I expect there will be cases of fraud and abuse. But I would be surprised and outraged if the government doesn't have auditors checking on a statistically relevant sampling of the vouchers. If you have evidence of widespread fraud, I'm interested. Your unsubstantiated opinion that widespread fraud has occurred? Not interested.
>> That's not the same as enery cost of the vehicle. A lot of carbon is used in steel and plastic production as well.
That carbon is also added to the footprint of the vehicle. Embodied energy and carbon emissions track pretty closely, and will continue to do so until we make a concerted effort to use less carbon-intensive energy sources.
>> I think the gambit worked too. It got you to admit that oil is going to be less valuable in ten years. That indicates just by itself that it is worth using the oil now rather than in ten years when it is less valuable.
You think yourself too clever. The reason oil will be less desirable in ten years is the same reason it's going to be more valuable. Without a concerted effort to ditch the stuff, demand will only increase, and the best case scenario ten years out is that supply is only slightly lower than it is today.
That seems to be the opposite of what you're saying, which is "burn it all before future generations (of ten years hence?) can squander it on less useful activities." Less useful than pouring it through a 14MPG clunker? The average car today will extract twice as much utility from it. The car of 2019, probably three times, as measured in miles, of course. Is that fact reflected at all in the notions of value and opportunity cost that you've been pushing?
>> Plus when you consider time value of money (namely, that money or some valuable durable asset is more valuable if you have it now rather than the same amount, adjusted for inflation, at some future time), you get two reasons to use oil now rather than waiting for some future time when you don't need the oil as much.
The time value argument assumes that the economy expands indefinitely in the future. Since you're arguing for a "use it all, let God sort it out" mentality that undermines sustainability, you don't get to make that assumption.
>> Hence, my assertion that there's no distinction between the term "wanting to use oil" and "wanting the results of using oil". In reflection, this is also a trivial semantics distinction that really doesn't cannot be distinguished in any useful way.
Then I'm really not understanding. You could just as easily say that there's no distinction between "wanting to emit CO2" and "wanting the results of emitting CO2." Say I want to use my blender for a minute, and I'm plugging into an electrical system powered by coal. I might regret the CO2 emitted. I might be happy to pay five or six times as much for non-emitting solar power. I might even feel guilty enough to buy carbon offsets (they fell off the back of a truck). But that's the plug I have to plug into, and my choices are constrained to "use" or "not use". Are you trying to tell me that economics has absolutely no tools for distinguishing this situation from one where I'm running the blender and screaming, "YEAH! Screw you, eco-twits! That there is the sound of freedom!"
To any economist who is still treating the consumer's brain as a "black box", I say "u r doin it rong". Better economists than them have been applying behavioral psychology to economic choices with great effect. To say that people's choices are an utter mystery ignores just how much time economists spend asking people, "okay, why'd you do that?"
Saying that people "want to burn oil" because they burn oil in their day-to-day activities may be a meaningful tautology in economic circles. But it has little to do with the "wish" that is implied in "And oil has value only because people wish to consume it."
The simple fact that cars that get good gas mileage are valued more highly than cars that get poor mileage wou
>>>> Nor is that clunker getting CARS money, unless the dealer and the purchaser are defrauding the government. The clunked car has to have been registered and insured for a full year.
>> Fraud happens. Given the rate of depletion of federal funds, I'd say a lot of it just happened.
Numbers? Documentation? A scrap of evidence beyond "govt iz teh w4ste?"
>>>> I think that replacing the car is a much better energy investment than getting those last few miles out of it.
>> Why are you concerned about "energy investment"? I haven't seen an indication that it's a serious matter.
You were the one who brought up the carbon emitted by manufacturing new vehicles, not me.
>>>> Giving people money when the economy has seized up, in the hopes that they'll buy stuff,
>> How about give people money in the hopes that they use it? Not necessarily to buy stuff. Paying off debt or saving money is good too.
Money hoarded doesn't increase demand, which is the center of the economic trouble. Pushing paper around, paying off old debts by making the government responsible for new ones, doesn't actually make much of a difference. The recipient might feel a bit better for having less debt, or having money in the bank, but it's a weaker stimulus than simply having the government buy infrastructure projects.
>>>> People do not wish to consume oil. [...] In short, they wish for the results of oil consumption.
>> They are synonymous in economics.
In theory. Real economics happens in people's brains, not on an economist's marginal cost graphs.
In theory, you're not eating a bowl of ice cream, you're consuming the services the ice cream provides (calories, feeling of enjoyment). You're not burning the oil, you're going someplace, or having something delivered to you. But in practice, people consuming ice cream care about the fact. The services cannot be separated from the delivery mechanism. With oil consumption, most people view the trip taken as the whole point. They'd rather not be burning the oil, and would be happy if they were burning it half as fast, or a tenth as fast, or not at all, so long as it didn't affect the service they actually sought.
>>>> More to the point, who cares why oil "has value"? It does, so we're running out of a valuable resource. If we want oil's services in the future, we have to stop wasting it now.
>> Well, I'm not interested in saving oil now so we can have a oil-based economy in say 2300. My view, this valuable resource is valuable only because we use it. So use it. And when it becomes costly enough that it is no longer desirable for transportation, then use something else.
2300? More like "no longer desirable" by 2020, and "downright impossible" by 2050. Unless we collapse into cannibalism for a couple of centuries, oil isn't going to be a meaningful energy source by 2300. Or 2200. Or 2100. You chose a number you knew to be patently bogus, to try to make current conservation efforts look stupid.
>>>> is as much a necessity today as a phone line was back in the 1980s
>> Yes, and having a phone line for your house - with your own phone number - would have been considered a fantasy luxury only forty years before that. Do you sense a pattern, here?
I sense a pattern of you ignoring my point. My point is, have you ever tried hunting for a job, when you didn't have a phone number where an employer could reach you to schedule an interview? For homeless people, or for people who have had services shut off, this is a real barrier to entering the job market. Back when "your own phone number" was a luxury, not having one wasn't a barrier to full participation in society. Now Internet access is rapidly approaching the point where it's a necessity as well.
As lifestyles ratchet up, it doesn't just increase the amount of stuff you can buy. It also increases the amount of stuff you *have* to buy in order to participate in modern society.
>>>> as the economy has expanded, the wealthy have taken the lion's share of the increase
>> Also an eternal state of affairs: the people who risk money to grow something usually are the ones that get the most visible return on that investment.
No, this is just a fairy tale you tell yourself to justify a status quo that is bad for 90% of the population, but good for the sort of people who contribute money to the Heritage Foundation. We are NOT an "eternal state of affairs." We're not talking about an eternal state of affairs. We're talking about a change in the economy that began in the early 1980s, slowed down during the Clinton years, and then went crazy during the Bush years.
From the post-war years through the 1980s, the economy expanded at a steady clip. The rich got richer. The poor got richer. The middle class got richer. The benefits of that increased prosperity were spread broadly, and the proportion of wealth given to each group remained relatively steady. Rising tides really did lift all boats.
Then something happened in the 1980s that broke that contract. It wasn't that the wealthy suddenly got more innovative, or started taking more bold, entrepreneurial, economy-growing risks. It was that labor unions got pulverized, taxes for the rich were scaled back, and jobs started moving overseas to keep labor costs down. All these things were very good for the top 1% of earners, okay for the top 10%, and absolutely destructive for everyone else. And not a damned one of those things constitutes a true innovation that justifies the new torrent of wealth for the wealthy. Buying legislation? Paying people less? Brilliant! Give that innovator a bag of money!
Just as an aside, the public option itself would cost very little. If anything, it would save the economy as a whole money, by forcing private plans to become more competitive. The big money is spent subsidizing the plans of those who currently cannot afford to pay insurance premiums, and those subsidies will be paid to the plan of the person's choice, whether public or private. These are separate issues. I think that trillions of dollars over the course of decades is a worthwhile investment, if it means a healthier and more productive population.
>> Making cars generates carbon too. And it's not clear to me whether most of the cars traded either way will be driven a lot. For example, a clunker pulled out of the junkyard for a couple of days isn't generating carbon emissions.
Nor is that clunker getting CARS money, unless the dealer and the purchaser are defrauding the government. The clunked car has to have been registered and insured for a full year.
The studies I've found estimate that the energy costs of a new car range from 1/10th to 1/4th the amount of energy spent driving it into the ground. Most of the variation there is because some cars use a hell of a lot more gas than others, not differences in manufacturing. So if the trade-in has, say, 15,000 miles left on it, the energy it will use over the rest of its life is about how much energy is needed to make its replacement car. I think that replacing the car is a much better energy investment than getting those last few miles out of it.
>> Even then, why break windows to simulate economic activity when you can do some nondestructive variant that does the same thing on the same time scales (eg, cutting taxes temporarily).
Giving people money when the economy has seized up, in the hopes that they'll buy stuff, isn't going to work as well as simply buying stuff. Anytime you disburse money directly, there's a good chance the recipient is going to hoard the money rather than spending it. As I said, fear of spending, and the resulting lack of demand, is the short-term cause of the recession.
>> If someone is driving the vehicle, then it is very likely that they get more wealth out of use of the vehicle than they lose from burning gas. As another example, you eat food. That's destroying wealth. Why haven't you starved yourself to death yet? The reason is that you produce much more wealth alive than you consume through food and other means. The same argument holds for autos that people actually drive.
You make an excellent argument for a vegetarian lifestyle. If you can get the same amount of productive activity by eating food that costs about 1/10th the resources of a regular lifestyle, you're making the overall economy more productive. CARS is just a way to put more of our fleet on a low-meat diet.
Given the number of cars on the road (several million sold each year during good years) compared to the number of clunkers being destroyed by the program (a few hundred thousand), and given that none of the clunked cars get more than 17 mpg, I doubt the program is going to seriously raise the price of beater cars. It will have a much stronger effect on the market for very inefficient vehicles, which will mean that fewer poor people will be stuck with cars that are constantly sucking money from their wallets.
>> And oil has value only because people wish to consume it.
People do not wish to consume oil. Nobody wakes up today and asks, "How can I make myself happier by burning dead dinosaurs?" They wish to get from place to place. They wish for warm homes. In short, they wish for the results of oil consumption. It will be much harder to get those results if we squander it all to nudge a handful of gas-guzzlers a few miles at a time.
More to the point, who cares why oil "has value"? It does, so we're running out of a valuable resource. If we want oil's services in the future, we have to stop wasting it now.
How did they raise the price to compensate? Not everyone coming in to buy a car has a qualifying beater car to trade in, and I doubt sellers have a separate price sticker for non-CARS purchases. Further, if a seller did this, they'd lose a lot of business to sellers who hadn't.
Do you have any evidence that auto prices went up around the time the program started?
Of course it will lower carbon emissions. The cars being traded in are, on average, a good deal more efficient than the ones being taken off the road. I'd love to see the convoluted counterargument that trumps that logic. The only question is, by how much?
And yes, when everyone is afraid to spend money, and everybody is going out of business because everyone is afraid to spend money, then breaking a few windows to force some economic activity isn't a bad idea.
Though in this case, the things getting broken are actually wealth-destroying oil-wasters. Isn't oil wealth as well? I've heard it called "black gold" and "texas tea", and it's been known to make ordinary backwoods poachers into wealthy residents of Beverly Hills.
One more thing: Try to go out and buy a new house today that would be average size for 1969. Not a condo. A house. You know, free-standing structure with a garage and a swing on the front porch.
My guess is, you can't find one. They pretty much have stopped building them, not because there is no demand for them, but because banks and real estate developers want big, shoddily-made houses that won't outlast their depreciation schedule. The bank wants a big house so it can loan more money. It would much rather be getting a $1700 check from you every month than a $900 one. The developer wants the house to be big, for obvious reasons. The real estate agent wants it to be big, because the paperwork on a $500K house is exactly the same as the paperwork for a $150K house (yet the agent is paid on a percentage).
There should be a huge demand for smaller houses. Yet I haven't seen anybody (outside of a handful of intentional communities) building good, durable, affordable housing for the mass market.
Big houses are less an "increase in the standard of living" and more a tool for the oppression and exploitation of the lower classes by the wealthy.
Too true. Miscalculations have disastrous consequences. It's fortunate that such miscalculations don't happen in the private sector./me willfully ignores the last eight years.
Again, you avoid the main point: If it takes two full-time wage earners to support a comparably middle-class lifestyle, where it took only one in the 1960s, that's a very real way in which we are not better off.
And why does it take double the work to support a middle-class lifestyle? Rising expectations play a small factor. The greater reason is that all the newfound abundance of our more productive economy has been siphoned off by a greedy few.
The broader point stands: as the economy has expanded, the wealthy have taken the lion's share of the increase. They couldn't have done that, except that Reagonomics allowed the wealthy to unilaterally rewrite the pie-divvying algorithm.
Since we ordinary folk are vastly better off than we were 30 years ago -- or so you claim -- then the wealthy (who have seen their incomes skyrocket relative to the rest of us) must be truly living blessed lives, wealth beyond the dreams of Midas himself.
But the moment anyone suggests taking even a bit of that wealth and putting it back in the hands of the poor, conservatives start screaming about socialism, and how it will destroy the economy.
You also ignore that, as these new artifacts of wealth become more common, it becomes assumed that you have them. The raised expectations are hard on people who can't meet them. An Internet connection is as much a necessity today as a phone line was back in the 1980s. So arguably life has only gotten harder for people who have neither.
I think government systems like Britain's use Quality Adjusted Life Years as their metric for determining which treatments are approved. It does lead to all sorts of tricky questions, like how many years of life with a disability like blindness worth in non-disabled years? How many years of life without a leg is a year of life with a leg worth?
Sometimes their government gets it wrong, or their decision outrages a certain group. But the point is, you're right. These decisions have to be made, and are already being made. But right now, it's made entirely on the basis of, "how much are you willing and able to pay?" If you're rich enough, you can drop millions on treatments to grant you a few more years. If you're too poor, and can't pay $20K for care that might let you live 30 more years, tough.
The cars being clunked are not "perfectly usable." Maybe some of them had plenty of miles left on them. But those were very inefficient miles, and it isn't a bad idea to ensure that they not get driven. The clunkers were a liability, and would be even more so once the economy recovers and gas prices shoot up again.
In other words, the oil beneath our feet is also wealth, and inefficient cars literally burn through that wealth.
The energy consumed making a Prius is probably 1/5th to 1/4th the amount of energy it uses in its lifetime.
(Citation? I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours.)
Also, energy costs of manufactured goods aren't laws of nature. Mining, forging, assembling, etc., could all use less energy than they do today. We should be putting the whole economy on an energy diet.
You've already been told that you're wrong twice. No need for me to belabor the point. No, I'm just chiming in to tell you how much I'm enjoying the fact.
Building a new car burns-up the equivalent of 50,000 miles worth of gasoline (2000 gallons).
The Slate article quotes 113M BTUs to manufacture a Prius, or 911 gallons worth of gas. In driving, that amount of energy would get you about 40,000 miles. But those are Prius miles, not Escalade miles or Hummer miles.
If we're going to start measuring in "miles worth of gasoline," then we're definitely going to want to build Hummers instead of Priuses. I'll bet you could build a Hummer for 10,000 miles worth of gasoline.
Wait wait wait. You think that, if you drop from a $30/hr job to an $8/hr job, a tax cut is going to make up the difference?
Let's ignore the fact that if you're making near minimum wage, chances are you're already not paying much of anything in taxes. Your math is still bogus.
What they should do is raise taxes and fund government programs targeted towards easing the misery of the poor. THAT will actually help a minimum wage earner.
The various Prius models have been around since 2001. I'm sure we have enough data on failure rates to make some decent extrapolations.
Calculating BTUs doesn't require particularly deep majicks either. Every gallon of gas has a certain amount of stored thermal energy. You burn a gallon of gas, you use that many BTUs.
You see, there's rational skepticism, and then there's "nobody in the world can possibly know anything about anything." Guess which one you're praciticing?
What is your brother doing with that $11/hr? Raising a family? Putting away enough money for retirement? Does he have health insurance?
Unless the answer to those questions are "yes, yes, yes, and yes," then your choice of the word "surviving" is apt.
In the world you're pushing toward, there will be a few very wealthy people, and an entire economy operated primarily by "survivors", but whose output is precisely tuned to fulfill the whims of the wealthy few.
When you compare it to that alternative, "spread the wealth" socialism doesn't sound half bad.
I like your mantra. Does it also apply to people who can't afford education, health care, or home ownership? Are you okay with having an economy that runs on the backs of people who, by your definition, are "not free?"
Do you support a living wage law, so that every employed person can achieve "economic freedom?"
14M cars were scrapped in 2000. The 200,000 or so cars under the Clunker program isn't going to have a huge effect on used car prices.
The only thing I can really tell from your statspew is that you really don't like Priuses, and that your current car doesn't come close to qualifying under Clunker anyhow. Any car that did get clunked in favor of a 60MPG car would save over 8700 gallons of gas over 200K miles. So why are you bringing it up exactly?
Please. Go Galt. I'd happily grant you and yours one state and a "Get out of the U.S. free" card. Just please take Glenn Beck with you.
Depends on where you live. If you're generating in the afternoon, when energy usage is at its peak, you're creating more valuable energy than you're using. In some areas, they charge extra for peak power. But homeowners probably trade one kwh of peak energy generation for a credit against the less valuable kwh they used later that evening. Further, peak power is more valuable even where the rates aren't structured to reflect the fact.
Peak power means that every source of generating capacity is already running near max, and adding to that capacity requires additional capital outlay. IOW, the homeowner is saving the power company capital costs.
Last point: Energy generated by a homeowner doesn't need big, expensive transmission lines. Most likely, someone will use the power before it makes it out of the neighborhood. If anything, they're reducing the burden on transmission lines.
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I expect there will be cases of fraud and abuse. But I would be surprised and outraged if the government doesn't have auditors checking on a statistically relevant sampling of the vouchers. If you have evidence of widespread fraud, I'm interested. Your unsubstantiated opinion that widespread fraud has occurred? Not interested.
>> That's not the same as enery cost of the vehicle. A lot of carbon is used in steel and plastic production as well.
That carbon is also added to the footprint of the vehicle. Embodied energy and carbon emissions track pretty closely, and will continue to do so until we make a concerted effort to use less carbon-intensive energy sources.
>> I think the gambit worked too. It got you to admit that oil is going to be less valuable in ten years. That indicates just by itself that it is worth using the oil now rather than in ten years when it is less valuable.
You think yourself too clever. The reason oil will be less desirable in ten years is the same reason it's going to be more valuable. Without a concerted effort to ditch the stuff, demand will only increase, and the best case scenario ten years out is that supply is only slightly lower than it is today.
That seems to be the opposite of what you're saying, which is "burn it all before future generations (of ten years hence?) can squander it on less useful activities." Less useful than pouring it through a 14MPG clunker? The average car today will extract twice as much utility from it. The car of 2019, probably three times, as measured in miles, of course. Is that fact reflected at all in the notions of value and opportunity cost that you've been pushing?
>> Plus when you consider time value of money (namely, that money or some valuable durable asset is more valuable if you have it now rather than the same amount, adjusted for inflation, at some future time), you get two reasons to use oil now rather than waiting for some future time when you don't need the oil as much.
The time value argument assumes that the economy expands indefinitely in the future. Since you're arguing for a "use it all, let God sort it out" mentality that undermines sustainability, you don't get to make that assumption.
>> Hence, my assertion that there's no distinction between the term "wanting to use oil" and "wanting the results of using oil". In reflection, this is also a trivial semantics distinction that really doesn't cannot be distinguished in any useful way.
Then I'm really not understanding. You could just as easily say that there's no distinction between "wanting to emit CO2" and "wanting the results of emitting CO2." Say I want to use my blender for a minute, and I'm plugging into an electrical system powered by coal. I might regret the CO2 emitted. I might be happy to pay five or six times as much for non-emitting solar power. I might even feel guilty enough to buy carbon offsets (they fell off the back of a truck). But that's the plug I have to plug into, and my choices are constrained to "use" or "not use". Are you trying to tell me that economics has absolutely no tools for distinguishing this situation from one where I'm running the blender and screaming, "YEAH! Screw you, eco-twits! That there is the sound of freedom!"
To any economist who is still treating the consumer's brain as a "black box", I say "u r doin it rong". Better economists than them have been applying behavioral psychology to economic choices with great effect. To say that people's choices are an utter mystery ignores just how much time economists spend asking people, "okay, why'd you do that?"
Saying that people "want to burn oil" because they burn oil in their day-to-day activities may be a meaningful tautology in economic circles. But it has little to do with the "wish" that is implied in "And oil has value only because people wish to consume it."
The simple fact that cars that get good gas mileage are valued more highly than cars that get poor mileage wou
>>>> Nor is that clunker getting CARS money, unless the dealer and the purchaser are defrauding the government. The clunked car has to have been registered and insured for a full year.
>> Fraud happens. Given the rate of depletion of federal funds, I'd say a lot of it just happened.
Numbers? Documentation? A scrap of evidence beyond "govt iz teh w4ste?"
>>>> I think that replacing the car is a much better energy investment than getting those last few miles out of it.
>> Why are you concerned about "energy investment"? I haven't seen an indication that it's a serious matter.
You were the one who brought up the carbon emitted by manufacturing new vehicles, not me.
>>>> Giving people money when the economy has seized up, in the hopes that they'll buy stuff,
>> How about give people money in the hopes that they use it? Not necessarily to buy stuff. Paying off debt or saving money is good too.
Money hoarded doesn't increase demand, which is the center of the economic trouble. Pushing paper around, paying off old debts by making the government responsible for new ones, doesn't actually make much of a difference. The recipient might feel a bit better for having less debt, or having money in the bank, but it's a weaker stimulus than simply having the government buy infrastructure projects.
>>>> People do not wish to consume oil. [...] In short, they wish for the results of oil consumption.
>> They are synonymous in economics.
In theory. Real economics happens in people's brains, not on an economist's marginal cost graphs.
In theory, you're not eating a bowl of ice cream, you're consuming the services the ice cream provides (calories, feeling of enjoyment). You're not burning the oil, you're going someplace, or having something delivered to you. But in practice, people consuming ice cream care about the fact. The services cannot be separated from the delivery mechanism. With oil consumption, most people view the trip taken as the whole point. They'd rather not be burning the oil, and would be happy if they were burning it half as fast, or a tenth as fast, or not at all, so long as it didn't affect the service they actually sought.
>>>> More to the point, who cares why oil "has value"? It does, so we're running out of a valuable resource. If we want oil's services in the future, we have to stop wasting it now.
>> Well, I'm not interested in saving oil now so we can have a oil-based economy in say 2300. My view, this valuable resource is valuable only because we use it. So use it. And when it becomes costly enough that it is no longer desirable for transportation, then use something else.
2300? More like "no longer desirable" by 2020, and "downright impossible" by 2050. Unless we collapse into cannibalism for a couple of centuries, oil isn't going to be a meaningful energy source by 2300. Or 2200. Or 2100. You chose a number you knew to be patently bogus, to try to make current conservation efforts look stupid.
>>>> is as much a necessity today as a phone line was back in the 1980s
>> Yes, and having a phone line for your house - with your own phone number - would have been considered a fantasy luxury only forty years before that. Do you sense a pattern, here?
I sense a pattern of you ignoring my point. My point is, have you ever tried hunting for a job, when you didn't have a phone number where an employer could reach you to schedule an interview? For homeless people, or for people who have had services shut off, this is a real barrier to entering the job market. Back when "your own phone number" was a luxury, not having one wasn't a barrier to full participation in society. Now Internet access is rapidly approaching the point where it's a necessity as well.
As lifestyles ratchet up, it doesn't just increase the amount of stuff you can buy. It also increases the amount of stuff you *have* to buy in order to participate in modern society.
>>>> as the economy has expanded, the wealthy have taken the lion's share of the increase
>> Also an eternal state of affairs: the people who risk money to grow something usually are the ones that get the most visible return on that investment.
No, this is just a fairy tale you tell yourself to justify a status quo that is bad for 90% of the population, but good for the sort of people who contribute money to the Heritage Foundation. We are NOT an "eternal state of affairs." We're not talking about an eternal state of affairs. We're talking about a change in the economy that began in the early 1980s, slowed down during the Clinton years, and then went crazy during the Bush years.
From the post-war years through the 1980s, the economy expanded at a steady clip. The rich got richer. The poor got richer. The middle class got richer. The benefits of that increased prosperity were spread broadly, and the proportion of wealth given to each group remained relatively steady. Rising tides really did lift all boats.
Then something happened in the 1980s that broke that contract. It wasn't that the wealthy suddenly got more innovative, or started taking more bold, entrepreneurial, economy-growing risks. It was that labor unions got pulverized, taxes for the rich were scaled back, and jobs started moving overseas to keep labor costs down. All these things were very good for the top 1% of earners, okay for the top 10%, and absolutely destructive for everyone else. And not a damned one of those things constitutes a true innovation that justifies the new torrent of wealth for the wealthy. Buying legislation? Paying people less? Brilliant! Give that innovator a bag of money!
Just as an aside, the public option itself would cost very little. If anything, it would save the economy as a whole money, by forcing private plans to become more competitive. The big money is spent subsidizing the plans of those who currently cannot afford to pay insurance premiums, and those subsidies will be paid to the plan of the person's choice, whether public or private. These are separate issues. I think that trillions of dollars over the course of decades is a worthwhile investment, if it means a healthier and more productive population.
>> Making cars generates carbon too. And it's not clear to me whether most of the cars traded either way will be driven a lot. For example, a clunker pulled out of the junkyard for a couple of days isn't generating carbon emissions.
Nor is that clunker getting CARS money, unless the dealer and the purchaser are defrauding the government. The clunked car has to have been registered and insured for a full year.
The studies I've found estimate that the energy costs of a new car range from 1/10th to 1/4th the amount of energy spent driving it into the ground. Most of the variation there is because some cars use a hell of a lot more gas than others, not differences in manufacturing. So if the trade-in has, say, 15,000 miles left on it, the energy it will use over the rest of its life is about how much energy is needed to make its replacement car. I think that replacing the car is a much better energy investment than getting those last few miles out of it.
>> Even then, why break windows to simulate economic activity when you can do some nondestructive variant that does the same thing on the same time scales (eg, cutting taxes temporarily).
Giving people money when the economy has seized up, in the hopes that they'll buy stuff, isn't going to work as well as simply buying stuff. Anytime you disburse money directly, there's a good chance the recipient is going to hoard the money rather than spending it. As I said, fear of spending, and the resulting lack of demand, is the short-term cause of the recession.
>> If someone is driving the vehicle, then it is very likely that they get more wealth out of use of the vehicle than they lose from burning gas. As another example, you eat food. That's destroying wealth. Why haven't you starved yourself to death yet? The reason is that you produce much more wealth alive than you consume through food and other means. The same argument holds for autos that people actually drive.
You make an excellent argument for a vegetarian lifestyle. If you can get the same amount of productive activity by eating food that costs about 1/10th the resources of a regular lifestyle, you're making the overall economy more productive. CARS is just a way to put more of our fleet on a low-meat diet.
Given the number of cars on the road (several million sold each year during good years) compared to the number of clunkers being destroyed by the program (a few hundred thousand), and given that none of the clunked cars get more than 17 mpg, I doubt the program is going to seriously raise the price of beater cars. It will have a much stronger effect on the market for very inefficient vehicles, which will mean that fewer poor people will be stuck with cars that are constantly sucking money from their wallets.
>> And oil has value only because people wish to consume it.
People do not wish to consume oil. Nobody wakes up today and asks, "How can I make myself happier by burning dead dinosaurs?" They wish to get from place to place. They wish for warm homes. In short, they wish for the results of oil consumption. It will be much harder to get those results if we squander it all to nudge a handful of gas-guzzlers a few miles at a time.
More to the point, who cares why oil "has value"? It does, so we're running out of a valuable resource. If we want oil's services in the future, we have to stop wasting it now.
Yes, that's exactly the point I was trying to get across. /facepalm
How did they raise the price to compensate? Not everyone coming in to buy a car has a qualifying beater car to trade in, and I doubt sellers have a separate price sticker for non-CARS purchases. Further, if a seller did this, they'd lose a lot of business to sellers who hadn't.
Do you have any evidence that auto prices went up around the time the program started?
Citation frakking needed.
Of course it will lower carbon emissions. The cars being traded in are, on average, a good deal more efficient than the ones being taken off the road. I'd love to see the convoluted counterargument that trumps that logic. The only question is, by how much?
And yes, when everyone is afraid to spend money, and everybody is going out of business because everyone is afraid to spend money, then breaking a few windows to force some economic activity isn't a bad idea.
Though in this case, the things getting broken are actually wealth-destroying oil-wasters. Isn't oil wealth as well? I've heard it called "black gold" and "texas tea", and it's been known to make ordinary backwoods poachers into wealthy residents of Beverly Hills.
Cue the theme song.
One more thing: Try to go out and buy a new house today that would be average size for 1969. Not a condo. A house. You know, free-standing structure with a garage and a swing on the front porch.
My guess is, you can't find one. They pretty much have stopped building them, not because there is no demand for them, but because banks and real estate developers want big, shoddily-made houses that won't outlast their depreciation schedule. The bank wants a big house so it can loan more money. It would much rather be getting a $1700 check from you every month than a $900 one. The developer wants the house to be big, for obvious reasons. The real estate agent wants it to be big, because the paperwork on a $500K house is exactly the same as the paperwork for a $150K house (yet the agent is paid on a percentage).
There should be a huge demand for smaller houses. Yet I haven't seen anybody (outside of a handful of intentional communities) building good, durable, affordable housing for the mass market.
Big houses are less an "increase in the standard of living" and more a tool for the oppression and exploitation of the lower classes by the wealthy.
Yeah, I thought you'd like that last bit.
Too true. Miscalculations have disastrous consequences. It's fortunate that such miscalculations don't happen in the private sector. /me willfully ignores the last eight years.
Again, you avoid the main point: If it takes two full-time wage earners to support a comparably middle-class lifestyle, where it took only one in the 1960s, that's a very real way in which we are not better off.
And why does it take double the work to support a middle-class lifestyle? Rising expectations play a small factor. The greater reason is that all the newfound abundance of our more productive economy has been siphoned off by a greedy few.
The broader point stands: as the economy has expanded, the wealthy have taken the lion's share of the increase. They couldn't have done that, except that Reagonomics allowed the wealthy to unilaterally rewrite the pie-divvying algorithm.
Since we ordinary folk are vastly better off than we were 30 years ago -- or so you claim -- then the wealthy (who have seen their incomes skyrocket relative to the rest of us) must be truly living blessed lives, wealth beyond the dreams of Midas himself.
But the moment anyone suggests taking even a bit of that wealth and putting it back in the hands of the poor, conservatives start screaming about socialism, and how it will destroy the economy.
You also ignore that, as these new artifacts of wealth become more common, it becomes assumed that you have them. The raised expectations are hard on people who can't meet them. An Internet connection is as much a necessity today as a phone line was back in the 1980s. So arguably life has only gotten harder for people who have neither.
I think government systems like Britain's use Quality Adjusted Life Years as their metric for determining which treatments are approved. It does lead to all sorts of tricky questions, like how many years of life with a disability like blindness worth in non-disabled years? How many years of life without a leg is a year of life with a leg worth?
Sometimes their government gets it wrong, or their decision outrages a certain group. But the point is, you're right. These decisions have to be made, and are already being made. But right now, it's made entirely on the basis of, "how much are you willing and able to pay?" If you're rich enough, you can drop millions on treatments to grant you a few more years. If you're too poor, and can't pay $20K for care that might let you live 30 more years, tough.
The cars being clunked are not "perfectly usable." Maybe some of them had plenty of miles left on them. But those were very inefficient miles, and it isn't a bad idea to ensure that they not get driven. The clunkers were a liability, and would be even more so once the economy recovers and gas prices shoot up again.
In other words, the oil beneath our feet is also wealth, and inefficient cars literally burn through that wealth.
(Citation? I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours.)
Also, energy costs of manufactured goods aren't laws of nature. Mining, forging, assembling, etc., could all use less energy than they do today. We should be putting the whole economy on an energy diet.
You've already been told that you're wrong twice. No need for me to belabor the point. No, I'm just chiming in to tell you how much I'm enjoying the fact.
The Slate article quotes 113M BTUs to manufacture a Prius, or 911 gallons worth of gas. In driving, that amount of energy would get you about 40,000 miles. But those are Prius miles, not Escalade miles or Hummer miles.
If we're going to start measuring in "miles worth of gasoline," then we're definitely going to want to build Hummers instead of Priuses. I'll bet you could build a Hummer for 10,000 miles worth of gasoline.
Wait wait wait. You think that, if you drop from a $30/hr job to an $8/hr job, a tax cut is going to make up the difference?
Let's ignore the fact that if you're making near minimum wage, chances are you're already not paying much of anything in taxes. Your math is still bogus.
What they should do is raise taxes and fund government programs targeted towards easing the misery of the poor. THAT will actually help a minimum wage earner.
The various Prius models have been around since 2001. I'm sure we have enough data on failure rates to make some decent extrapolations.
Calculating BTUs doesn't require particularly deep majicks either. Every gallon of gas has a certain amount of stored thermal energy. You burn a gallon of gas, you use that many BTUs.
You see, there's rational skepticism, and then there's "nobody in the world can possibly know anything about anything." Guess which one you're praciticing?
What is your brother doing with that $11/hr? Raising a family? Putting away enough money for retirement? Does he have health insurance?
Unless the answer to those questions are "yes, yes, yes, and yes," then your choice of the word "surviving" is apt.
In the world you're pushing toward, there will be a few very wealthy people, and an entire economy operated primarily by "survivors", but whose output is precisely tuned to fulfill the whims of the wealthy few.
When you compare it to that alternative, "spread the wealth" socialism doesn't sound half bad.
Interesting that, in your world, SUVs, Mercedes, and BMWs are the same car.
Doubly interesting that the driving of such vehicles makes one a "socialite". Look up the word. It doesn't describe anybody I know.
Triply interesting that you think that you can refute a perceived trend merely by pointing to yourself as a counterexample.
I like your mantra. Does it also apply to people who can't afford education, health care, or home ownership? Are you okay with having an economy that runs on the backs of people who, by your definition, are "not free?"
Do you support a living wage law, so that every employed person can achieve "economic freedom?"
That's an empty statement. Are we talking absolute dollars? Inflation adjusted dollars? Debt as a percentage of GNP?
The last figure makes more sense than any of the others, and by that measurement, we're #27. [src]
14M cars were scrapped in 2000. The 200,000 or so cars under the Clunker program isn't going to have a huge effect on used car prices.
The only thing I can really tell from your statspew is that you really don't like Priuses, and that your current car doesn't come close to qualifying under Clunker anyhow. Any car that did get clunked in favor of a 60MPG car would save over 8700 gallons of gas over 200K miles. So why are you bringing it up exactly?
Please. Go Galt. I'd happily grant you and yours one state and a "Get out of the U.S. free" card. Just please take Glenn Beck with you.
Depends on where you live. If you're generating in the afternoon, when energy usage is at its peak, you're creating more valuable energy than you're using. In some areas, they charge extra for peak power. But homeowners probably trade one kwh of peak energy generation for a credit against the less valuable kwh they used later that evening. Further, peak power is more valuable even where the rates aren't structured to reflect the fact.
Peak power means that every source of generating capacity is already running near max, and adding to that capacity requires additional capital outlay. IOW, the homeowner is saving the power company capital costs.
Last point: Energy generated by a homeowner doesn't need big, expensive transmission lines. Most likely, someone will use the power before it makes it out of the neighborhood. If anything, they're reducing the burden on transmission lines.
True, but you're ignoring the services the customer is providing the power company. I think the PR flack should cut his losses and call it even.