As you can tell, I have been very busy lately. I still have been lurking the same blogs and reading the comment threads so my time isn’t quite reduced to zero. Recently, an article came out regarding some Ohio State researchers who claimed to have invented a process to burn coal and emit no CO2. You don’t need to have a lot of chemical engineering chops to be skeptical of a process like that but I was interested enough to investigate it. Articles with headlines like this were common so it sounded like real progress toward retarding the global warming aspect of the pending progressive economic suicide:
Of course every every news source I found made the fundamental assumption that CO2 emission (plant food) is actually hurting something. Plenty of readers here agree with that premise, however I don’t see any evidence for that claim. The mere fact that CO2 can alter climate, does not preclude the possibility that the climate for our existence can improve. This is beside the point though, a true zero emission technology is hard to argue against in our feelings-are-equal-to-logic world, and if it gets people moving in the right economic direction, I’m on board too.
Note that the resulting process on the bottom line looks very similar to the old fashioned process of actually burning coal in a fire pit. In fact, it is exactly the same, so it leaves one wondering just what “scheme” these people have invented.
This rather convoluted process has at least two advantages. It produces a pure stream of carbon dioxide that’s easy to capture and ready to be stored underground. And the burning of iron in air also takes place at lower temperatures that don’t produce nitrogen oxide.
So what we have is a process which uses Iron oxide (rust) to transport oxygen to pulverized coal. The Iron is then re-rusted with air, to recycle the material and burn more coal. The process happens slower than simply pumping air through coal so the material burns slower and the scientists separate the CO2 from the water rather than dropping it all into the sky. In a nutshell, rather than some great technological leap forward, the process is a convoluted way to transport the oxygen to burning coal. I can’t find anything of revolutionary properties that cannot already be achieved with other technologies. Separating gasses from the H20 in the emission stream of a standard coal plant and compressing it into a tank, is not technologically challenging. The emission fraction of CO2 from a standard coal plant is already 99ish percent and if you are putting the Co2 gas into a tank, why not put all of it except the water into it? Other technologies already produce a more pure CO2 stream than most coal plants (if that is actually important) and do it at a high temperature more standard process.
One would think this would be a near non-story but this isn’t a world where logic trumps sensationalism. There was plenty of money spent on it though.
The government has invested over 3 million and coal/oil companies have invested hundreds of thousands, and both of these groups have direct knowledge that the project cannot actually be successful because it doesn’t address what to do with the carbon dioxide. Worse, the reduced efficiency to capture, grind and separate the CO2, it actually produces MORE CO2 per watt than standard coal plants. I suppose that since there aren’t any good alternatives for investing green money, they have to dump the cash somewhere. It is really too bad that the givernment is stealing it from me in huge wads first, because I could have actually done something with that cash.
You would think that the project would stop there until we had a place to actually put the CO2. The scientists have shown the capability to burn stuff this way but we have nowhere to put the stupid compressed CO2 gas. That isn’t how the left thinks feels. Instead, our glorious economic superiors are “investing” confiscated money toward actually implementing powerplants with this technology.
It is unfortunate that we have to look to Hollywood for an explanation of anything, but South Park probably has the most apt description of these particular “clean burning” zero emission technologies:
So Dr. Lewandowsky did it again. He, and his coauthors, falsely used my name in order to support some kind of psychology paper on climate skeptic bloggers titled – “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation.” There were a lot of false (and funny) claims against bloggers on the internet, however, the Lewandowsky team chose to again single out my name in particular regarding specific false attributions of beliefs regarding the global temperature record. Readers will recall that in his previous contributions to scientific understanding, Lewandowsky et al. had made the claim:
and climate deniers believe that temperature records have been illegitimately adjusted to exaggerate warming (e.g., Condon, 2009).
Being surprised at the accusation, I pointed out in multiple emails to Dr. Lewandowsky that the Air Vent blog has published many articles using those exact records (here for instance) both on line and in peer-reviewed literature and no such claim regarding global temperature had ever been made by me. I have even created on-line global temperature results which have been compared favorably to many of the professionally funded series by others publishing global temperature series for climate science. A short chain of emails ensued where I explained in detail how my scientific positions have never supported his accusation. After a short while, with no hope of resolution, I was forced to go directly to the editor of Psychological Science, who eventually agreed to remove the citation.
Dr. Lewandowsky has agreed to remove your citation not because it was misleading–he does not believe it was–but because I think it is best replaced by a source other than a blog post. Any other blog post cited in the manuscript is also being replaced, for the same reason. … Eric Eich
Like pulling teeth right?
Humorously, the Air Vent was the single blog which made the citation list. I am not a naturally vindictive person so I took the editor at his word and let the matter rest. I have not had time to follow through as to whether the citation removal was completed, however Stephan Lewandowsky has continued to link to the unpublished original, University of Western Australia hosted, libelous document.
It seems that Lewandowsky is apparently less forgiving than I have been. He recently published a new paper based on blog reactions to his previous scientific breakthrough. This new paper astoundingly contained an even less supportable claim:
“Conspiracist ideation is arguably particularly prominent on climate blogs, such as when expressing the belief that temperature records show warming only because of systematic adjustments (e.g., Condon, 2009) …..”
My bold!
I would link to the paper, except that his new editors were far more rational than Eric Eich, and on notification, have simply removed the paper from publication. They have additionally agreed to remove the false reference before any publication continues. Original link here. I am impressed with the quality of the Frontiers in Psychology Journal response, and hopefully Lewandowsky will now let the unfounded personal attacks rest.
As Dr. Lewandowsky and his team were aware, the conspiracy claims against me regarding the adjustment of temperature records were unsupported. This is was a psychology paper of which I am at least an “alleged” subject. A misrepresented data point, like so many other bloggers, who’s identity was unethically revealed. Since I did originally take the time to inform Lewandowsky of my actual opinions on temperature records, and since he was fully aware that the article in question did not support his claims, it is my opinion that Lewandwosky and his coauthors intentionally introduced false data into a peer-reviewed paper. Ironically for a paper on conspiracy ideation based on others (read non-authors) pre-conceived bias, the authors scientifically irrational accusations were completely unnecessary to the point their paper purports to make…..
.. unless one believes in the Lewandowsky conspiracy.
I have been receiving emails from the authors of the condensation driven wind theory for several days now as they have published a new paper. Since I have no time whatsoever, I haven’t even read their latest work.
When a climate scientist claims that 2 + 2 =5 and the rest of the scientists tell them it doesn’t, CS turns a blind eye. Michael Mann’s hokey stick nonsense drives those of us who actually read math completely wild. When they add extreme need for compulsory planet wide behavioral change to correct for the new fact that 2 + 2 = 5, those of us who read math are unimpressed. Adding the even less convincing concept that “5″ is really bad for your health, education, economic success etc., leaves the ordinarily math-competent individual in a ball of confused tears ;D
However, even in today’s science 2 + 2 does still approximately equal 4, and despite the dragon slayers best efforts, that is more than zero.
Based on this reasoned logic, Tom Fuller has started a new blog based on a lukewarmer’s perspective. Tom is an excellent writer and it is worth checking out.
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On lukewarmer status. I still cannot accept my card, not that I would not be happy to. From my perspective, it would be comforting to accept a middle ground on the matter of climate science. Who doesn’t like fresh air or happy non-threatening wildlife? As this blog has endlessly beaten to death, I agree with all of the premise of CO2 warming, I agree that the “recent” data leads to the middle ground, but I’m not convinced that warming won’t actually be greater than the low trends thermometers have been measuring. I’m also not convinced that long term trends won’t be less than we are measuring. So my Id is still stuck without a home, however, were I to bet $1000, I would put it on Tom’s side. Climate does seem to me to have a middle ground with far less damage or consequence than the IPCC has presented, and it looks like GOD might just be putting his thousand bucks on being a lukewarmer as well.
On another subject, we bought a 360 HP Taurus SHO with an eco-boost engine this fall for my wife. At 18 MPG, it is a bit more “boost” than “eco”. Our company has a huge parking lot which is “private property” for me, so I have had a bit of fun over the past several months. I’ve read of some of the extremist climate goofs not lighting pilot lights on their water heaters and not taking showers every day. I wonder if the stinky geniuses would agree that since I am owner of a “green” company that saves more CO2 than they ever will, that it’s ok for me to spend a little extra on fuel…! haha.
Ex-spurt is a commonly misunderstood term. The true definition of Ex-spurt is, “A drip under pressure”, or perhaps in past tense form, “a drop under pressure.” Often an ex-drip will self-identify as a spurt, but on closer examination he is really just a drip. Reader (Alan D McIntire) left a link on the Yellow Science thread, to a “scientific” paper written by this latter sort of expert, which is a rather humorous contribution to science. The paper was message-motivated its conception, but the inspiration to write this post came from the machinations the authors exhibited in trying to rationalize the unfortunate data they collected.
Dan M. Kahan is the main author of the “work” which employs statistical techniques to interpret a questionnaire. Anyone can critique a question, and many readers of the technical climate blogs do, but the reasoned questioning of a stupid question makes me glaze over so that is not the topic of this post. What is interesting is that the authors really attempted to discern why the public has expressed such a wide rejection of “climate science™” in the face of the “National Academy of Science”, and how better to communicate their (the authors) own beliefs.
The paper uses a lot of obtuse language which will dissuade most casual readers from actually parsing the intent. Psychology is likely to be a permanently soft science due to the difficulty and occasional unwillingness to define well qualified, limiting parameters for statistical tests. This is the central reason that psychology has never actually achieved the true “gold star” rating of physics. There is simply too much room in the field for opinion to interpret weakly fulcrumed data. e.g. you write a question which intends to differentiate subjects and then interpret the question with complex statistics. The actual result of both the question and the statistics are beyond most human scientists abilities to interpret, but that doesn’t stop any of us.
Meh…
Reality doesn’t change funding, the authors note states:
Authors’ Note. Research for this paper was funded by the National Science Foundation, Grant SES 0922714.
The abstract begins:
The conventional explanation for controversy over climate change emphasizes impediments to public understanding: limited popular knowledge of science, the inability of ordinary citizens to assess technical information, and the resulting widespread use of unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk.
Translation:
The people which the authors regularly associate with state that skepticism of climate change alarmism is rooted in misunderstanding of science, inability to access the technical results mentally, and the general stupidity of the population.
The rest of the abstract indicates quite obtusely when the “science” ends and the activism begins:
On the whole, the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones. More importantly, greater scientific literacy and numeracy were associated with greater cultural polarization: Respondents predisposed by their values to dismiss climate change evidence became more dismissive, and those predisposed by their values to credit such evidence more concerned, as science literacy and numeracy increased. We suggest that this evidence reflects a conflict between two levels of rationality: The individual level, which is characterized by citizens’ effective use of their knowledge and reasoning capacities to form risk perceptions that express their cultural commitments; and the collective level, which is characterized by citizens’ failure to converge on the best available scientific evidence on how to promote their common welfare. Dispelling this, “tragedy of the risk-perception commons,” we argue, should be understood as the central aim of the science of science communication.
Translation:
Those who understand science and math, are less likely to see climate change as a serious threat to their existence, but those who are predisposed by their “values” to reject climate science, have a stronger correlation to rejection of science. The authors “suggest” that the subjects lack of rationality is caused by cultural commitments which override reason. The individual understands the collective need, yet overrides it with individual interest.
Old song eh?
I do love that song. But why does the increased rejection of a conclusion by “cultural rationale” make any point regarding the rejection by scientifically literate individuals? Culture and reason are uncorrelated by definition. To those of us who value data over result, the fact that the correlation is higher for cultural rejection of climate science, has literally zero influence on the scientific rejection of the same. Still, the current bed-wetting phase of psychological science allows plenty of room for motivated, sophistic, discussion as to why people make decisions that others, particularly authors, don’t agree with.
The “irrationality” of every human are defined in the paper as:
But an even more fundamental objective is to advance a more precise diagnosis of the kind of irrationality that afflicts public deliberations on climate change. “Irrationality” describes a state of antagonism between an agent’s goals and the decision-making capacities that the agent uses to attain them.
So, in climate science, “public deliberations” are some kind of irrationality…. Because an agent’s goals don’t match the authors “expected” results.
The meat of the paper is shown in the following sets of graphs:
Interesting that the more adept a person is in science and math, the less likely they are to agree with climate change! A similar result was found for nuclear power as well:
The more educated people are, the less worried they are about nuclear power. The problem the authors have though is that they cannot understand how education on climate change results in less concern. They don’t seem to suffer the same personal disdain regarding nuclear power, but the issues discussed in this paper were comprised entirely of current US liberal (egalitarian-communitarian) hot-button topics. On reading, it is no stretch to assume that these are the issues which the authors deem important concerns for society.
The cultural cognition theory also generates a testable prediction. This theory posits that persons who subscribe to a “hierarchical, individualistic” worldview—one that simultaneously ties authority to conspicuous social rankings and eschews collective interference with the decisions made by individuals possessed of such authority—can be expected to be skeptical of claims of environmental and technologi-cal risks. Such people, according to the theory, intuitively perceive that widespread acceptance of such claims would license restrictions on commerce and industry, forms of behavior that Hierarchical Indivi-dualists value. In contrast, persons who hold an “egalitarian, communitarian” worldview—one that favors less regimented forms of social organization and greater collective attention to securing individual needs—tend to be morally suspicious of commerce and industry, which they see as the source of unjust disparities in wealth and power. They therefore find it congenial, the theory posits, to see those forms of behavior as dangerous and thus worthy of restriction. On this view, then, we should expect Egalitarian Communitarians to be more concerned than Hierarchical Individualists with climate change risks (Doug-las & Wildavsky 1982).
The authors point out here that politics affects peoples opinion to a greater degree than education. However, in the near standard circular-reasoning mode of soft-science, the authors imply the correct answer for both the nuclear and the climate change cases, and generate conclusions from there. They fail to notice how their own bias affects their conclusions. For instance, climate change:
The result is the failure of the public—or at least a large propor-tion of it—to form the views of climate change risk held among more knowledgeable, dispassionate ex-perts (Weber & Stern 2011).
We will call this position the “public irrationality thesis” or “PIT.” Our claim is that PIT is con-trary to empirical evidence of who believes what about climate change.
And on nuclear:
This result is arguably consistent with PIT. Historically, members of the public have been understood to be more concerned about nuclear power than they should be based on the best available scientific evidence. If, consistent with PIT, we attribute the public’s view to deficits in reason, then we should expect to see concern with nuclear power risks abate as science literacy and numeracy increases.
So the authors are self-certain that the graphs above mean that the smart people got Nuclear power more right, but climate change wrong.
Unfortunately, this is absolutely a climate change activist paper, we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking anything else of it. It also has a strong communitarian leaning. The concept of it is entirely centered around using psychology to empower science to act on our behalf and direct the public as they see fit. Irrational decision making based on political views are fingered as the culprit for the publics “incorrect” decisions on climate change.
The authors of the paper do make some good points of course but again, nothing which jeopardizes the authors intent. The following paragraph correctly notes the anti-industrial stance of the “communicators”, the fake carbon-emission limit “solutions” but again blames only misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the science based on non-communitarian political views for the disagreement.
In fact, such inattention can deepen polarization. Citizens who hold hierarchical and individualis-tic values discount scientific information about climate change in part because they associate the issue with antagonism to commerce and industry. That association is aggravated when a communication identi-fies carbon-emission limits as the exclusive policy remedy for climate change (Kahan in press). Individu-als are prone to interpret challenges to beliefs that predominate with their cultural community as assaults on the competence of those whom they trust and look to for guidance (Kahan, Braman, Cohen, Gastil & Slovic 2010). That implication—which naturally provokes resistance—is likely to be strengthened when communicators with a recognizable cultural identity stridently accuse those who disagree with them of lacking intelligence or integrity.
I Believe that in their humorous machinations on irrational decision making, the authors have missed a simpler alternate explanation that happens to fit their own data better.
Negative slope of the risk with increased education.
This means that the generally dumber people see nuclear power and climate change as more risky. Sorry dumb people! The smarter people, who didn’t need much education to answer the brain-sorting questions, see it as less risk (slightly). To be fair to the study, there is an extreme bifurcation of risk in climate change between the individualistic and the communistic groups. This large-scale bifurcation of risk assessment on climate change, combined with a negative overall slope WRT education, is not an insignificant fact and the huge differential of opinion is not satisfactorily explained by the authors.
My explanation is that the smart people are more right……
Genius!
Climate change science is a self-sorted group of communitarian personalities, funded by government with a strong belief that they know best for society. Of interest to me was that general climate science results and beliefs, are at the extreme end of the data collected in this paper. The dangers are systematically exaggerated, and their solutions to the problems posited are singularly anti-industrial. Additionally, these authors made the false claim that the climate scientists are the least-emotional and biased source. A brief review of the general public behavior of climate scientists as well as private emails, indicates that fact the opposite is true. You don’t hide the decline, if you aren’t interested in a particular result.
It takes little imagination to understand that communitarian personalities see climate change as their best chance to enact global changes to energy and governance. Backing this point up, there is substantial evidence that their decision process is based heavily on emotion. For example, we know low-energy density technologies like biofuels, wind and solar don’t do anything to solve the “scientific problem” yet viable high-output technologies like nuclear and natural gas are held back by the same people. These are examples of “feel good” science. All of these examples point directly and singularly to rationality of decisions for political gain by the anti-industrial communitarians.
Let’s look briefly at how this alternate conclusion has explained the data in the paper. Climate risk is being heavily exaggerated by the climate science community as evidenced by their opinions being on the extreme end of the collected data, and smart recognize it. Communitarians, also at the extreme end of the spectrum, emotionally approve of the result and see the advantage of the argument which they help exaggerate to their own perceived benefit. Individualists look at the same data, recognize that climate science has NOT made an adequate case for any danger whatsoever, and further recognize that the political goals of the science are highly-destructive to their economic well-being. Logically, the individualist still sees the lack of an adequate argument as still having some risk associated with it.
We shouldn’t forget that there isn’t a single piece of evidence that anyone has been hurt by global warming — anywhere — ever. We are often told the opposite is true by the communitarian scientific thinkers, against all evidence. Hurricanes, drought, shrinking fish, sheep etc… All fake results today, which may start to show trends in the future. In the case of nuclear energy, the communitarian groups have consistently and dramatically overestimated risk. The situation is so bad that all nuclear is lumped together into a single concept completely ignoring the realities of differing technologies. To me the anti-nuclear people are completely delusional, and some even express concern about the nuclear pollution of space! Dumber than hell in my opinion. Still there is less political advantage to be had in fighting nuclear power than fighting for climate change “solutions”, and the two groups in Figure 2 above are much closer in conclusion.
So there you have it, an explanation for the authors results which requires zero irrational thought on anyone’s behalf. It explains the huge discrepancy between the different political viewpoints on climate change, without resorting to making decisions that are not in their own best interest. It also employs the fact that “climate science™” sits at the extreme end of the risk spectrum, despite having literally zero evidence of any damage to date and substantial evidence of models running too hot. It does all that while providing a rationale for political bifurcation on nuclear power being closer together than climate.
Adding irrationality to explain why people don’t converge on the most extreme end of climate change opinion, makes no sense whatsoever, and shows a form of irrationality by the authors of this paper. A loose and irrational(adjective) variable called “irrationality”, added to a paper to create a perceived data fit, without messing up the authors world-view.
And this concludes another episode of communitarian climate change insanity brought to you by the “experts” of the crazy world we live in.
Reader Skiphil has left a link to some incredible commentary by our good friend Stephan Lewandowski who apparently holds a PhD in bovine scatology. There is nothing wrong with being educated in scatology, however, Stephan’s propensity to practice his chosen craft publicly leaves one wondering if anyone actually believes his nonsense. Still, the Journal of Psychology took the time to interview this obviously dimwitted man, and then publish his answers under the guise of “observations”. What grabs my attention about his (and his coauthors) “work” is the delusional self-referencing that the paper and commentary glosses right over. The full paper is linked here.
The gist of the paper, which must seem complicated to the authors, is that information repeated, is assimilated better than information that is not. Also, information which “makes sense” to you, is more likely to be accepted by you. Haha… who would have guessed. Unfortunately, they took this basic concept of psychology and turned it into a highly biased political article which tells us more about the authors than about the population they allege to study.
From his interview:
Your paper indicates that social networking is a contributor to misinformation. Do you think that social media can also act to counter misinformation?
In principle, yes. And indeed there are some terrific science blogs with large numbers of twitter followers (e.g., skepticalscience.com) that have made it their mission to combat misinformation in specific arenas, such as climate science.
Now we all know that Skeptical Science is nothing but a political propaganda outlet designed to attack any reasoned discussion on global warming, which doesn’t support the alarmist agenda. Not just the science, but the agenda, and like politicians “helping the poor”, the blog’s name has nothing to do with its intent.
Do mainstream media outlets care about retracting misinformation?
In my experience, sadly, not always. Some media outlets are better than others, but in my experience some media outlets act quite irresponsibly with far-reaching consequences: There is fairly good data to suggest that, overall, viewers of Fox News are the most misinformed across a range of crucial issues whereas listeners of National Public Radio are the least misinformed.
It seems to me that in the past year this sort of commentary on Fox News being a disinformation outlet has become a commonly repeated theme in the leftist dialog. Although, I get my news from all sources, I strongly disagree with Stephan’s claim because Fox is the only source which doesn’t require a full blown dissection to remove the biased nonsense, not that some parsing isn’t required. Each time I watch/listen to a leftist news outlet like CNN, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, or National Public Radio, I hear literally dozens of twists and half-truths and it leaves me wondering just what kind of uneducated people don’t recognize that they are being repeatedly lied to. Compound that with the nearly 100% leftist print media, and the entire globe is saturated with repeated left-wing dogma. Hell, China state news is more conservative than the New York Times. So then Lewandowsky, with obviously extreme political views, writes that Fox news viewers are misinformed, in a paper which purports to be analyzing the difference between reality and endlessly repeated misinformation. It is a funny world when lies have changed places with truth even in science. It has become a modern fact that yellow journalism is empowering yellow science, and to me the government/media/science collaboration can only lead only to very bad places.
The paper is rife with similar points for which their veracity can be discussed ad-naseum:
In one study, retractions of nonfictitious misperceptions (e.g., the mistaken belief that President Bush’s tax cuts in the early 2000s had increased revenues; the idea that there were WMDs in Iraq) were effective only among people whose political orientation was supported by the retraction (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010). When the corrections were worldview-dissonant (in this case, for Republican participants), a “backfire” effect was observed, such that participants became more committed to the misinformation.
I mean, isn’t the issue of taxation/revenue more complicated than a snapshot statement. After all, the economy lags any impetus by some amount of time. Bush inherited a recession, so the question becomes did the tax cuts create more revenue than the government would have received from the point they were enacted to the far future, not whether they immediately gained more. Still, it is stated here as though lost revenue from tax cuts were fact. It is a true irony that this “fact” of lost revenue is heavily repeated in left-wing media outlets and comports with the authors worldview. While the revenue of the federal government shows an initial drop in the 9-11 recession (blue line below), they quickly rose upward until the 2008 recession. Certainly, this alleged “fact” deserves some proper discussion, yet it is presented as a known reality in their paper. What’s worse is that economics are also polluted by the same “cash for results” feedback which exists in climate science. More economic tax papers are blatantly leftist than neutral or conservative, and like Steig’s Antarctic work, it is not because of their superior accuracy.
Lewandowsky’s left-saturated mental state seems to penetrate every aspect of his thoughts.
Is there a correlation between misinformation and education?
Not necessarily. In fact, when it comes to global-warming misinformation, there are data to suggest that education can have an ironic effect. Specifically, for Republicans, increasing education translates into a decreasing concern with climate change and a greater willingness to accept misinformation over the true state of the science—so worldview trumps facts, and education can increase that disparity.
This paper is chock full of half-truths and blatant falshoods. I compare it to a MSNBC report on climate change or listening to an Obama speech on gun control. To read it properly, you must check every sentence for accuracy or exaggerated meaning. For example:
Similarly, people who oppose climate science because it challenges their worldview may do so less if the response to climate change is presented as a business opportunity for the nuclear industry (cf. Feygina, Jost, & Goldsmith, 2010). Even simple changes in wording can make information more acceptable by rendering it less threatening to a person’s worldview. For example, Republicans are far more likely to accept an otherwise identical charge as a “carbon offset” than as a “tax,” whereas the wording has little effect on Democrats or Independents (whose values are not challenged by the word “tax”; Hardisty, Johnson, & Weber, 2010).
So the first sentence indicates that most people who understand the really obvious anti-industrial bias in climate science, and further recognize that the proposed “green” solutions are malarkey, also recognize that nuclear energy is the only economically and physically functional improvement we can technologically do that can even dent the issue. Lewie twists it into something else entirely. The second sentence indicates to me that either that the language in the questionnaire tricked some people, or the study is statistically biased as government funded left-wing studies so often are. Yellow science stated as fact.
For other examples of the disease penetrating government science, Obama is about to legislate more funding for gun control studies. Does anyone really question whether these government funded studies will garner more left-wing authors than conservatives or what these studies will conclude? How many will tweak the stats, and how many citations will they get from Lewandowsky? The same is true for the fake second hand smoke studies which have been repeated so often that left-saturated people like Madonnna flip out on stage at the sight of a cigarette. These ideologically saturated actors and musicians do heavy street drugs, yet are panicked about second-hand smoke at a distance! All caused by government funded yellow science.
I like to make controversial statements here, in case you didn’t notice, so I’ll add another. The yellow journalsim, misinformation and yellow science are far more prevalent in the left-wing agenda than the conservative. This fact occurs just for the reason stated in Lewandowsky’s paper. The leftist-version of “facts” are repeated over and over in the global media so often that they cannot be escaped by the public and retractions are not even considered. Higher tax = more revenue, business = anti-little guy, global warming = doom, etc… Additionally, their thought process is based on central government control of every aspect of the population empowered politicians are the beneficiaries of the groupthink and are all too happy to provide funding for more of the same. It is an obvious feedback loop which I don’t expect we can escape from easily. In my opinion, Lewandowsky is just an unknowing halfwitted cog in the human grinding machine. The function of his cog to use taxpayer money to create yellow science that promotes the left-wing central planning agenda.
Tom Fuller and I have always had a cordial relationship despite the fact that his politics are Pelosi-left. He left a comment on the last thread in relation to taxes and the deficit which depicts exactly how the left-wing media is trying to portray our current debt situation. While he is refreshingly honest in his beliefs, they do not match objective reality.
Hiya Jeff (and all…)
If I can focus first on the debt argument here, I must say I am not at all worried by American levels of public debt.
Our debt has been higher in the past as a percentage of GDP, which is the only sane metric to use. The people who are lending us money are in line to do so. They have more confidence in our ability and intention to pay than maybe you do. They like us so much they’re willing to lend us money at effectively zero interest.
If America were a ‘household’, its debt would be considered very manageable–a bit more than 100% of annual income. Anybody reading this who has a mortgage may well hold a much higher percentage of debt.
What worries me is that our obligations are set to grow dramatically, to help seniors stay out of poverty and get some sort of medical care. That is why I am not overly upset at taxes returning to levels last seen during the Clinton administration, when we managed to grow the economy quite well, even with taxes at a respectable level.
We’ve had much higher debt in the past and done just fine. We’ve had much higher taxes in the past and done just fine. We have problems ahead that we need to prepare for–but we can and we will.
Happy New Year!
On Taxes
Now the only time in history that debt hit a higher percentage of GDP in the US was in WW2. I like this first graph because it doesn’t try to blame one party or the other for spending but it does show how serious the situation is in recent years. Everyone likes to hate Bush Jr. because that is what is popular today, but unlike most people, my beef with him was that he didn’t fight congress enough on spending. You can see that as a percentage of GDP, he barely tweaked the debt level until the last two years of his presidency when the Democrats controlled two branches of government and massive spending bills were passed under the false guise of “saving the economy”. The 2012 point at the end of the graph is an out-of-date estimate.
So when you look at that plot, the only time we had a debt level this high was when we were in the middle of a world war. Not just an ordinary little war, a world-wide battle for our lives.
The next graph shows the continual cancer-like growth of the largest and most powerful government in world history as a percentage of its populations Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Note that the plot is of “total government receipts” rather than the receipts from income tax so popular in leftist newspapers. Receipts from income tax have remained flat, and the media continually confuses its audiences with this tax fact that represents a small fraction of the picture. Total government receipts, is the Federal-only tax load on the economy in dollars, and does not include State taxes. When discussing historic tax levels, this is the majority of the real tax that you should be looking at, as these are the actual tax dollars being sucked out of the “free market” by our “limited” central government.
Tom wrote – “We’ve had much higher taxes in the past and done just fine.”. While his opinion that taxes were “much higher”, is an admittedly widely held belief, it is flatly incorrect. The total governmental tax load on the US economy is the highest it has been in history, and as Tom pointed out, the future load already put into law is much greater.
So the next time you hear that US taxes were much higher in the past….
Now there are a number of countries with higher receipts as a percentage of GDP than this, that the left likes to use as examples. However, these countries are either very much business repressed or in unusual economic circumstances like Denmark experiences, where exports provide the funding to allow a relatively successful left-wing society on a very tiny scale. I like the Denmark example because its often used as a counter example to a US style of government, yet it is comprised of 5 million people who are ironically dependent on oil and gas for their funding. There is nothing wrong with that in my opinion, but it cannot be scaled to function here as the amount of gas and oil required to support the same system for 300 million people would quite literally “flood” the market. You might even need an actual boat! We also have that little problem that the left seems to think CO2 emissions are killing the planet so instead of moving forward with common sense production of gas, there is great resistance to it.
On Causes
I like this next graph taken from usgovernmentrevenue.com. It depicts several of the primary sources of income for the US governement and you can see fairly clearly where the increases in figure 2 above come from.
The blue line is total revenue, red indicates income taxes, green is business and other revenue, gray is ad valorum (property tax), and yellow is social security/medicare tax. Now we often look at the volatility of a timeseries while studying climate here, note the extreme fluctuations at the most recent end of the graph. These are caused by dynamics in the economy as the government borrows and spends to try and prop up our over-taxed free market economy. Notice the business and income taxes are the lines which create the recent short term variability in the total, not the social tax, and not the property tax. These taxes are profit based tax, rather than asset based. This fluctuation represents extreme losses of income in the private sector (loss of profitability). This income loss was unequivocally created by government loads on the economy which come in all forms. e.g. People like to say the housing “bubble” was the cause in 2008, but providing housing to those who couldn’t afford it, was just one of the many government loads created nearly exclusively by the Democrat party in the interest of fairness. Of course there are other examples as well but that one is a pet-peeve of mine.
One theme here is that ever-tightening regulations are also taxes on the economy. These costs are true and real expenditures from business (taxes), and real checks are written to pay for them, yet the increases in cost are not shown in the plot above. These costs should not be ignored lightly but are difficult to quantify as they are not easily tracked. I find that today’s anti-industry climate makes the Democratic party completely deaf to the consequences of these realities, and while we are about to experience them in very clear and unfortunate economic terms over the coming decades, the yellow journalism of today will not discuss the problem.
On Debt
So now that we have figured out that taxes as a percentage of the US economy have never been higher, let’s look at the total government debt. Tom wrote, “We’ve had much higher debt in the past and done just fine.” This seems reasonable at first glance but let’s look a little closer at figure 1. In World War II, the US debt skyrocketed over 4 years from 52 percent to 121 percent of GDP. This expenditure was massive and I think even most Germans of today would admit it was necessary. Reading an expanded view of the graph, the WWII expenses took 16 years under a booming economy to pay them off to pre-war levels. Our net government revenue at the time was under 25% of GDP, and the hidden social/regulatory costs to operate a business were far lower than today.
So in reality, we paid much less tax in the 50′s than today and it took over a decade to recover from the WWII expenditure in a booming economy. To me this indicates that Tom is right, we can recover from our current debt, yet in order to do it we have to bring government spending, anti-business regulations and taxation down dramatically. If we don’t reduce business regulation, the same government revenue means that you have a hidden net-higher rate than a numerically comparable rate in history.
Let’s look again at Figure 3 above to see if we can tell what is responsible for our currently massive tax levels. After WWII, income taxes were increased dramatically. Overall tax rates were low enough that the economy continued to grow, yet this is the time when Social Security programs were enacted. Social Security was a liberal social program designed with the best intention and the yellow line represents the tax level for social security as a percentage of GDP. What I notice is a continued growth of social security income to nearly ten percent of the total economy before 1990. Visually this represents the majority of the federal tax increase between 1960 and 1990.
I am pretty sure that we are fully stuck with the SS and Medicare tax for the foreseeable future, yet it is very clear that by looking to emergency spending of WWII, we are overspending in an unprecedented manner. Don’t forget that even with the high taxes, the social programs are famously under-funded.
Together these plots show that we are currently spending more money as a percentage of GDP than we were in WWII and that taxation growth up to 1990 was largely a function of liberal social programs. In WWII, we were smart enough to stop the spending and rebuild our economy. At that time, we had reduced tax law that favored manufacturing and did not have the insane employment laws, environmental laws and compliance costs we have now. The plots indicate to me that nothing about the US situation is even remotely similar to history. The addition of an underfunded Obamacare expense to our budget is a guarantee that everything will not just be alright in the future either. To sum up, we have government expenditures in excess of a WWII scale, during peacetime, with nothing but increases in spending and taxation as far as the eye can see.
What’s more is that the information in the graphs above, combined with the present recession, is a strong indicator that we are on the wrong side of the Laffer curve. Ignore that little detail at your own peril.
On Debt vs GDP
So Tom then wrote this statement which also needs discussion: “If America were a ‘household’, its debt would be considered very manageable–a bit more than 100% of annual income. Anybody reading this who has a mortgage may well hold a much higher percentage of debt.”
This is also a complete misnomer often sold by left-wing media that many reasonable people believe. Gross Domestic Product is not “Income”, it is gross sales. The profit on GDP is Income, and it is a tiny fraction of GDP. The comparison is therefore a non-sequitur. If you sell a box of oranges to your friend for the same cost at which you bought them, how much of your personal GDP (gross sales) from the oranges, is available for payment of debt?
It is more sensible to look at the national debt other ways. If we take the 16 trillion of debt and divide it by the 300 million population, we get a nice low number of $53,000 usd per man, woman and child. This is not a bad number to work with and doesn’t sound insurmountable by itself. Unfortunately, only working people pay taxes, and they only work for a fraction of their lives. Currently we have about 110 million employed people in the US which brings the total debt that working people owe to the government to 145,000 dollars per working person. There are about 110 million households so this is very similar to the dollars owed per household as well.
But the annual deficit is what contributes to debt, and our government spending is so massive that and we are presently borrowing $10,000 per household per year. This means that every home needs to send $833 more per month to the federal government in taxes just to break even with our current expenses, and does not include the coming spending increases with Obamacare. Most readers will agree that that is a fairly huge amount of money for the government to be borrowing on our behalf during peacetime. Those households on social security would really need to tighten their belts to pay that bill.
None of this includes the also massive debts being incurred by left-wing State governments like California and Illinois. Illinois currently carries a debt of 55,000/private worker for example.
The financial situation of this country is terrible. The latest tax bill was full of payoffs to left-wing campaign supporters for Obama. I have never witnessed the kind of quid-pro-quo corruption of his administration, like Benghazi, that doesn’t even make a footnote in the media today. The media excoriates big business conservatives, then giggles as the Democrats hand out huge piles of cash to big business, right after receiving campaign cash from them.
Common Sense Solutions
While people can interpret the numbers above differently, the range of reasonable interpretation does not include the possibility that what our government is doing might somehow be ok. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to work out what we need to do to fix it. It also doesn’t take much of a crystal ball to see what the future will bring if we don’t change our ways.
Spend less, tax less, spend less, control less and spend less and we will all have a better future.
I still owe everyone some commentary on Steig’s 3rd (or is it the 4th) victory lap. I have spent several hours on the new Antarctic doom paper, hopefully I will have some time shortly to write on that. In the meantime, we are awaiting some movement on the “fiscal cliff” and as usual, I have a few thoughts on that.
My first thought is that the “deep spending cuts”, is that they don’t even touch the overspending by the Federal government, yet we are told that these cuts are disastrous. I do agree that they are cut from the wrong areas, i.e. defense instead of EPA, but disastrous is not how I would describe any cuts at this point. We desperately need to reduce spending, so I’m ready for whatever we can get. The defense spending will be reinstated at the first opportunity anyway.
My second thought leaves me more confused. Democrats are pretending concern about the middle class paying too much tax, yet this is exactly what they have so often demanded. Raising taxes is the only way under the worldview of the anti-industrial left to logically balance the budget. Cutting spending is simply not an option. Keynesian economics is literally driven by the ignorant view that theft from business and spending of money by government, drives business. So they must spend or the economy will die and they will have less money to spend. Of course, like so much of life, they are partially right. The US government has so ingrained itself into business at this point, that they are in control of massive percentages of the workforce and the economy.
And this brings me to the Laffer curve.
The Laffer curve is basic economic theory representing a tax vs revenue curve, which represents how much revenue is gained at different tax levels. Wikipedia has a typically extreme leftist view of the subject here and like taxation, the public understanding of the subject is a huge irritation to me. If you tax personal income at 100 percent – or greater – then there is no incentive to make income and the government receives zero tax. If you tax at zero percent, the government gets zero tax so somewhere in-between, the government makes more than zero. The left will have you believe that you can maximize income at about 70% tax rate, which is just dumb, but that is what they think. Often, the argument the “blogging left” makes for higher tax is based on revenue as a percentage of GDP, but capitalism doesn’t exist to maximize a percentage of dollars sold, it exists to maximize total dollars earned. Because taxes retard the gross economy, maximizing a percentage of GDP is not related to the Laffer curve.
Politicians of all types are fond of saying, X tax will create additional revenue to pay for Y program. This language has then been regularly repeated by the ever-compliant and rarely understanding media. On the left, both the media and the politicians firmly believe that increasing tax on the wealthy will bring them more money, and in the short run, they will be correct.
This is where it all falls apart.
The same Democrat politicians and extreme left media are today making the claim that raising tax on the middle class, would be economic disaster and less government income would be had.
So on which side of the Laffer curve are we? We cannot be on both. Either more tax is more revenue with a decent economy and more ability for government investment, or more tax is less revenue and a terrible economy. It cannot be both. Yet the Democrats freely admit that taxing the middle class will ruin the economy. These same leftists often point out the increasing separation in wealth between the rich and poor to justify the taxes, rarely noting the indirect economic pressures that their re-distributive policies create on the poor. The reality is that a good economy has guaranteed for nearly a century that America’s poor, are some of the wealthiest poor people in the world. It isn’t about the wealth of the rich, or it shouldn’t be, it should be about the wealth of the rich and the poor, and despite the propaganda, that is what capitalism has done best. Provide money for the people, from rich to poor.
The Laffer curve is a funny thing. If you want to maximize tax revenue, you need to find the balance of where business is competitive and making a strong profit, and government is taking just enough green blood out, such that the gross economy isn’t dragged below the optimized limit. Currenlty, many countries are taxing businesses at under 20%, yet the near-bankrupt Europe is far higher. China is right at 20% by this table, but the laws are also written to allow many deductions. US business competes with these countries today. Business is war, and business in these countries are what we are at war with. Looking deeper into the table, the US is listed as taxing business at 40%, yet the reality is far worse. We are faced with many taxes, such that the true rate is north of 50% already - keeping in mind that we haven’t yet experienced the next 5% tax increase in the next few hours, and another percent for the affordable health care act.
This all fits together when you realize that when other countries tax business at a lower rate than the US or Europe, they are shifting the maximum income which can be gained through tax to a lower percentage level. If we tax the US more, and other countries tax less, their competitiveness is increased, and ours is reduced. Laffer teaches that less tax revenue for the government is a guaranteed result of a tax hike after some optimized yet unknown percentage rate, and international competition in general means that the magic point at which less government revenue is realized, is guaranteed to have shifted to a lower percentage.
Now this whole subject is way to complicated for most people, and most won’t spend more than a minute or two even thinking about it, it is key to understanding what they are voting for. Unfortunately, it literally hurts their stupid little uneducated brains, but they are not the readers of this blog.
Many economists have spent time trying to calculate the peak government revenue point (shape of the Laffer curve), but the subject is as elusive as moisture and condensation in a climate model. My impression is that the widely differing results are more based on author belief than in true accuracy. Still, it is my opinion that you can look at the successes of other countries and spot which tax levels are working, and which are not. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of noise in the data created by individual political and resource situations that allows plenty of obfuscatory argument for any direction you want to go so there are no solid answers. A low tax in a country like Somalia, cannot correct the insane government situation which destabilizes any business viability. A high tax on a country like Saudi Arabia, is equally confused by the massive oil reserves, they have a 20% rate though.
So, since I have declared a true calculation all but impossible, I will tell you my belief of where we sit on the curve. If the US government cut taxes on business income in half, halved the capital gains tax, reduced some of the stupid employment laws and the unreasonable environmental controls, slash the IRS code and filing requirements, we would see a massive influx of international business looking for a politically stable ground to put their headquarters. We could double the size of America’s economy in very short order, putting nearly everyone who wanted a job to work. Such a move would take the world by complete surprise and again, companies would compete for workers and America’s poor would stay near the top of the world in wealth. There would be a huge influx of cash from the rest of the world that over twenty years could eliminate our National Debt- except that politicians would have their hands in the cookie jar. More than that, it would again allow America the economic power to lead the world toward the freedom and health that they all deserve. If it were done suddenly, there would absolutely be a huge drop in revenue in the first few years though, just as a huge tax hike creates more revenue in the short term, yet could kill the economy in a decade.
Even if you disagree, the thinking person should not forget that more tax does not necessarily equate to more revenue.
Liberals are in a froth over a new gun ban on semi-automatic rifles (fire once per trigger pull). While these are powerful and dangerous weapons, I flatly don’t believe this new ban will have any impact at all on violent crime. Like so many things from the unbiased media, I cannot see any logical path that achieves their stated intent of reducing public harm. A new regulation based on banning of one completely-fake classification of gun, can’t do much when there are so many smaller, faster, and more easily concealed weapons. Yes, the primary design purpose of an “assault weapon” is killing, but it is also the primary purpose of any pistol ever made. In reasonably practiced hands, pistols have more potential to be dangerous to the general public, just because of their size.
Sure you can ban “clips” or “high-capacity” magazines, but there are so many already available, how would that stop a crazy person from purchasing them? Of course it won’t. Small magazines might limit the number of people killed in one of those rampage style slaughters, but I doubt it actually would. Motivated people are smart enough to find a way. Mass injury is actually done quite effectively with knives in China, because gun ownership is not allowed and civilians are often too impoverished by the communist system to actually purchase an illegal gun. Tax the ammo is another “solution” offered, and all you do is make it expensive for good people to shoot and for the insane to accomplish the same thing.
There is another relevant secret in America, which is rarely reported by the unbiased media, our jails are full of people who suffer from psychological problems. I’m not just talking about criminal murderers, but everything in the spectrum of the low-functioning mind. From dimwits to violent outbursts to thieves to killers, the jails are a catch-all for people who cannot “think” of a better solution to their lives. Our jails have replaced our otherwise rudimentary mental health system, and today America imprisons more people than any other nation. Oddly enough, it is usually conservatives who primarily support this draconian system.
Yet our crime rates are still high. To me, it is an example of another government solution, which doesn’t really work.
Americans have a lot of money or at least that is what the world tells us. All of us can purchase an item for $1000 — if we really want it. We are not an island, can own boats and planes, and can travel on the ocean without restriction. Travel across a border is as easy as finding a vehicle. What would happen if we banned all guns in the US, not just a fabricated class of “assault weapons”? Would that stop criminals and gangs from owning weapons? Would that law stop anyone with intent, from finding a gun and taking revenge? I don’t think so, I think a complete gun ban would generally empower those with criminal intent, because they know that the victim is likely defenseless. Like the control aspect that psychologists say drives a rapist, a full ban probably even encourages some types of defective personalities to be violent.
We should never forget that despite their best intentions, the typical role of the police is not to protect you. They usually investigate, and subsequently ruin the life of whomever they decide did something wrong, well after the event actually occurred. Evidence of crime is perception based, so the rule of law is far more flexible than people in general typically grasp. The protection aspect of the police is therefore primarily driven by fear of their power. In practice, it is actually up to you to protect yourself. People of all viewpoints often make the same mistakes on this and demand more severe punishment to maximize an already frightening deterrent, without considering what sort of people actually violate the rules. The point is that when someone makes the decision that they have nothing left to live for, or to lesser extent that they want to commit an illegal act which they will get away with, the police and law for that matter become completely moot.
Do you need an “assault weapon” to protect yourself from what is essentially a person bent on kamakazi attack? Nope, any gun will do the same.
Will banning “assault weapons” protect our defenseless from attack? Nope.
Will a ban reduce the danger of the attacks? Nope, not according to the data.
Is it ok for everyone to carry a weapon? Nope.
This is the point where every article tells you that it is a “complex issue” and that lawmakers will be working on the solution. Trust me, their solution will be nothing but more government spending and crap. A useless weapons ban, with useless people to enforce it, etc… The NRA issued a statement regarding the recent murders, which while mostly reasonable, was flatly stupid in its solution. We cannot afford to place full time police in every school when we already overspend the government budget by stupidly large margins.
However, we do have teachers who are apparently willing to throw their bodies between guns and our children. We know that teachers are generally people who would never intentionally harm our most valuable assets, and they already protect them all day long. The leftists insist, against all forms of logic, that these same people remain unarmed. Amazingly, the left-leaning politicians further demand that all schools are gun-free zones, which of course applies only to law abiding citizens, including teachers and administrators. The situation is now obviously stupid to the point were it is dangerous, yet the same leftists react by demanding “gun bans”. How many times do you stick your finger in the empty light socket before you realize it is on?
It is obvious that America needs a proper mental health care system, as well as protection for our schools and public areas. Since a mental health system is more than a slow moving object, I demand reasonable and proper correction of the predictable outcome of the no-guns-at-school laws. I demand that an absolute minimum of two, trained first responder, concealed carry, teachers/administrators are on property at all times. I demand that my state-educated children are protected by armed and vetted “good guys”, whom we already pay for, at all times.
In my opinion, this is no longer a negotiable issue. When they are home, my children are protected by numerous child-safe firearms. Both they and you are safer from harm where I am sitting, than at my son’s elementary school, and that is a completely unacceptable situation. Even if the leftist media succeeds in creating support for a ban of all weapons including sharpened chopsticks, I demand the same thing. Gun-free policy has made the schools, stadiums and theaters the targets of choice, because everywhere else in America is personally dangerous to the untreated psychopaths who snap and wish to maximize law abiding citizen’s anguish.
Do what you will with gun bans, but remember that until we do something reasonable to physically “defend” our children, they are nothing more than low-hanging meat-targets for the insane.
Thanks to some very hard working bloggers and readers who care at WUWT, the IPCC second order draft has been released. Steig 09 appears to be much less prominently referenced in the second order draft than in the zero order which is still too often. I take it as an indication that some people have actually figured out that S09 was not in any way accurate. Still, in the Second order draft, the IPCC is reporting warming values so high that they are not supported by either the S09 paper or the O’Donnell correction.
From Chapter 5 – Information from Paleoclimate Archives:
Currently there is no compelling observational evidence for a robust CO2-induced polar amplification in
Antarctica. Whereas the Antarctic Peninsula is experiencing one of the strongest regional warming trends
(0.5°C decade–1 over the past 50 years), almost twice that of the global mean temperature, zonal mean
Antarctic surface warming has been modest at 0.1°C per decade over the same time period (O’Donnell et al.,
2010; Steig et al., 2009). West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide borehole measurements indicate warming
of 0.8°C per decade during the last two decades (Orsi et al., 2012), but it remains unclear if this trend
represents long term polar amplification, or is within the range of regional decadal variability (see also AR5
Chapter 2). Polar amplification in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica is virtually absent in the transient
CMIP5 RCP4.5 future simulations (see Chapter 12).
Below are the actual numbers from Steig (far right column) and O’Donnell’s two methods E-W and RLS in the center and left column. At 0.1C/decade for the continent, the IPCC is reporting approximately 2X the actual Antarctic trend measured by the skeptic-leaning “thermometers”. It is also right at the farthest edge of the 95% margin of error threshold for the continental Eigenweighted calculation (0.4+/- 0.06). The peninsula was reported too low by S09 as we have long discussed, but in O10 some regions do reach 0.5C/decade (again according to the thermomters) but the peninsula regional average is only 0.35 +/- 0.11. Therefore the IPCC reporting 0.5C/Decade for the peninsula is completely outside the margin of error for both papers. Not surprisingly to those of us who spend time reading climate science and IPCC UN politics, the reported values fail in the alarmist direction.
Region
RLS C/Dec
E-W C/Dec
S09 C/Dec
Continent
0.06 ± 0.08
0.04 ± 0.06
0.12 ± 0.09
East Antarctica
0.03 ± 0.09
0.02 ± 0.07
0.10 ± 0.10
West Antarctica
0.10 ± 0.09
0.06 ± 0.07
0.20 ± 0.09
Peninsula
0.35 ± 0.11
0.32 ± 0.09
0.13 ± 0.05
.
It is really unfortunate that they have chosen to report the Orsi borehole mathmagic as though it were a thermometer, but this is the paleoscience chapter so they need to put something in. That paper claimed a 0.8C/decade warming in the last two decades. Readers will recall that this was the paper which Steig famously claimed “proved” O’Donnell was wrong. Besides the whole field of borehole thermometery being ridiculous, it seems to me that the 0.8C/decade value is completely outside the realm of any possibility. I write that because it is 13 times the continental average and were the trend real, nearby thermometers would have obviously detected it.
I don’t know folks, it doesn’t look like the world of Climate ever changes. Maybe they will get it right in a few more drafts.
What will we do when the US runs out of money? A few months ago it seemed that the American public may actually grasp the size of the numerical problem, but the elections revealed that people in bulk are not capable of basic math. It only takes the most cursory of reviews to understand that increased taxes will not even dent the overspending, yet somehow that is not a problem. Unfortunately, it takes a slightly larger intellect to understand that more taxes do not always equate to more revenue. It takes still more for people to understand that top-loading the wealthy, dramatically affects the poor.
For myself, as a business owner, it is difficult for me to understand how people think our current situation ‘might’ be ok. It clearly is not, and more of the same will simply destroy our future, as well as that of our children. After this past election, I’m expecting future generations to experience tremendous difficulties in America as well as the world. It doesn’t take much historic review to see where liberal cradle-to-grave policies will take us. There is nothing wrong with wanting to give people everything, except that we require them to create in order to be able to give it. When you incentivize people to stay home and not work, that is exactly what you get.
See, the basic problem with government control of populations is that the people making the rules, don’t focus on the incentives they create. They never will and that is why less government is nearly always beneficial. If you make a rule that allows life-sustaining payment for extended unemployment, the people are incentivized to remain unemployed. Yes, some will seek jobs, but many times they chose unemployment as a reasonable and understandable alternative. In the past two years, I have seen dozens of examples of people who turned down employment in favor of government checks. When you allow “permanent disability” to mean anything from a broken back to emotional harm, a lot of people are suddenly incented to experience serious emotional harm! Duh.. Disability claims have absolutely skyrocketed in recent years and people who really qualify are being left off the list in favor of those who should not. It has been a common theme of this blog that groups of people incentivized to a certain path, are numerically biased to that path. It is no different than the fake Mannian math which preferentially choses data to create hockey sticks. If you bias the population, you skew the “average” result toward the bias.
But tax hikes are still the solution to insane overspending…
Just a little more from the “rich”.
The numbers don’t add up, and worse yet, they are not even close! So…… When a tiny little country like Greece, with less per-capita debt than the US, economically collapses and sends shudders through the global economy, what will the world do when the US does something far worse? I can’t even imagine what it will be like, and at the same time, after this election, I can’t even imagine how we will manage to avoid it.
While the liberals in America make the false argument that the rich don’t pay their “fare share”, whatever that is, it is business owners who are actually being targeted. Of course the truly rich politicians won’t tell you that. When real wages are dropping across the country and a minimum wage job draws a thousand applicants, does it really make any sense to tax business further? Liberals tax cigarettes because they say they want less of them. Obama taxes the rich because he believes that redistribution is the key to happiness. This government has not enacted one single pro-business reform in the last 4 years and we are reaping the benefits in spades. Guess what that means for the workers wages a company hires when high unemployment creates an oversupply of qualified candidates?
In the past decades, regulations and costs have been added to business operations. Business owners have continually pointed out the consequences and are regularly ignored or demonized in return. Higher electric cost, higher compliance cost, higher reporting requirements, hundred page tax filings, higher employment compliance costs, communication taxes, gas taxes, border crossing taxes, foreign business taxes……on and on. These are all added costs. These have continued to increase over the past 20 years, the result has been a herkey-jerkey decrease in real income for the middle class and poor in America. Just like every socialist country in the world, the population is generally poorer, and the separation between those with money and those without is generally larger. Of course the media blames corporate greed rather than the obvious governmental problem.
And on we go, down the same stupid path.
This time though, is very different than any other in history. America holds a huge fraction of the wealth of this planet. An enormous amount of business is controlled by this country, yet these American customers of the globe are about to go flat broke. No amount of tax increase on the wealthy can even dent the over 1 trillion per year deficit. In fact, it is my contention that a further tax increase will result in a reduced net revenue. Of course you have to adjust for inflation and you have to estimate GDP with and without the tax. A second method, which is far easier to understand, is to simply calculate what a manufacturing business would have do to react to higher taxes!
Unlike the fake government economics, business actually has to live within their budget or they go broke. In the current banking environment, often there is literally zero backup.
Below are a hundred individual numbers. 10 rows of 10 representing the income of a 10 million dollar fictitious S corporation manufacturing company.
Twenty five percent of the income goes to pay employees including the company contribution to federal taxes.
67890
1234567890
1234567890
1234567890
Five percent goes to employee benefits.
1234567890
1234567890
1234567890
Five percent goes to material transport.
67890
1234567890
1234567890
Five percent goes to various utilities, insurance, supplies and materials which support operations
1234567890
1234567890
Two percent more is invested in commissions and sales activities leaving about 18 percent profit after every possible writeoff has been taken. This is the money reported on an S corporations owners personal tax return as income. One point eight million dollars.
34567890
1234567890
Currently the Federal government taxes this money at 35% and the state of Michigan taxes it at 5%. Then there are various property taxes and fees which must be paid so the effective rate is about 45% on income.
1234567890
So 10 percent is left to invest in growth, savings and profit for distribution. If the company doesn’t invest in growth, it will die.
The company above invests 5% into growth leaving 5 percent for the owners to distribute or save for a less productive time.
12345
Now in a 10 million dollar company, that 5 percent represents 500,000 dollars which is not an insubstantial amount of money. Except that that 10 million dollar company burns through an average of about 40,000 dollars for every weekday it exists, so 500K isn’t much of a cushion for operations. The federal government sees that 18 percent profit as personal income of course, and taxes it as though the owners were professional hockey players who actually took home 1.8 million dollars.
Today these owners are being asked to pay their “fare share” and are looking at a 5% tax hike along with a massive increase in health care costs, as well as increased capital gains tax which will massively limit investment opportunity.
So now assume that the federal portion of our hypothetical company’s taxes went from 35% to 40% as is currently proposed. Then we are looking at about a 50% rate of taxation. If you are an investor in the company who contributes less than 500 hours of work per year, your rate goes up an additional 3.8% from Obamacare, but we will assume you are an active partner and we will ignore the projected twenty to forty percent increase in health care costs.
After tax, you have then:
123456789
Or 9 percent to spare from your 10 million dollar company.
If you invest 5% as before, you only have:
1234
Four percent left from your nice 10 million dollar manufacturing company that just paid 900,000 in taxes. That is actually 20% less take-home income after tax from a 5% increase. What’s more is that your company just paid the federal government 900,000 dollars instead of a measley 800,000, while retaining 400,000 for the owners to either save or distribute. Over two times the money you can actually spend on growth or personal profit is paid in tax.
Something is going to have to give, and my guess is that it won’t be the liberals. After the economy gets worse, they will just blame something else and find a new way to attack business. The media has completely brainwashed the public into believing that this tax hike is about ‘increased revenue’ and paying your fair share, when the propaganda has literally zero basis in reality.
Now while this example does not represent my company, this is a very typical scenario for a manufacturing firm in the United States. Just to add a little more “real world” flavor to the discussion, one of our largest competitors just got bought out by a Taiwanese company. Of course Taiwan only taxes their corporations at 17 percent so it is no surprise to see American business being bought out. This Taiwanese company will manufacture at its own plant and charge the maximum amount of cost to the American branch to limit US tax. Even a mental midget can guess what Obama’s expansion of that tax differential means for American competitiveness with Taiwan in a global economy.
In my case the numbers have worked out such that I will pay 4 times more in taxes to the various United States Governments than my personal take home income in 2012. Not 40% tax but 400%.
The general public is completely ignorant of these things. Consider for a moment though what a business must do to react to this massive cost increase. In our case, price hikes are not possible as it is a global economy, so the cash will have to come from somewhere else in the company. Benefits, pay, number of employees, investment, etc… In the end, investment and growth will necessarily suffer as both our company and our customers have less purchasing power. It is absolutely clear that both the government and employees will actually receive less money from us than they would have in the long run.
If you are an employee in private industry, you will likely continue to watch the un-reported inflation of prices rise faster than your check. This isn’t corporate greed, as the idiots on MSNBC would tell you, it represents the cold fact that evil business owners will have less money to pay out. So when you are asking your boss for a raise in the coming years, don’t be surprised if his answer is – go get it from Uncle Sam.
Another deer season gone, no luck for me. This time I did see several doe and maybe a spike buck in the morning of the first day but it was too dark to tell. Camp is a special place and I have a few minutes so here are some of my favorite images and videos from camp.
First a quick 360 video of the cabin:
Then we have the second of two deer taken by one of the camp owners. A very nice 10 point which weighed 180 lbs dressed.
A typical gourmet dinner at camp:
Deer warning sign explaining the rules of the woods in plain English:
Gorgeous shot of lake Superior Beach at the mouth of the two-heart river. Yes it was cold!!
This is a short video of the aftermath of a huge forest fire which burned 33 sq miles this summer. None of the trees in this video are alive. Even in the most distant background, they are simply cooked at their bases with dead needles on the trees. The logging companies have come in and cut most of the useful standing wood before the beetles moved in. Lots of cabins were destroyed but fortunately the fire was a substantial distance from our cabin.
As always, the trip was an excellent break from the world with plenty of laughing and relaxation for everyone. Well….except the deers!
Gone hunting for invisible deer again. It is climategate season!! The week will probably end with nothing new (including deer-s) but the UK police managed to leak (publish) that nobody involved in Climategate could be prosecuted after three years.
Hopefully, the boys/(manly girls) aren’t so eager for recognition that they fall into that trap. There are always ways to prosecute. Was the second release really not a second alleged violation? Is there really no other way to prosecute? I don’t know UK law but breaking and entering, theft of personal property, copyright, illegal accessing of national security data, who knows!? The rule is, if you have done something difficult to those who make the rules, you have broken whatever rule they can think of. Just another reason to stay away from leftism.
Be smart instead!
Anyway, if I see bambi, I’m taping some antlers on his fuzzy head and shooting them back off! I will be back in a week.
The media complain that Blogs are too powerful for their own good, but when a story of serious consequence has negative political implications to the left, the media reactions are universal. Ignore it!
This time they have gone too far.
I wouldn’t vote for anyone involved in this situation no matter which party they were affiliated with. The ex-Seals, you know the dead ones, apparently broke their orders to go and save the incessant calls for help in Benghazi. Oh, you haven’t heard yet? That is because Fox news is the only major outlet covering it – even hours after it was released.
