Say Anything Blog

Noel Sheppard

I blame Bush.

NASA Debunks Part of Global Warming Myth, Will Media Report It?

Is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration filled with climate change deniers?

Such seems likely to be alleged by hysterical alarmists in the press when and if they read a new study out of NASA which determined that “not all the large changes seen in Arctic climate in recent years are a result of long-term trends associated with global warming.”

Goes quite counter to all the recent media reports, as well as assertions by Nobel Laureate Al Gore, that low ice conditions in the Arctic are all the fault of that despicable—albeit essential to life and naturally occurring!—gas carbon dioxide.

Of course, it’s quite unlikely many climate alarmists will even hear about this study, for today’s green media wouldn’t want to do anything that destroys their illusion that there’s a scientific consensus regarding this matter.

[...]

  A team of NASA and university scientists has detected an ongoing reversal in Arctic Ocean circulation triggered by atmospheric circulation changes that vary on decade-long time scales. The results suggest not all the large changes seen in Arctic climate in recent years are a result of long-term trends associated with global warming.

  [...] 

  “Our study confirms many changes seen in upper Arctic Ocean circulation in the 1990s were mostly decadal in nature, rather than trends caused by global warming,” said [James Morison of the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center Applied Physics Laboratory].

Somehow I imagine Morison won’t be interviewed by any of the major television networks any time soon, especially as the study concluded that this circulation pattern may already be reversing possibly leading to increased ice levels in this area in coming years:

  The Arctic Oscillation was fairly stable until about 1970, but then varied on more or less decadal time scales, with signs of an underlying upward trend, until the late 1990s, when it again stabilized. During its strong counterclockwise phase in the 1990s, the Arctic environment changed markedly, with the upper Arctic Ocean undergoing major changes that persisted into this century. Many scientists viewed the changes as evidence of an ongoing climate shift, raising concerns about the effects of global warming on the Arctic.

[...] 

Once again, another in a seeming litany of reports emerging offering scientific alternatives for climate change beyond it being all man’s fault.

And folks wonder why so many people are skeptical concerning the anthropogenic impact on long-term weather patterns.

Of course, one thing’s for certain: this news definitely won’t make “An Inconvenient Truth” producer Laurie David happy!

As the truth continues to come out, the scareology continues to be exposed as being just that.

NPR Isn’t Scared by $100 Oil

As oil flirts with $100 a barrel, guess who is getting gold stars for reporting ... NPR.

National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” stories on $100 a barrel oil this week have featured some underreported views on the industry: The economy is surviving the higher costs, and the oil companies are using the profits for future exploration.

Reporter Jim Zarroli told NPR listeners what was supposed to happen, saying, “Time and again, economists from Alan Greenspan on down have warned that oil prices are inflationary ... Interest rates go up, borrowing becomes more difficult, and growth slows.”

But, Zarroli also pointed out the unique trend that gets little coverage: Despite the rise in oil prices since March 2007, the economy has continued to grow at a strong pace.

[...]

“Companies often use fatter profits to search for new deposits, or to go back and suck the last drop from retired wells,” said reporter Christopher Joyce.

Those $100 bills are going to search for new deposits in places like the Gulf of Mexico, where drillers must drill in deeper water and farther out at sea - making exploration more expensive. Joyce pointed out that higher prices can also help pay for the most current technology needed to squeeze more oil out of those old wells.

Incidentally, The Economist’s November 8 print edition cautioned as oil companies released their numbers for the third quarter that “Record oil prices, it turns out, do not translate into record profits.”

ExxonMobil, the publication pointed out, reported a 10-percent drop in profits in the third quarter, and profits also fell at Chevron, Eni, BP and ConocoPhillips.

Democrats treat wealthy Americans as a renewable resource that can never be exhausted by taxes.

‘The question is: Should we be giving an extra $120 billion to people in the top 1%?”

So asked Gene Sperling, Hillary Clinton’s chief economic advisor, at a recent National Press Club panel discussion. Translation: It’s the government’s money, and anything left over after Uncle Sam picks your pockets is a “gift.”

Indeed, to hear leading Democrats talk about the “richest 1%”—a diverse cohort of investors, managers, entrepreneurs and, to be sure, some fat-cat heirs—one gets the impression that wealthy Americans are a natural resource, to be pumped for as much cash as we need.

Further, the Democrats don’t think that well will ever run dry. “I no more believe that the hedge-fund managers are going to quit working at billion-dollar hedge funds because tax rates go up 5% than Alex Rodriguez will quit playing baseball because they put in a salary cap,” Austan Goolsbee, Barack Obama’s economics guru, said last Friday.

This sort of thing used to be a staple of the hard left. “Look at the wealth of America, weigh its resources, feel its power,” wrote the Nation’s editors back in 1988, endorsing presidential candidate Jesse Jackson’s extravagant public spending plan. “There’s enough money in this country to do everything Jackson asks, and more.”

But now this vision simply defines liberal economics. John Edwards’ unending campaign for president is based on the idea that there are two Americas and that everyone will be better off when un-rich America mugs rich America. According to Democrats, it’s greedy to want to keep your own money, but it’s “justice” to demand someone else’s.

[...]

Let’s take seriously for a moment the notion that rich people are an inexhaustible army of Energizer bunnies that just keep going and going, no matter what taxes you throw in their path. You can see where Democrats get this idea, after all. The top 1% of wage earners already provide nearly 40% of federal income tax revenues. And the bottom half of taxpayers contribute only about 3%.

Taxes are a necessary evil. But their silver lining is that they foster a sense of accountability and reciprocity between the taxpayer and the tax collector. Indeed, democracy is usually born from this relationship. Widening prosperity brings a rising middle class, which in turn demands the rule of law, incorrupt bureaucracies and political representation in exchange for its hard-earned money. You might recall the phrase “no taxation without representation.”

[...]

Today, our politics seems to be suffering from a “rich people curse.” We treat the rich like a constantly regenerating piñata, as if they will never change their behavior no matter how many times they get whacked by taxes. And we think everyone can live well off the goodies that will fall to the ground forever.

[...]

Meanwhile, Democrats keep telling the bottom 95% of taxpayers that all of America’s problems will be solved if only the rich people would pay “their fair share” of income taxes. Not only is this patently untrue and a siren song toward a welfare state, it amounts to covetousness as fiscal policy.

I don’t know what the best tax rates are, for rich or poor.

But I’m pretty sure that it’s unhealthy for a democracy when the majority of citizens don’t see government as a service they’re reluctantly paying for but as an extortionist that cuts them in for a share of the loot.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the study released today by the Treasury Department ("Income Mobility in the U.S. from 1996 to 2005”; press release; full study PDF).

That’s because it provides documented evidence of more, not less, economic mobility than in previous eras. Beyond that, taken in combination with an independent report I covered last week, it demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that the first four-plus years of the Bush economy were exceptional.

Tuesday’s read-the-whole-thing feature editorial at OpinionJournal.com provides a great overview (bolds are mine), plus some tantalizing details:

..... you may have heard that the U.S. is becoming a nation of rising inequality and shrinking opportunity. We’d refer those campaigns to a new study of income mobility by the Treasury Department that exposes those claims as so much populist hokum

..... (The study shows) beyond doubt that the U.S. remains a dynamic society marked by rapid and mostly upward income mobility. Much as they always have, Americans on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder continue to climb into the middle and sometimes upper classes in remarkably short periods of time.

The Treasury study examined a huge sample of 96,700 income tax returns from 1996 and 2005 for Americans over the age of 25. The study tracks what happened to these tax filers over this 10-year period. One of the notable, and reassuring, findings is that nearly 58% of filers who were in the poorest income group in 1996 had moved into a higher income category by 2005. Nearly 25% jumped into the middle or upper-middle income groups, and 5.3% made it all the way to the highest quintile.

Of those in the second lowest income quintile, nearly 50% moved into the middle quintile or higher, and only 17% moved down. This is a stunning show of upward mobility, meaning that more than half of all lower-income Americans in 1996 had moved up the income scale in only 10 years.

Also encouraging is the fact that the after-inflation median income of all tax filers increased by an impressive 24% over the same period. Two of every three workers had a real income gain--which contradicts the Huckabee-Edwards-Lou Dobbs spin about stagnant incomes.

..... Only one income group experienced an absolute decline in real income--the richest 1% in 1996. Those households lost 25.8% of their income. Moreover, more than half (57.4%) of the richest 1% in 1996 had dropped to a lower income group by 2005.

..... The key point is that the study shows that income mobility in the U.S. works down as well as up--another sign that opportunity and merit continue to drive American success, not accidents of birth. The “rich” are not the same people over time.

The study is also valuable because it shows that income mobility remains little changed from what similar studies found in the 1970s and 1980s.

..... The political left and its media echoes are promoting the inequality story as a way to justify a huge tax increase. But inequality is only a problem if it reflects stagnant opportunity and a society stratified by more or less permanent income differences. That kind of society can breed class resentments and unrest. America isn’t remotely such a society, thanks in large part to the incentives that exist for risk-taking and wealth creation.

..... As the Treasury data show, we shouldn’t worry about inequality. We should worry about the people who use inequality as a political club to promote policies that reduce opportunity.

[...]

Treasury’s mobility study, combined with The Conference Board’s discretionary income data, shatter yet another myth. It’s a myth Old Media propagates and will continue to propagate day-in and day-out, despite the overwhelming evidence just cited: That, as far as the average American is concerned, the Bush 43 economy has been mediocre, nothing special, or worse, and that it has paled in comparison to the Golden Era of the 1990s.

Now you know better.

ARTHUR MAX, Associated Press Writer

VALENCIA, Spain - The U.N.‘s top climate official warned policymakers and scientists trying to hammer out a landmark report on climate change that ignoring the urgency of global warming would be “criminally irresponsible.”

Yvo de Boer’s comments came at the opening of a weeklong conference that will complete a concise guide on the state of global warming and what can be done to stop the Earth from overheating. It is the fourth and last report issued this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, co-winner of this year’s Nobel Peace prize.

Environmentalists and authors of the report expected tense discussions on what to include and leave out of the document, which is a synthesis of thousands of scientific papers. A summary of about 25 pages will be negotiated line-by-line this week, then adopted by consensus.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel Prize-winning panel, said scientists were determined to “adhere to standards of quality” in the report. It was indirect barb at the government representatives, who have been accused by environmentalists of watering down and excluding vital information from the summaries of earlier reports to fit their domestic agendas.

The document to be issued Saturday sums up the scientific consensus on how rapidly the Earth is warming and the effects already observed; the impact it could have for billions of people; and what steps can be taken to keep the planet’s temperature from rising to disastrous levels.

The IPCC already has established that the climate has begun to change because of the greenhouse gases emitted by humans, said de Boer, director of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Everyone will feel its effects, but global warming will hit the poorest countries hardest and will “threaten the very survival” of some people, he said.

“Failing to recognize the urgency of this message and act on it would be nothing less that criminally irresponsible” and a direct attack on the world’s poorest people, De Boer said.

[...]

So, here it is:  the lefties want power and control, and will try to use the UN as the “hammer” to force us all to follow their agenda.
Consider yourselves warned.

Brad Wilmouth

Finally, the MSM lets some truth slip out!

On Sunday’s “NBC Nightly News,” correspondent Pete Williams previewed details of a new book, The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack, by Ronald Kessler, in which Kessler revealed information obtained by the an FBI agent who extensively interviewed Saddam Hussein and found, among other things, that the former Iraqi leader had deliberately tried to “fool the U.S.” into believing he had weapons of mass destruction because “he wanted Iranian leaders to believe that he had nuclear and biological weapons.” The FBI agent, named George Piro, also reported that Saddam Hussein “hoped the post-Gulf War sanctions on Iraq would dissolve, allowing him to pursue a nuclear capability.” (Transcript follows)

NBC News correspondent Pete Williams began his report: “Saddam Hussein told his American captors that he so feared Iran, he wanted Iranian leaders to believe that he had nuclear and biological weapons. So he planned to fool the U.S. by, among other things, stalling U.N. inspectors to make it appear he had something to hide, weapons of mass destruction or WMD. But he hoped the post-Gulf War sanctions on Iraq would dissolve, allowing him to pursue a nuclear capability.”

Then a soundbite of Kessler ran: “Saddam said that if America thought that he had WMD, then, of course, Iran would, and this would fulfill his goal of making sure that Iran did not want to attack Iraq.”

Below is a complete transcript of the story from the Sunday November 11 “NBC Nightly News”:

[...]

Read the transcript.
So, the leftie mantra, “Bush lied, people died” is yet another leftie lie.
It should be: “Saddam lied, people died.” Had we not deposed him when we did, we would be in a world in which Iraq and Iran would be developing nuclear weapons to use against each other and the rest of the world.
It’s funny that lefties consider the President of the United States a bigger enemy than our real enemies, but not so surprising when you consider the ideology of the left.

Russ Vaughn

Makes sense.

As retirees with limited incomes, my wife and I were feeling the pinch of rising energy prices like everyone else. A couple of years ago, following my Capitalist Pig instincts, of which Rush Limbaugh has made me proud, I decided to heed an age-old truism, “If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em,” as well as one of the Maharushie’s maxims, “When you’re handed lemons, make lemonade.”

I decided that if we were going to be contributing to the obscene profits the Democrats and Drive-by Media claim BIGOIL companies are reaping, we might as well share in them by owning some energy company stocks. After several days of careful internet research, I purchased a few thousand dollars of a Vanguard natural resources mutual fund and converted the cash accumulation of my wife’s life insurance policy from a modestly performing bond mutual fund into another high performing energy resources mutual fund from Jennison.

Now when I look at a pump and see the price has jumped several more cents per gallon, instead of my old reaction of shock and anger at those BIGOIL robber barons, I now stand there watching those digits climb higher and higher on the pump, calculating how this latest increase is going to translate into performance growth in those mutual funds. By the time I hang the nozzle back on the pump, I’m usually smiling.

You see, for the last two years the growth in value of our modest investment in those funds not only has covered all our gasoline bills for three cars but also our residential gas and electric bills, with enough left over to pay the insurance on all three automobiles. Believe me, it’s a nice feeling driving away from the gas station knowing you just got another free fill-up.

[...]

60 Minutes, if you want to do an exposé on my obscene profits as a Little BIGOIL Baron, I’m definitely available.

Individual independence, combined with the private ownership and control of capital; what makes America great.

A Stunning Report on ‘Discretionary Income’ Old Media Uses Its Discretion to Ignore

Someone needs to tell me why this news about discretionary income isn’t as significant as I believe it is.

But first, three warnings:

1. I’m not about to spend the $250 needed to read the full report from the Conference Board that backs the story (their “about” page is here).

2. I don’t feel totally comfortable with how the statistic is measured—“Households with discretionary income, as defined by the study, are those whose spendable income exceeds that held by households with similar demographic features.”

3. I don’t feel totally comfortable that the statistic has been measured consistently.

Now with the disclaimers out of the way, here’s the stunning news: More Americans have “money to burn,” technically known as “discretionary income,” than at any time in the past quarter-century, and perhaps in the country’s history.

A lot more. A whole lot more.

So many more that I went as far back as I could for comparable stats.

Here is what I found:

[...]

Summarizing, here is the progression of Americans with discretionary income:

-- 1983 - 33%

-- 1987 - 30%

-- 1997/1998 - 52%

-- 2002 - 52.1%

-- 2003/2004 - 51%

-- 2006 - 63.5%

In everyday language, this means that about 12% of the population went from just getting by to having money to spare in a span of two or three years.

Again, someone needs to tell me why this news isn’t as significant, or as remarkable, as it appears.

You might think that in the non-stop Old Media hype about how the alleged crises in housing, mortgage lending, currency strength, and who knows what else, that good news like this might be welcome, if only as a change of pace.

As has been the case almost non-stop for almost 7 years, you would be wrong.

[...]

If you’re wondering how it is that so many people are coming up with the money for all manner of iPods, monthly video game subscriptions, and scalped Hannah Montana tickets, there’s probably a very simple answer: They have it.

Old Media would prefer that you not know that.

Mark Finkelstein

When Rush Limbaugh opened today’s show by mentioning that the New York Times had relegated to page A19 the story of the ridding of Al Qaeda-in-Iraq from all of Baghdad, I actually thought he might be joking. Surely not even the Times could be so brazenly biased as to bury such a huge story reflecting the success of the surge.

But, sure enough, Rush was right. Page A19 is precisely the remote location to which the Times banished the story. And to further diminish the number of people who would learn the good news, the paper stuck this bland headline on it:

“Rebel Unit Now Out of Baghdad, U.S. General Asserts”

The headline of the online-version of the story:

“Militant Group Is Out of Baghdad, U.S. Says”

differs slightly, but the text is the same.

Yeah, it was just some “rebel unit” or “militant group” that the MNF has driven out of all of Baghdad:

AL-FREAKING-QAEDA!

And note the Times’s passive tone: AQI is “out” of Baghdad. Hey: they were driven out by the MNF. Defeated. Killed or taken prisoner. Those that escaped either fled or slinked out.

But thanks to Rush, and now with a little help from NB, many more people are going to read the story and learn that:

  American forces have routed Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the Iraqi militant network, from every neighborhood of Baghdad, a top American general said today, allowing American troops involved in the“surge” to depart as planned.

  Maj. Gen. Joseph F. Fil Jr. [pictured here], commander of United States forces in Baghdad, also said that American troops had yet to clear some 13 percent of the city, including Sadr City and several other areas controlled by Shiite militias. But, he said, “there’s just no question” that violence had declined since a spike in June.

  “Murder victims are down 80 percent from where they were at the peak,” and attacks involving improvised bombs are down 70 percent, he said.

[...]

The Dem Ministry of Propaganda(the MSM) needs to cover up this story as much as they possibly can, lest the dreaded President Bush be given credit for what he is accomplishing against the terrorists.

Thomas Lifson

Barack Obama is letting us know the kind of welfare state he has in mind for America. In addition to government spending, he is proposing job-killing mandates for employers of all but start-up companies. As the EU social welfare states like Germany and France have discovered, making it very expensive to hire people tends to make new jobs scarce.
Margaret Talev of McClatchy reports, and uses language somewhat surprising for MSM coverage of a Democrat [italics added below]:

  Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama is rolling out a cradle-to-grave tax-and-benefit program aimed at women and working-class families.

  The sweeping subsidies and mandates reflect his past as a community organizer.

[....]

The result of Eurosocialism is high unemployment and low economic growth.  Do we really want to go down that road?  Our system is far superior to that.

Betsy Newmark

In my Advanced Placement Government and Politics class, we’ve been talking about the Constitutional Convention and the fight over ratification. As we were listing the objections of the Anti-federalists to the proposed constitution, it struck all of us how relevant their criticisms are still today. They feared the powers of the presidency would lead to a monarchical power grab - imperial presidency fears, anyone. They said that the “necessary and proper” clause and the “general welfare” clause were too vague and would allow the federal government to do almost anything it wanted. Who could deny that that hasn’t happened? They feared that the legislators in Congress would grow away from the people and soon govern without concern for the popular will and worried that there were no term limits on the congressmen. And they worried over giving Congress the power to tax and were concerned over how far the federal government would interfere in the economy. Does any of that sound familiar to anyone? And they worried that unelected judges would have too much power without the people having any control over the courts.

Too often we downplay the concerns of the Anti-federalists because they were the losers of the debate and we now have such reverence for the Constitution. But their legacy lives on. First of all, we owe their strong objections for the Bill of Rights. And when you hear critics today of Congress, fears of executive power, complaints about the judiciary, the desire for term limits on Congressmen and the devolution of power back to the states, remember the Anti-federalists and how they foresaw all of this.

In light of all this tribute to the Anti-federalists, Melanie Scarborough’s column yesterday seemed especially pertinent. She wrote about how people expect the federal government to do today what the Founders never dreamt of being the federal government’s rsponsibility.

  Exemplifying the absurd, Congress even created a federal subsidy to help Americans buy converter boxes when television broadcasts shift from analog to digital. Where does the Constitution guarantee citizens the right to clear TV reception?

  Listening to some of these candidates, one can only wonder if these people ever listen to themselves. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., wants taxpayers to give every baby born in the United States $5,000 at birth to encourage the habit of saving.

  ....Who would have dreamed a generation ago that citizens would let their government dictate the minutiae of everyday life such as where young children may ride in the car and what time teenagers have to be home — or that small businesses would be saddled with regulations on such things as carving butterfly shrimp?

  Politicians peddle overweening government on the pretense of “keeping Americans secure.” But the Constitution requires government to provide for the common defense — not for individual safety. If you’re afraid of incorrectly carved shrimp, then stay home to eat.

Sometimes, when I’m listening to today’s politicians, I pause and wonder what the Anti-federalists would say. Heck, I wonder if those who supported the Constitution and sought to explain why the Anti-federalists didn’t need to worry about the powers of the new central government would recognize today’s federal government. Hamilton perhaps would recognize that government, but Madison? I’m not so sure.

Food for thought.  I find it especially interesting how accurately the Anti-Federalists predicted many of the excesses of govt that beset us today.

The Associated Press

Israel reports jump in Jerusalem Arabs seeking Israeli citizenship
By

The number of East Jerusalem residents seeking Israeli citizenship has risen sharply in recent months, an Israeli official said Wednesday, as talk of a possible re-division of the city gains momentum.

The Interior Ministry has received hundreds of applications for citizenship from Arab residents of East Jerusalem over the past few months, instead of the average of several dozen, said ministry spokeswoman Sabine Hadad.

Hadad was unable to provide specific figures but said there has been an increase of hundreds.
 
The trend appears to stem from Palestinian fears that they could lose Israeli social benefits, such as health care or welfare payments, if their neighborhoods are shifted to Palestinian control in the future.

When Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan in 1967, the city’s Arabs were given the opportunity to become citizens, yet they rejected it because they refused to acknowledge Israeli control over the city.

Instead, they were given the status of permanent residents, holding Israeli ID cards and making them eligible for many benefits enjoyed by Israelis. In contrast to West Bank Palestinians, permanent residents also enjoy freedom of movement in Israel.

The rise in citizenship applications comes as Israeli and Palestinian officials prepare for a U.S.-sponsored peace conference at the end of this month in Annapolis, Maryland.

[...]

Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast war and annexed it, a move never recognized by the international community. Today, around a third of Jerusalem’s 750,000 residents are Palestinian.

Actions speak louder than words.
When given the choice, most people choose freedom over terrorism.

Here’s something you don’t see every day: a global warming alarmist coming out strongly against the use of biofuels.

Though George Monbiot isn’t a household name in the States, he is considered one of Britain’s leading environmentalists, and is regularly quoted by warm-mongers to advance climate hysteria.

Yet, despite his irrational disdain for carbon dioxide, Monbiot has long campaigned against the use of biofuels.

With that in mind, his Tuesday article in the British Guardian contained his harshest criticisms to date for this supposedly eco-friendly source of energy that global warming obsessed media in America dare not share with the citizenry (emphasis added throughout):

Story Continues Below Ad ↓

It doesn’t get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava. The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the district of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought. It would surely be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in our tanks.

Those familiar with Monbiot know that he has quite a flare for the dramatic:

"The cost of rice has risen by 20% over the past year, maize by 50%, wheat by 100%. Biofuels aren’t entirely to blame - by taking land out of food production they exacerbate the effects of bad harvests and rising demand - but almost all the major agencies are now warning against expansion. And almost all the major governments are ignoring them."

[...]

Of course, NBC also wouldn’t want its viewers to read Monbiot’s startling conclusion:

"If the governments promoting biofuels do not reverse their policies, the humanitarian impact will be greater than that of the Iraq war. Millions will be displaced, hundreds of millions more could go hungry. This crime against humanity is a complex one, but that neither lessens nor excuses it. If people starve because of biofuels, Ruth Kelly and her peers will have killed them. Like all such crimes, it is perpetrated by cowards, attacking the weak to avoid confronting the strong."

As amazing as it might seem, I largely agree with Monbiot’s assessment; where we part company is in who are the cowards, who are the weak, and who are the strong.

George Monbiot

Bring on the Recession

How else will the destructive effects of growth be stopped?

If you are of a sensitive disposition, I advise you to turn the page now. I am about to break the last of the universal taboos. I hope that the recession now being forecast by some economists materialises.

I recognise that recession causes hardship. Like everyone I am aware that it would cause some people to lose their jobs and homes. I do not dismiss these impacts or the harm they inflict, though I would argue that they are the avoidable results of an economy designed to maximise growth rather than welfare. What I would like you to recognise is something much less discussed: that, beyond a certain point, hardship is also caused by economic growth.

On Sunday I visited the only UN biosphere reserve in Wales: the Dyfi estuary. As is usual at weekends, several hundred people had come to enjoy its beauty and tranquillity and, as is usual, two or three people on jet skis were spoiling it for everyone else. Most economists will tell us that human welfare is best served by multiplying the number of jet skis. If there are two in the estuary today, there should be four there by this time next year and eight the year after. Because the estuary’s beauty and tranquillity don’t figure in the national accounts (no one pays to watch the sunset) and because the sale and use of jet skis does, this is deemed an improvement in human welfare.

This is a minor illustration of an issue which can no longer be dismissed as trivial. In August the World Health Organisation released the preliminary results of its research into the links between noise and stress. Its work so far suggests that long-term exposure to noise from traffic alone could be responsible, around the world, for hundreds of thousands of deaths through ischaemic heart disease every year, as well as contributing to strokes, high blood pressure, tinnitus, broken sleep and other stress-related illnesses. Noise, its researchers found, raises your levels of stress hormones even while you sleep. As a study of children living close to airports in Germany suggests, it also damages long-term memory, reading and speech perception. All over the world, complaints about noise are rising: to an alien observer it would appear that the primary purpose of economic growth is to find ever more intrusive means of burning fossil fuels.

This leads us to the most obvious way in which further growth will hurt us. Climate change does not lead only to a decline in welfare: beyond a certain point it causes its termination. In other words, it threatens the lives of hundreds of millions of people. However hard governments might work to reduce carbon emissions, they are battling the tide of economic growth. While the rate of growth in the use of energy declines as an economy matures, no country has yet managed to reduce energy use while raising gross domestic product. The UK’s carbon dioxide emissions are higher than they were in 1997, partly as a result of the 60 successive quarters of growth that Gordon Brown keeps boasting about. A recession in the rich nations might be the only hope we have of buying the time we need to prevent runaway climate change.

[...]

But because political discourse is controlled by people who put the accumulation of money above all other ends, this policy appears to be impossible. Unpleasant as it will be, it is hard to see what except an accidental recession could prevent economic growth from blowing us through Canaan and into the desert on the other side.

Blah, blah, blah.

Even though this was written by a Euro, it is the basic tenet of the lefties that prosperity is bad for us.  To make a “better world”, we should surrender our freedom to make our own economic decisions, for the common good.  Just more Marxism.
What’s good for the lefties is bad for America.
They just keep proving it over and over again.

“The Arab street knows full well that we give billions to Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinians and are probably baffled that we don’t cut it out. They also know we have just as frequently fought Christians on their behalf as Muslims; they know if their voting feet tell them anything that no place is more tolerant of their religion or more open to immigration than the United States. Yes, (Radical) Islamists all know that opening a mosque in Detroit is one thing, and opening a church in Saudi Arabia is quite another. Hitler wasn’t interested in Wilson’s 14 Points or how nicely Germans lived in the U.S. he cared only that we “cowboys” would not or could not stop what he was up to.”