxes to build schools, highways and national health care for their citizens. But they spend very little on defense compared with us.
So who protects their oil supplies from the Middle East? U.S. taxpayers. We spend nearly $600 billion a year on defense, a large chunk in the Persian Gulf. But how do we pay for that without a gas tax? Income taxes and Social Security. Yes, we tax our incomes and raid our children's Social Security fund so Europeans and Japanese can comfortably import their oil from the gulf, impose big gas taxes on it at their pumps and then use that income for their own domestic needs. And because they have high gas taxes, they also beat Detroit at making more fuel-efficient cars. Now how tough is that?
Finally, if Mr. Cheney believes so much in markets, why did the 2005 energy act contain about $2 billion in tax breaks for oil companies? Why does his administration permit a 54-cents-a-gallon tax on imported ethanol — fuel made from sugar or corn — so Brazilian sugar exports won't compete with American sugar? Yes, we tax imported ethanol from Brazil, but we don't tax imported oil from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or Russia.
"Everyone says we need a new Marshall Plan," said Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign policy expert and the author of "The Case for Goliath." "We have a Marshall Plan. It's our energy policy. It's a Marshall plan for terrorists and dictators."
How tough is it, Mr. Cheney, to will the ends — an end to America's oil addiction — but not will the means: a gasoline tax? It's not very tough, it's not very smart, and it's going to end badly for us.
Full disclosure: I bought a Toyota Tacoma pick up truck that gets 20 mpg on a good day. I can afford the gas. If it came in an ethanol variation I would jump on it. If bio-diesel was reliable at freezing temperatures, I'd jump on it. For me, it's not about the money -- I WANT TO PAY for something other than gas, but there's nothing out there that meets my needs. Something that can go down logging roads, haul kayaks, snowmobiles, etc., but that isn't a 20' land barge that gets 8 mpg... that's a Tacoma. But what incentive is there for Toyota to make an ethanol Tacoma? What incentive is there to make it a bio-diesel, or whatever? None. Because most Americans can still afford $2.50/gallon to get to work everyday and play on the weekends.
Why should the Federal government raise gas taxes by 2-3 dollars? Because you are paying that tax anyway by paying over 500 billion for our military every year. Where do you want your tax dollars going? To the military so we can make the world safe for oil? Notice how the Europeans and Japanese spend a tiny fraction of what we spend on defense. In fact, the US spends as much as THE REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED on defense. That's right. Our defense budget is as large as the defense budget of every other country on Earth. Of course you can look at it over time since the cold war, as a percentage of GDP, etc., but that's not the point is. The point is that the US has the largest, most powerful Military in the world. Therefore US taxpayers are paying to make the world safe for oil -- and dangerous for you and me. We spend billions of dollars to indirectly protect the very regimes whose citizens (and in some cases, governments) seek to destroy us.
So why not reduce our dependency on oil. Perform, as a SECURITY measure, a forcing function (hey, this president gets to do whatever he wants anyway, why not use his powers for good instead of evil) on oil. Raise gas taxes by 2, 3, or 4 dollars. Plow the profits into incremental improvements in our energy dependencies. The easiest thing would be biofuels, especially things like ethanol. Check out this report produced by UT-El Paso about their Chevy Silverado conversion project. I'd get my truck converted but there's nowhere to get E85 outside the cornbelt. With just a little nudge from a fat gas tax, we could get this country off of oil in no time.
And I've got to make this very important point: I don't care about suburbia, or public transit, or any of that crap. America outside of New York City has been designed for use by single-occupant cars. It sucks but it's the way it is. We've got to fight one battle at a time. If you look at it dollar for dollar and life for life, the number one thing we can do to make America better is to stop sending money to the middle east, period. We get some bonus environmental action. But my goal is to be effective. Left wing environmentalists are often members of the liberal elite like myself, and we only know how to preach to the choir. But if you can convince Red State America that by converting their Ford Mega 6000 SUX 4mpg SUV to ethanol, they are saving American lives and making life much harder for terrorists; if you can convince them that 1/5th of every dollar they spend on gas goes straight to Saudi Arabia, where it promptly goes straight to Osama bin Laden and his friends -- THEN you're getting somewhere. Even better, if you can tell him (and I mean HIM intentionally) that by buying ethanol or whatever bio-fuel that you're buying America and you're supporting American farmers and all that baseball-apple pie shit, well, you've scored another point.
begin Friedman article:
"I think — the president and I believe very deeply that, obviously, the government has got a role to play here in terms of supporting research into new technologies and encouraging the development of new methods of generating energy. ... But we also are big believers in the market, and that we need to be careful about having government come in, for example, and tell people how to live their lives. ... This notion that we have to 'impose pain,' some kind of government mandate, I think we would resist. The marketplace does work out there."
What is he talking about? The global oil market is anything but free. It's controlled by the world's largest cartel — OPEC — which sets output, and thereby prices, according to the needs of some of the worst regimes in the world. By doing nothing, we are letting their needs determine the price and their treasuries reap all the profits.
Also, why does Mr. Cheney have no problem influencing the market by lowering taxes to get consumers to spend, but he rejects raising gasoline taxes to get consumers to save energy — a fundamental national interest.
Don't take it from me. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard, who recently retired as chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 3 about his New Year's resolutions: "Everyone hates taxes, but the government needs to fund its operations, and some taxes can actually do some good in the process. I will tell the American people that a higher tax on gasoline is better at encouraging conservation than are heavy-handed [mileage standards]. It would not only encourage people to buy more fuel-efficient cars, but it would encourage them to drive less."
Mr. Cheney, we are told, is a "tough guy." Really? Well, how tough is this: We have a small gasoline tax, but Europe and Japan tax their gasoline by $2 and $3 a gallon, or more. They use those taxes to build schools, highways and national health care for their citizens. But they spend very little on defense compared with us.
So who protects their oil supplies from the Middle East? U.S. taxpayers. We spend nearly $600 billion a year on defense, a large chunk in the Persian Gulf. But how do we pay for that without a gas tax? Income taxes and Social Security. Yes, we tax our incomes and raid our children's Social Security fund so Europeans and Japanese can comfortably import their oil from the gulf, impose big gas taxes on it at their pumps and then use that income for their own domestic needs. And because they have high gas taxes, they also beat Detroit at making more fuel-efficient cars. Now how tough is that?
Finally, if Mr. Cheney believes so much in markets, why did the 2005 energy act contain about $2 billion in tax breaks for oil companies? Why does his administration permit a 54-cents-a-gallon tax on imported ethanol — fuel made from sugar or corn — so Brazilian sugar exports won't compete with American sugar? Yes, we tax imported ethanol from Brazil, but we don't tax imported oil from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or Russia.
"Everyone says we need a new Marshall Plan," said Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign policy expert and the author of "The Case for Goliath." "We have a Marshall Plan. It's our energy policy. It's a Marshall plan for terrorists and dictators."
How tough is it, Mr. Cheney, to will the ends — an end to America's oil addiction — but not will the means: a gasoline tax? It's not very tough, it's not very smart, and it's going to end badly for us.
04 February 2006
The 2 Biggest Threats to America (aside from King Bush II)
1. Spiraling health care costs
2. Oil, period.
Current expenses of the US:
War on Iraq: $1 trillion
Future Combat Sytems: $1 trillion
Imagine if we spent $1 trillion on fixing health care and $1 trillion on reducing oil consumption by 75%....
For all 3 of you who read this, you know one of my obsessions is my loathing for Future Combat Systems, a massive pork barrel project that has yet to produce anything other than a black hole for US taxpayer dollars to be sucked into. As I noted previously, FCS provide billions for such a diverse range of Congressional districts that no one wants to shut it down. The 25% or so members of Congress who are riding the gravy train are undoubtedly employing the mutual back scratching technique, and with so many people involved, it's gained a momentum all its own, despite repeated warnings from GAO that the program is more likely to fail than not, given the failure of the program directors to follow best practices. Bottom line: over the course of the next 10 years we're flushing about $1 trillion in change down the toilet on Donny Rumsfelds toy train yard fantasy. Give his track record of total and complete abject failure, it's amazing he still has a job. The fact that we're still spending money on his pipe dream fantasies is distressing to say the least.
2. Oil. We all know about this. Buying oil from the middle east allows dictatorships and corrupt regimes to stay in power from Iran to Saudi Arabia. We're going to spend another $1 trillion on our failed efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to get our own oil supply. In the meantime we're pumping less oil in Iraq now than we were pre-war. Pathetic.
Now, supposing we did something totally different:
1. Spend $1 trillion dollars on nationalized health care instead of fighting in Iraq
2. Spend $1 trillion dollars to reduce oil consumption by 75% instead of building Rummy's toy train collection
What would you do?
1. DARPA invented TCP/IP, the protocol that makes the Internet go round, over 30 years ago. It's held up pretty well over time. Government is capable of producing excellent results when it wants to. I'm confident that given a trillion dollars, some smart fellows could come up with a "health care internet" that created a unified simple medical record data interchange format. It's got to be possible to create a universal interchange data format. If you want Medicaid money or whatever, you'd have to use it, essentially creating a forcing function for a country wide standard for data interchange. For everything from medical records to billing information. You could reduce the 33% of money spent on health care that goes to filing insurance claims and use that money to insure everyone. Imagine the benefit to American business. Imagine the growth and pork available to Congressional districts everywhere. Everyone ones.
2. Oil. I don't want to get into one of those "ethanol costs more energy than you get" arguments. I don't know the answers. But I know if you threw $1 trillion at it, you could come up with a cost effective way so calories in is smaller than calories out. Whether it's some kind of bio-fuel or something more pie in the sky like hydro cells, get us off oil, now. Then, if we want to blow up Iran, we can do that. If we want to tell the Saudis that they can pay for their own goddamn army and go fuck themselves in the meantime, we can. I am so sick and tired of the world kow-towing to these repressive dictatorships, and the assholes like Donald Rumsfeld that think they will ever be democratic societies. These are ancient cultures that only believe in honor and revenge. They have no concept of respect or fealty (Afghanistan, anyone?). I don't give a rat's ass about them. As far as I'm concerned, the middle east can go fuck itself in its entirety, and the sooner they go back to killing each other instead of us, the better. The sooner we stop buying oil from them, the sooner we can leave them alone to rot in hell. This includes Israel too. As soon as we stop caring about what happens in the Middle East, the less we need a "bulwark" against the Islamic states. Israel is a bad-ass country and they can fend for themselves. We need to let them free to do what they need to do and stop thinking of them as a potential landing strip for an invasion we don't have the backbone to ever launch.
Controversy baby... I'm going redneck out here in Washington State!
2. Oil, period.
Current expenses of the US:
War on Iraq: $1 trillion
Future Combat Sytems: $1 trillion
Imagine if we spent $1 trillion on fixing health care and $1 trillion on reducing oil consumption by 75%....
For all 3 of you who read this, you know one of my obsessions is my loathing for Future Combat Systems, a massive pork barrel project that has yet to produce anything other than a black hole for US taxpayer dollars to be sucked into. As I noted previously, FCS provide billions for such a diverse range of Congressional districts that no one wants to shut it down. The 25% or so members of Congress who are riding the gravy train are undoubtedly employing the mutual back scratching technique, and with so many people involved, it's gained a momentum all its own, despite repeated warnings from GAO that the program is more likely to fail than not, given the failure of the program directors to follow best practices. Bottom line: over the course of the next 10 years we're flushing about $1 trillion in change down the toilet on Donny Rumsfelds toy train yard fantasy. Give his track record of total and complete abject failure, it's amazing he still has a job. The fact that we're still spending money on his pipe dream fantasies is distressing to say the least.
2. Oil. We all know about this. Buying oil from the middle east allows dictatorships and corrupt regimes to stay in power from Iran to Saudi Arabia. We're going to spend another $1 trillion on our failed efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to get our own oil supply. In the meantime we're pumping less oil in Iraq now than we were pre-war. Pathetic.
Now, supposing we did something totally different:
1. Spend $1 trillion dollars on nationalized health care instead of fighting in Iraq
2. Spend $1 trillion dollars to reduce oil consumption by 75% instead of building Rummy's toy train collection
What would you do?
1. DARPA invented TCP/IP, the protocol that makes the Internet go round, over 30 years ago. It's held up pretty well over time. Government is capable of producing excellent results when it wants to. I'm confident that given a trillion dollars, some smart fellows could come up with a "health care internet" that created a unified simple medical record data interchange format. It's got to be possible to create a universal interchange data format. If you want Medicaid money or whatever, you'd have to use it, essentially creating a forcing function for a country wide standard for data interchange. For everything from medical records to billing information. You could reduce the 33% of money spent on health care that goes to filing insurance claims and use that money to insure everyone. Imagine the benefit to American business. Imagine the growth and pork available to Congressional districts everywhere. Everyone ones.
2. Oil. I don't want to get into one of those "ethanol costs more energy than you get" arguments. I don't know the answers. But I know if you threw $1 trillion at it, you could come up with a cost effective way so calories in is smaller than calories out. Whether it's some kind of bio-fuel or something more pie in the sky like hydro cells, get us off oil, now. Then, if we want to blow up Iran, we can do that. If we want to tell the Saudis that they can pay for their own goddamn army and go fuck themselves in the meantime, we can. I am so sick and tired of the world kow-towing to these repressive dictatorships, and the assholes like Donald Rumsfeld that think they will ever be democratic societies. These are ancient cultures that only believe in honor and revenge. They have no concept of respect or fealty (Afghanistan, anyone?). I don't give a rat's ass about them. As far as I'm concerned, the middle east can go fuck itself in its entirety, and the sooner they go back to killing each other instead of us, the better. The sooner we stop buying oil from them, the sooner we can leave them alone to rot in hell. This includes Israel too. As soon as we stop caring about what happens in the Middle East, the less we need a "bulwark" against the Islamic states. Israel is a bad-ass country and they can fend for themselves. We need to let them free to do what they need to do and stop thinking of them as a potential landing strip for an invasion we don't have the backbone to ever launch.
Controversy baby... I'm going redneck out here in Washington State!
02 February 2006
Congress cuts entirlement spending... but keeps entitling friends
Here's the numbers showing Federal Tax dollar contributions compared to Federal money ditributed back to the states. My favorite: The difference, per capita, between what Red States get, on average, and what Blue states contribute, on average is $17,415 per capita. Put another way, Blue States lost $8,916 per capita while Red stages gained $8,499 per capita. So those of us who foot the bill for King George II must be complete idiots. How can we be the ones paying when we're the ones getting screwed? I think the Blue states should all secede, possibly joining Canada. See the Tax Foundation website for the source for these numbers.
Other interesting points:
- 25 out of 31 total red states get more Federal tax $ than they contribute
- 13 out of 18 blue states give more Federal tax $ than they receive
- The Top 12 Federal tax contributing states are blue
- The Top 8 Recipients of Federal tax money are Red
- Blue states, not including MD and VA (where much of the Federal Gov't. is located), paid $1.4 trillion more than they got back
- Red states received $800 billion more than they paid
Also in the meantime, check the picture to see how you're hard-earned tax dollars are being spent in Iraq. Robert J. Stein Jr. was happily using $100 bills from the Coalition Provisional Authority to wipe his bottom -- he was working for the defense contractor S&K Technologies, a St. Ignatius, Mont., company that had won Army contracts to provide administrative support in Iraq. See the NYT for full story.
So, as you can see, when Congress isn't busy spending $1 trillion on the war in Iraq (ok, fine, that's the projected total cost -- some bright folks at Columbia B-School published this report and came up with this number), or a $1 trillion on future combat systems, they're giving it away as cold hard cash to convicted felons (Mr. Stein had a felony fraud conviction on his record which S&K failed to notice). So when it gets to be tax time, I get very Charlton Heston... is it time for armed insurrection or what?
Btw, I should probably just give up. The reason this crap happens is pork, plain and simple. Here's an interesting set of facts about FCS:
"The FCS industry base spans 159 congressional districts over 35 states, with 363 companies on board, according to materials released by the program’s industry team.The bulk of the work is done in California, where companies account for approximately 1,000 of the 7,000 high-tech jobs provided nationwide by the program. Those 7,000 jobs provide about $3 billion in salaries each year, said Muilenburg."
Quote source
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