A typical 1000 Megawatt coal powerplant such as the behemoth ERGs boondoggle just being completed in SE Wisconsin requires 1215 train carloads of Coal (Carbon) every day. Once burned, each carbon molocule (Atomic Weight 12) will have two Oxygen Molecules (Atomic Weight 16) attached to it and this 'refuse' to be sequestured will weigh 3.67 times as much. All else being equal, this means you would need 4459 boxcars full of carbon junk leaving the power plant. But CO2 can't easily be compressed into boxcars so it is likely the carbon will be sequestered with calcium or silicon (in rock), and weigh much more. And Shell thinks this is cheaper than solar, wind and hydropower? Have I missed April fools day or is someone playing a shell game?
All the wind power generation in Germany (the world leader) in 2007 was 38.5 TWH, or an average of 4.4 GWe (of course, it wasn't a continuous 4.4 GWe, but up and down with wind speed). That is 4.4 GWe average on 22.2 GW rated of turbines, or about 20% of installed capacity. There are 19,460 turbines in Germany for their 22 GW rated capacity.
4.4 GWe continuous could come from 3 Gen. III ABWR nuclear reactors. 3 versus 19,460. An ABWR needs to be refueled once every two years, or an average of 76 tons of fuel per year (one train car worth) per reactor.
If you had taken the time to read about the Japanese lost decade you should have realized that their problem wasn't government building roads and bridges but insolvable banks that were kept alive just as AGI, Citi and others are kept alive now.
Actually they did both. The New York Times says "In total, Japan spent $6.3 trillion on construction-related public investment between 1991 and September of last year, according to the Cabinet Office." This was in a country whose GDP was about 1/3rd of the US.
Neither worked. Only being willing to close down the zombie banks worked.
This is entire economic meltdown has been caused by the shipping of jobs, especially manufacturing jobs, overseas.
You realize that US manufacturing output rose over the last 10 years (until last year). We've had decreasing manufacturing employment because US manufacturing has become more and more efficient (i.e. mechanized). US minimum wage laws make it impossible for the lowest skill manufacturing to be done here (some people think that is a good thing.)
I think you have the causality backwards. The meltdown has decreased US manufacturing over the last year. US exports have also been rising over the last 10 years, until the most recent crisis.
I believe the cause of the most recent crisis is the bursting of the real estate bubble, period. It was a bubble created by tax rules on mortgage interest deduction, the implicit and later explicit government guarantees on Fannie and Freddie, and the private sector forgetting that mortgages should be limited to 80% loan-to-value because sometimes house prices do go down, and if you don't have a 20% cushion, your borrowers will default on a house that will need to be sold for at a loss to the lender. This tremendous shock is working its way through the global economic structure, and it will take a while for the global economy to rebalance jobs away from house construction and finance.
If you don't think a teacher can inspire students, you've never had a good teacher, let alone a great one.
Efficient and dependable businesses don't depend on optimal labor. For example, the Toyota Lean Production system depends on "Poka-yoke", a method of preventing errors by putting limits on how an operation can be performed in order to force the correct completion of the operation. This assures that operators can be exchanged or moved from line to line if needed, and that production does not depend on particular "star performers", but you get good production from "average performers" and even "sub-average performers".
We should craft educational systems that meet their performance metrics with "average" teachers. That may mean the teachers need to be properly trained, or given well-researched lesson plans, but the average teacher should be able to get an adequate job done.
The problem is that teachers don't (and shouldn't) have that kind of control over the end product: namely, their own students. At best they can guide and influence, but even in the best of situations, more often than not students will be affected by things completely beyond the teacher's ability to predict or control. It is thus grossly unfair to use student performance as a measure of teacher performance, simply because the ties between them are much too loose.
No businesses have full control over their customers and products. You have to measure something to optimize it. If you don't measure anything, you can't optimize anything.
I think that student performance tests are a weak metric, but I can't think of anything better. Profit, of course, is the typical major metric for businesses, but we seem to have de-railed that for education.
I got 2 pages into that PDF before I got fed up with the bullshit. The study you linked talks about DEMOCRACIES being peaceful with each other.
Read the whole thing, especially the graph on page 179 which shows that the relative risks of wars is maximally raised by the reduction of variables measuring market freedoms. That is followed by reductions in shared interests, development, and democracy turns out to be the least influential variable in war risk.
In fact, nuclear fission was discovered in 1938, and large scale full production systems were operating by 1945 (Hanford), with commercial utility turn-on by mid 1950's.
Another way of looking at it is that we have naturally occurring fission reactors on earth in a 1G environment, while the closest natural fusion reactor requires 333000 times the gravity of the earth, and is 146 million km away from Earth.
Fuel for nuclear fusion is more abundant than fuel for nuclear fission, by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Not sure this is true - there is plenty of deuterium, but no naturally available tritium. Tritium has to be produced by neutron activation of lithium-6 or in deuterium moderated fission reactors.
Deuterium's abundance is 84.6 mg/kg of Earth's crust, Thorium (which can be bred into fissile material) is 96 mg/kg of Earth's crust.
The idea that real income has doubled since then is ludicrous.
Real income is adjusted by inflation. You have pointed out the important fact that the relative price level of housing (especially right before the bubble) has risen much faster than other relative costs. The real price of food and clothes, for example, are much lower now than in 1970. The real price of medical care is higher, but you can't really compare health care in 1970 and 2008, the technological differences are tremendous. Housing prices per square foot decreased until the top of the housing bubble, now they are back down to pre-1970 levels. But our houses are twice as large now, despite the fact that we have fewer kids. I remember my childhood friends in the 1970 sleeping two to a room, such things are almost unheard of in middle-class families today. Automobile costs are also up due to their size increase combined with regulatory costs to meet crash, CAFE, and emission requirements.
I should also point out that the average tax rate for the dual-working families has risen by about 25 percent between 1970 and today, because of increases in FICA and second earners moving families up in tax brackets.
if it's going to include "benefits" it'd better include the enormously inflated cost of health care! Oh it doesn't?
Health care paid by employers does count under total compensation. If you prefer to gather the statistics yourself and plot them, see the "Employer Costs for Employee Compensation" report, produced quarterly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
As of September, 2008, benefits (including health insurance) were 30.3% of worker total compensation, meaning if you had to pay your own 401K, health care, etc. you would see your pre-tax wages rise by 30%.
The leading elements of total compensation are all around 7% to 8% each, include legally required ("employer side" of FICA), insurance, health care, and paid leave. Lesser elements include retirement & savings and supplemental pay.
By the way, you should know that in 1970, FICA taxes (totaling both the "employer" and "employee" side) were 9.6% in 1970, and 15.3% today, so we've lost 5.7% of total compensation (below the FICA max) to the government since then.
And why would tariffs put you out of a job? Tariffs affect imports not exports.
The history of global trade is that if one country raises its tariffs, other countries tend to "retaliate".
That said, my industry also depends on a lot of imported specialized technical equipment (from Canada, Mexico, France, and Japan off the top of my head), so US tariff rises would increase our costs at least in the short run if not the long run as well.
39 years later his son, a white collar computer programmer raising three children and supporting a wife can't afford to buy a house on 100% of his wage in ANY POPULATION CENTRE
The question you should ask is "why?" Why are houses so large now? We know that inflation adjusted price of housing per square foot has been dropping until about the peak of the housing bubble. Is the size of houses just demand-driven, does it reflect a generally richer population, is it due to rises in the minimum wage, or is it due to land use zoning regulations? I'm not sure, but I'd like to see an actual analysis.
On the other hand, housing prices are now down 10-30% post-bubble in most places, with house rent even cheaper.
You are correct that housing and health care costs as a percent of income are higher now then 40 years ago, of course both housing stock and health care is much improved since then. And both are very highly regulated - housing by zoning laws and building codes, with demand driven up till recently by the existance of the government-sponsored enterprises of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Health insurance has a different set of rapidly expanding regulations that are different in every state, demand driven by government provided Medicare and Medicaid, defensive medicine due to nearly unlimited malpractice liability, and IT expenses to comply with Federal medical privacy laws. There also is the fact that it is still difficult for foreign doctors to legally immigrate into the US and set up practice, and we now pay our doctors twice as much as the OECD average.
None of this is related to trade though, with the exception of cheaper wood products coming in from Canada due to NAFTA, which was probably part of the decrease in housing costs per square foot built.
In today's environment, there's plenty to go around. It's not so much "haves and have nots" but "I have and you can't have" that's the problem. People call it the "evils of capitalism" and while greed is a big motivator, look at the pain it causes. They aren't kidding when they say money is the root of all evil.
Most war today is occurring in countries with very low levels of economic freedom. There are far greater evils from government control and over-regulation of economies than from the "free market" of capitalism. The science shows that free markets cause peace.
So greed for power of government over economies is the greed we should truly fear. Lack of economic freedom causes both poverty and war.
I find it tough to believe that the foam in the W88 is really that different from the foam in the W76. I thought the goal of the foam was to just become completely ionized and become transparent to X-rays? How hard can that really be when a fission weapon is exploding a few feet away.
I imagine there might be some physical characteristics of the foam related to ballistic devices (can handle G's on launch, re-rentry, etc.) but that would be similar across all ballistic weapons.
Unless there is something they aren't telling us;)
And one thing I failed to mention that I wish I had (not that it adds much to the argument) is the still present trade deficit. We are buying more than we are selling. What we are selling is largely to ourselves in decreasing numbers.
Actually exports have been rising (until 2009) as well as imports: see here. And keep in mind that those $3 trillion in imports are still pretty small compared with the $13 trillion domestic, non-imported US economy.
On the other hand, a global trade war would risk the $1.8 trillion in US exports and all of their respective jobs (my industry makes 1/3 of its revenue from exports), so let's not mess around with that! Plus it would raise prices on basic consumer goods, which would affect the poor the worst!
I just have to wonder how much more of this erosion of the U.S. the U.S. is willing to accept and permit? H1-Bs and lowering of wages,
US real total compensation per hour has doubled since 1970. Real hourly earnings aren't up much over that time, but that is because our additional compensation is going into 401k plans, health insurance, and more paid sick time. It is going there because tax policy makes it preferable for your employer to pay that compensation rather than paying you wages, having your wages taxed, and then you pay for them.
People constantly ask "so protectionism is the answer?" Right now, yes it is!
Protectionism is a false promise, it supports unsustainable and inefficient businesses at the expense of consumers. I work for a US company in an industry that earns 1/3 of its revenue (that's $10 billion dollars) in exports. So go ahead, put me out of a job!
The Indians and the Chinese cannot argue that their citizens should be allowed to compete world-wide, but that jobs inside their own borders are only open to native citizens.
However just because other countries are stupidly keeping their economies from maximum growth by cutting off the ability to hire the best people for the job doesn't mean the US should do so.
My cousin from El Salvador wanted to come to the US to attend school to get an education degree. She would have been a great teacher, especially for dealing with kids who needed bilingual help. She applied to school a year after 9/11, and her student visa was delayed, delayed, delayed, so she ended up staying in El Salvador and working in HR at a recruiting firm in El Salvador.
The idea is that we have underutilized resources that need to be employed in order to maximize our current capacity.
What if we have too much capacity right now? Perhaps that capacity should be eradicated. Do we need as many car companies, financial firms, etc. as we do now? Only the market knows. Perhaps the stimulus will only maintain corporations that should downsize or go out of business.
It's like my college loan. I couldn't afford college so I took out a loan. Then once I used my college education to get me a nice paying job I payed it back in 6 months
That works if the benefits of the loan outweigh the costs. If for example, you took out a loan for an art degree, you may never make enough to pay it back.
My viewpoint is that the costs of the stimulus will be outweighed by the cost of future growth due to increased taxes.
The experience of Japan's Lost Decade shows that often government stimulus costs are not worth their benefits. It takes a lot of faith to believe that government (whose incentives are getting campaign donations and votes) is going to invest more wisely than the market (whose incentive is to actually make money).
There may be cases where government is the only practical solution due to transaction costs (such as grabbing land for road building, national defense, police, monetary policy through the Federal Reserve), but in terms of industrial investment government is on an equal footing with the global market of investors.
Most doctors do things because it is the way they always do things. Not because they have evidence or a medical justification for it. That is what EBM attempts to change.
Don't get me wrong, most doctors I have encountered are idiots. Plain and simple. I've seen gastroparesis diagnosed as "you are swallowing too much air, just stop".
Government is also stupid. The difference is that if a doctor is an idiot, I can find another doctor. If government is telling me it is illegal for me to ignore their guidelines (as could be under a fully socialized system), I am in trouble.
A friend of mine has gastroparesis. This is a really wide-ranging disease because it is "brain damage of the gastrointestinal tract", where the damage could be localized in a particular part or more generalized, and every patient I've heard of seems to respond differently to the wide range of pro-kinetics and anti-emetics out there. I'm sure if you did a study of "average" gastroparetics you could say "due to evidence-based medicine, everyone should take medicine X", and this might be fine for 60% of the patients while forcing 40% into ineffective treatment. Medicine needs to address the individual needs of patients.
Private insurance will not pay for a woman's well visit if they don't have a Pap smear.
From another viewpoint, many states have mandatory requirements for Pap Smear insurance, for example in New Jersey:
No hospital service corporation contract providing hospital or medical expense benefits for groups with greater than 50 persons shall be delivered, issued, executed or renewed in this State, or approved for issuance or renewal in this State by the Commissioner of Banking and Insurance on or after the effective date of this act, unless the contract provides benefits to any named subscriber or other person covered thereunder for expenses incurred in conducting a Pap smear. The benefits shall be provided to the same extent as for any other medical condition under the contract.
So even if a doctor charges for a Pap Smear that isn't needed, refusing to pay for it could get you in legal trouble.
Most people don't realize how many mandatory regulated requirements there are for health insurance at the state level. This is one of the things that drive up insurance prices.
"US manufacturing production output was $1.8 trillion in 2007, the largest output of any country now or ever."
Yeah, including "manufacturing" of hamburgers, "manufacturing" companies that are completely outsourced, and, of course, the output of all this is taken in artificially inflated American prices.
The $1.8 trillion does not apply to non-US manufacturing. If something was imported from foreign production ("outsourced") it is not included. The comparisons between past manufacturing is adjusted for inflation, and the comparisons with other countries are based on currency conversion at current levels.
Here are the leading sectors of US manufacturing by value added, 2007:
All durable goods: $921 billion, including subsectors: Computer & Electronic Products: $146 billion Fabricated Metal Products: $140 billion Machinery: $126 billion Motor Vehicles: $98 billion Other Transportation Equipment: $96 billion
All non-durable goods: $694 billion, including subsectors: Chemical products: $249 billion Food manufacturing, food and beverage and tobacco products: $174 billion (there are your "hamburgers") Petroleum and coal products: $70 billion
To compare, US professional, scientific, and technical services: $1 trillion, in the same neighborhood as durable manufacturing.
Slashdot Mirror
0 Fahrenheit is easy, it is the temperature of a frigorific mixture of ice, water, and ammonium chloride.
A typical 1000 Megawatt coal powerplant such as the behemoth ERGs boondoggle just being completed in SE Wisconsin requires 1215 train carloads of Coal (Carbon) every day. Once burned, each carbon molocule (Atomic Weight 12) will have two Oxygen Molecules (Atomic Weight 16) attached to it and this 'refuse' to be sequestured will weigh 3.67 times as much. All else being equal, this means you would need 4459 boxcars full of carbon junk leaving the power plant. But CO2 can't easily be compressed into boxcars so it is likely the carbon will be sequestered with calcium or silicon (in rock), and weigh much more. And Shell thinks this is cheaper than solar, wind and hydropower? Have I missed April fools day or is someone playing a shell game?
All the wind power generation in Germany (the world leader) in 2007 was 38.5 TWH, or an average of 4.4 GWe (of course, it wasn't a continuous 4.4 GWe, but up and down with wind speed). That is 4.4 GWe average on 22.2 GW rated of turbines, or about 20% of installed capacity. There are 19,460 turbines in Germany for their 22 GW rated capacity.
4.4 GWe continuous could come from 3 Gen. III ABWR nuclear reactors. 3 versus 19,460. An ABWR needs to be refueled once every two years, or an average of 76 tons of fuel per year (one train car worth) per reactor.
Touching people over IP....
If you had taken the time to read about the Japanese lost decade you should have realized that their problem wasn't government building roads and bridges but insolvable banks that were kept alive just as AGI, Citi and others are kept alive now.
Actually they did both. The New York Times says "In total, Japan spent $6.3 trillion on construction-related public investment between 1991 and September of last year, according to the Cabinet Office." This was in a country whose GDP was about 1/3rd of the US.
Neither worked. Only being willing to close down the zombie banks worked.
This is entire economic meltdown has been caused by the shipping of jobs, especially manufacturing jobs, overseas.
You realize that US manufacturing output rose over the last 10 years (until last year). We've had decreasing manufacturing employment because US manufacturing has become more and more efficient (i.e. mechanized). US minimum wage laws make it impossible for the lowest skill manufacturing to be done here (some people think that is a good thing.)
I think you have the causality backwards. The meltdown has decreased US manufacturing over the last year. US exports have also been rising over the last 10 years, until the most recent crisis.
I believe the cause of the most recent crisis is the bursting of the real estate bubble, period. It was a bubble created by tax rules on mortgage interest deduction, the implicit and later explicit government guarantees on Fannie and Freddie, and the private sector forgetting that mortgages should be limited to 80% loan-to-value because sometimes house prices do go down, and if you don't have a 20% cushion, your borrowers will default on a house that will need to be sold for at a loss to the lender. This tremendous shock is working its way through the global economic structure, and it will take a while for the global economy to rebalance jobs away from house construction and finance.
Study after study has proven the benefits.
Care to point to an actual study?
I am in favor of the concept (I lean Keynesian
Too bad there is ZERO scientific evidence for Keynesian stimulus...
If you don't think a teacher can inspire students, you've never had a good teacher, let alone a great one.
Efficient and dependable businesses don't depend on optimal labor. For example, the Toyota Lean Production system depends on "Poka-yoke", a method of preventing errors by putting limits on how an operation can be performed in order to force the correct completion of the operation. This assures that operators can be exchanged or moved from line to line if needed, and that production does not depend on particular "star performers", but you get good production from "average performers" and even "sub-average performers".
We should craft educational systems that meet their performance metrics with "average" teachers. That may mean the teachers need to be properly trained, or given well-researched lesson plans, but the average teacher should be able to get an adequate job done.
The problem is that teachers don't (and shouldn't) have that kind of control over the end product: namely, their own students. At best they can guide and influence, but even in the best of situations, more often than not students will be affected by things completely beyond the teacher's ability to predict or control. It is thus grossly unfair to use student performance as a measure of teacher performance, simply because the ties between them are much too loose.
No businesses have full control over their customers and products. You have to measure something to optimize it. If you don't measure anything, you can't optimize anything.
I think that student performance tests are a weak metric, but I can't think of anything better. Profit, of course, is the typical major metric for businesses, but we seem to have de-railed that for education.
I got 2 pages into that PDF before I got fed up with the bullshit. The study you linked talks about DEMOCRACIES being peaceful with each other.
Read the whole thing, especially the graph on page 179 which shows that the relative risks of wars is maximally raised by the reduction of variables measuring market freedoms. That is followed by reductions in shared interests, development, and democracy turns out to be the least influential variable in war risk.
In fact, nuclear fission was discovered in 1938, and large scale full production systems were operating by 1945 (Hanford), with commercial utility turn-on by mid 1950's.
Another way of looking at it is that we have naturally occurring fission reactors on earth in a 1G environment, while the closest natural fusion reactor requires 333000 times the gravity of the earth, and is 146 million km away from Earth.
Fuel for nuclear fusion is more abundant than fuel for nuclear fission, by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Not sure this is true - there is plenty of deuterium, but no naturally available tritium. Tritium has to be produced by neutron activation of lithium-6 or in deuterium moderated fission reactors.
Deuterium's abundance is 84.6 mg/kg of Earth's crust, Thorium (which can be bred into fissile material) is 96 mg/kg of Earth's crust.
So I'd call it a toss-up on abundance....
The idea that real income has doubled since then is ludicrous.
Real income is adjusted by inflation. You have pointed out the important fact that the relative price level of housing (especially right before the bubble) has risen much faster than other relative costs. The real price of food and clothes, for example, are much lower now than in 1970. The real price of medical care is higher, but you can't really compare health care in 1970 and 2008, the technological differences are tremendous. Housing prices per square foot decreased until the top of the housing bubble, now they are back down to pre-1970 levels. But our houses are twice as large now, despite the fact that we have fewer kids. I remember my childhood friends in the 1970 sleeping two to a room, such things are almost unheard of in middle-class families today. Automobile costs are also up due to their size increase combined with regulatory costs to meet crash, CAFE, and emission requirements.
I should also point out that the average tax rate for the dual-working families has risen by about 25 percent between 1970 and today, because of increases in FICA and second earners moving families up in tax brackets.
if it's going to include "benefits" it'd better include the enormously inflated cost of health care! Oh it doesn't?
Health care paid by employers does count under total compensation. If you prefer to gather the statistics yourself and plot them, see the "Employer Costs for Employee Compensation" report, produced quarterly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
As of September, 2008, benefits (including health insurance) were 30.3% of worker total compensation, meaning if you had to pay your own 401K, health care, etc. you would see your pre-tax wages rise by 30%.
The leading elements of total compensation are all around 7% to 8% each, include legally required ("employer side" of FICA), insurance, health care, and paid leave. Lesser elements include retirement & savings and supplemental pay.
By the way, you should know that in 1970, FICA taxes (totaling both the "employer" and "employee" side) were 9.6% in 1970, and 15.3% today, so we've lost 5.7% of total compensation (below the FICA max) to the government since then.
And why would tariffs put you out of a job? Tariffs affect imports not exports.
The history of global trade is that if one country raises its tariffs, other countries tend to "retaliate".
That said, my industry also depends on a lot of imported specialized technical equipment (from Canada, Mexico, France, and Japan off the top of my head), so US tariff rises would increase our costs at least in the short run if not the long run as well.
39 years later his son, a white collar computer programmer raising three children and supporting a wife can't afford to buy a house on 100% of his wage in ANY POPULATION CENTRE
The question you should ask is "why?" Why are houses so large now? We know that inflation adjusted price of housing per square foot has been dropping until about the peak of the housing bubble. Is the size of houses just demand-driven, does it reflect a generally richer population, is it due to rises in the minimum wage, or is it due to land use zoning regulations? I'm not sure, but I'd like to see an actual analysis.
On the other hand, housing prices are now down 10-30% post-bubble in most places, with house rent even cheaper.
You are correct that housing and health care costs as a percent of income are higher now then 40 years ago, of course both housing stock and health care is much improved since then. And both are very highly regulated - housing by zoning laws and building codes, with demand driven up till recently by the existance of the government-sponsored enterprises of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Health insurance has a different set of rapidly expanding regulations that are different in every state, demand driven by government provided Medicare and Medicaid, defensive medicine due to nearly unlimited malpractice liability, and IT expenses to comply with Federal medical privacy laws. There also is the fact that it is still difficult for foreign doctors to legally immigrate into the US and set up practice, and we now pay our doctors twice as much as the OECD average.
None of this is related to trade though, with the exception of cheaper wood products coming in from Canada due to NAFTA, which was probably part of the decrease in housing costs per square foot built.
In today's environment, there's plenty to go around. It's not so much "haves and have nots" but "I have and you can't have" that's the problem. People call it the "evils of capitalism" and while greed is a big motivator, look at the pain it causes. They aren't kidding when they say money is the root of all evil.
Most war today is occurring in countries with very low levels of economic freedom. There are far greater evils from government control and over-regulation of economies than from the "free market" of capitalism. The science shows that free markets cause peace.
So greed for power of government over economies is the greed we should truly fear. Lack of economic freedom causes both poverty and war.
I find it tough to believe that the foam in the W88 is really that different from the foam in the W76. I thought the goal of the foam was to just become completely ionized and become transparent to X-rays? How hard can that really be when a fission weapon is exploding a few feet away.
I imagine there might be some physical characteristics of the foam related to ballistic devices (can handle G's on launch, re-rentry, etc.) but that would be similar across all ballistic weapons.
Unless there is something they aren't telling us ;)
And one thing I failed to mention that I wish I had (not that it adds much to the argument) is the still present trade deficit. We are buying more than we are selling. What we are selling is largely to ourselves in decreasing numbers.
Actually exports have been rising (until 2009) as well as imports: see here. And keep in mind that those $3 trillion in imports are still pretty small compared with the $13 trillion domestic, non-imported US economy.
On the other hand, a global trade war would risk the $1.8 trillion in US exports and all of their respective jobs (my industry makes 1/3 of its revenue from exports), so let's not mess around with that! Plus it would raise prices on basic consumer goods, which would affect the poor the worst!
I just have to wonder how much more of this erosion of the U.S. the U.S. is willing to accept and permit? H1-Bs and lowering of wages,
US real total compensation per hour has doubled since 1970. Real hourly earnings aren't up much over that time, but that is because our additional compensation is going into 401k plans, health insurance, and more paid sick time. It is going there because tax policy makes it preferable for your employer to pay that compensation rather than paying you wages, having your wages taxed, and then you pay for them.
Note that real disposable income actually rose the last four months.
People constantly ask "so protectionism is the answer?" Right now, yes it is!
Protectionism is a false promise, it supports unsustainable and inefficient businesses at the expense of consumers. I work for a US company in an industry that earns 1/3 of its revenue (that's $10 billion dollars) in exports. So go ahead, put me out of a job!
The Indians and the Chinese cannot argue that their citizens should be allowed to compete world-wide, but that jobs inside their own borders are only open to native citizens.
However just because other countries are stupidly keeping their economies from maximum growth by cutting off the ability to hire the best people for the job doesn't mean the US should do so.
My cousin from El Salvador wanted to come to the US to attend school to get an education degree. She would have been a great teacher, especially for dealing with kids who needed bilingual help. She applied to school a year after 9/11, and her student visa was delayed, delayed, delayed, so she ended up staying in El Salvador and working in HR at a recruiting firm in El Salvador.
The idea is that we have underutilized resources that need to be employed in order to maximize our current capacity.
What if we have too much capacity right now? Perhaps that capacity should be eradicated. Do we need as many car companies, financial firms, etc. as we do now? Only the market knows. Perhaps the stimulus will only maintain corporations that should downsize or go out of business.
It's like my college loan. I couldn't afford college so I took out a loan. Then once I used my college education to get me a nice paying job I payed it back in 6 months
That works if the benefits of the loan outweigh the costs. If for example, you took out a loan for an art degree, you may never make enough to pay it back.
My viewpoint is that the costs of the stimulus will be outweighed by the cost of future growth due to increased taxes.
The experience of Japan's Lost Decade shows that often government stimulus costs are not worth their benefits. It takes a lot of faith to believe that government (whose incentives are getting campaign donations and votes) is going to invest more wisely than the market (whose incentive is to actually make money).
There may be cases where government is the only practical solution due to transaction costs (such as grabbing land for road building, national defense, police, monetary policy through the Federal Reserve), but in terms of industrial investment government is on an equal footing with the global market of investors.
Most doctors do things because it is the way they always do things. Not because they have evidence or a medical justification for it. That is what EBM attempts to change.
Don't get me wrong, most doctors I have encountered are idiots. Plain and simple. I've seen gastroparesis diagnosed as "you are swallowing too much air, just stop".
Government is also stupid. The difference is that if a doctor is an idiot, I can find another doctor. If government is telling me it is illegal for me to ignore their guidelines (as could be under a fully socialized system), I am in trouble.
A friend of mine has gastroparesis. This is a really wide-ranging disease because it is "brain damage of the gastrointestinal tract", where the damage could be localized in a particular part or more generalized, and every patient I've heard of seems to respond differently to the wide range of pro-kinetics and anti-emetics out there. I'm sure if you did a study of "average" gastroparetics you could say "due to evidence-based medicine, everyone should take medicine X", and this might be fine for 60% of the patients while forcing 40% into ineffective treatment. Medicine needs to address the individual needs of patients.
Private insurance will not pay for a woman's well visit if they don't have a Pap smear.
From another viewpoint, many states have mandatory requirements for Pap Smear insurance, for example in New Jersey:
No hospital service corporation contract providing hospital or medical expense benefits for groups with greater than 50 persons shall be delivered, issued, executed or renewed in this State, or approved for issuance or renewal in this State by the Commissioner of Banking and Insurance on or after the effective date of this act, unless the contract provides benefits to any named subscriber or other person covered thereunder for expenses incurred in conducting a Pap smear. The benefits shall be provided to the same extent as for any other medical condition under the contract.
So even if a doctor charges for a Pap Smear that isn't needed, refusing to pay for it could get you in legal trouble.
Most people don't realize how many mandatory regulated requirements there are for health insurance at the state level. This is one of the things that drive up insurance prices.
"US manufacturing production output was $1.8 trillion in 2007, the largest output of any country now or ever."
Yeah, including "manufacturing" of hamburgers, "manufacturing" companies that are completely outsourced, and, of course, the output of all this is taken in artificially inflated American prices.
The $1.8 trillion does not apply to non-US manufacturing. If something was imported from foreign production ("outsourced") it is not included. The comparisons between past manufacturing is adjusted for inflation, and the comparisons with other countries are based on currency conversion at current levels.
Here are the leading sectors of US manufacturing by value added, 2007:
All durable goods: $921 billion, including subsectors:
Computer & Electronic Products: $146 billion
Fabricated Metal Products: $140 billion
Machinery: $126 billion
Motor Vehicles: $98 billion
Other Transportation Equipment: $96 billion
All non-durable goods: $694 billion, including subsectors:
Chemical products: $249 billion
Food manufacturing, food and beverage and tobacco products: $174 billion (there are your "hamburgers")
Petroleum and coal products: $70 billion
To compare, US professional, scientific, and technical services: $1 trillion, in the same neighborhood as durable manufacturing.
BEA Data sources