And if you don't have a credit rating to get a loan? How about if your leg was cut off? Not likely to get a loan since you're construction industry future is pretty bleak now...
My point is that you can say the 'market' will take care of it, but it won't. The 'market' simply casts off those who it finds inconvenient or costly. That's not a society I want to live in.
Actually the Progressive Caucus in the house has a plan to balance the budget in 10 years...by doing just such progressive types of expenditures and tax reforms. Nobody else even comes close to that, Obama or the GOP.
Food stamps are a net gain for the economy, for every dollar you put in you get $1.60 of economic output or there abouts. Unemployment payments are likewise positive budget factors. You get more out than you put in because of economic cascading effects. That is actual studied and proven by the CBO. The worst way to 'stimulate' the economy? tax cuts to the wealthy.
My point is that people aren't going to just stop lending to us overnight or for the foreseeable future - Defaulting on the debt, will cause them to stop lending to us pretty damned quick. So one step is guaranteed to cause financial disaster, the other might in time. Why the hell would you choose defaulting on the debt of those two options.
Investing in our country (and in others) so we can compete globally is the only way to grow ourselves out of this, we simply can't cut enough to solve the problems we face. It's funny how the GOP conservatives who usually 'rah rah' the American small businessman, seem to think they can't grow enough to help so we must cut our way to budget balance.
We still seem to have high unemployment. That means that both unemployment payments and food stamps will still be effective at stimulating the economy. Certainly more than tax cuts will be. Infrastructure spending *has* to be done or we can't have a modern economy. Something like 75% of all our bridges are at or about to be at expected lifespan (50 years). Funny how things will grind to a halt when you can't move stuff around.
The debt and the deficit are different things and need different solutions. The debt, all the world has to see is reasonable action towards financial sanity. They don't need to see it erased in 5 years. It's about confidence and not absolute numbers. Granted with the Tea Party 'patriots' driving us to a shut down/default, the world is rightly concerned that we don't have leadership they can have confidence in. Hence why there is panic in the financial markets towards the future.
The deficit is perfectly solvable provided we account for things we spend and actually pay for them unlike the GOP of the last 10 years. 'Tax and spend' is an epithet against the Dems, and yet it also is the very definition of fiscal responsibility. Funny how the GOP claims the Dems actually do what the GOP says they are better at.
If you think we'd be better off with a worldwide economic depression of the kind we've never seen (i.e. US defaults on its debt) versus deficit spending now so the economy can grow and start to actually pay things back, well more power to you.
To use your example, you are that person falling from the sky in a jet with stopped engines saying we just have to hit the ground at full speed, rather than trying to adjust the glide slope to give us more times to restart the engines.
Exactly, there are none left on earth. There would however be some left in the off-earth colony.
Even if there are plumbers, they don't know how to smelt metal into pipes or make plastic that isn't poisonous to the water running through it. You need a whole lot of different skills before you get even the basics of modern life. And with 5% scattered, even if you manage to keep each skill set survived, you won't have them in the same place anyway.
Well, that's a fair statement, but given the idea of setting up a new livable environment (biodome's etc) resources will be quite scarce so we'll be living much more within our means in that situation.
Would a for profit insurance company even bother to insure elderly people? They cost the most, so why bother, better to insure healthy people for the bottom line right? Even if they did, obviously the costs would be very high. Free markets don't work when you have to cover 'everybody'. Same reason Fedex doesn't ship everywhere but the Post Office does. Companies will drop unprofitable clients - which sucks when it's Grandma.
We need oil now and for many decades to come. Producing it here can only benefit us.
Spoken like the true addict that we are:) Actually it can harm us. If we use it now while oil is cheap we won't have it available when peak oil hits and it gets really expensive. 'Conserving' your resources is better than just using them up as fast as possible.
Now the other argument to be made is that if we don't start drilling right here right now, it won't be online when peak oil hits. A fair argument, except for the fact that the 'drill here drill now' people also claim peak oil is either a myth or hundreds of years away...thus invalidating their argument for doing it right now.
Better to do what this article is about and start spending that money on alternative sources so that they are ready to pick up the slack when peak oil hits.
Life has always survived and adapted, and it will do the same regardless of what we throw at it.
That is life reacting to the environment and yes, will continue to do so. The key difference is *we* are changing the environment not that the environment is changing.
A parasite shouldn't kill it's host if it expects to survive.
As for your car analogy, how exactly is causing global warming like a boat? If it doesn't do what you need it to do, then car/boat/whatever the outcome is failure.
We can't just print money and use it to pay off the debt.
I love how your next 2 sentences explain how we can do exactly that:) Not a great idea, but inflation is exactly how you make your debts worth less and therefore cheaper to pay off. Do T-bills get adjusted for inflation? Outstanding 'debt' is priced in dollars, if we inflate our currency that doesn't change the 'amount' we owe people.
As I said this is not a good idea, especially radically fast, but inflation over time causes the original debt to be worth less and thus now easier to pay off.
If you are a Democrat, you are an idiot....Democrats cry that we just need to raise income tax on the rich (or return to where they were a few years ago) and things will be hunky-dory.
You do realize the Dem's have agreed to reforms of Social Security and Medicare right? They aren't saying taxing the rich will fix everything just that it's crazy to give them tax cuts when cutting other major pieces of the budget.
If you think providing a social safety net is 'stupid', well I don't have a lot of sympathy for you. Your parents use it or will use it, just the same as Medicare. These are *necessary* programs for the health of our society. Imagine how bad the economy would be if everybody was saving to buy private insurance when they are 65+. It's ridiculously expensive to buy insurance when you're healthy, let alone when you're elderly. How about retirement? Again lots more money out of the economy as people have to save for their entire retirement.
Next, what do you do with people who lost their savings in the recession? They don't have any money to pay for health insurance or retire. If you say 'tough', well I have no sympathy for you.
Being in favor, and paying for, social programs is not stupid. It's the fabric that keeps this the best country in the world.
Your an idiot. Your household budget doesn't work like the governments and shouldn't. We don't have money to spend on stupid things, but we can print our own money and people are still lining up to lend us money.
If we keep playing political games with the deficit and the debt limit though, they won't keep lending us money because they'll see we're completely taken over by a crazy party (GOP).
If you could spend $100,000,000 and get back $160,000,000, would you spend it? or would claim we are broke and not spend the money to make that $160 million?
Food stamps, unemployment insurance and infrastructure spending all return more money into the economy than they cost. Tax cuts do not.
So we can invest in our economy and country and grow our way out of this, or we can cut to the bone and just keep sinking lower and lower. We have some things to reform, but our budget was close to being balanced a decade ago. The only thing that changed was massive debts run up by the GOP.
The reason ANWR is useless is because there isn't much there. Estimated recoverable oil is only about 1 year's worth at today's usage levels. Say we split that over 20 years for production. That's 5%. Lowers gas prices a whopping $0.40 for twenty years and then is gone, and we have a BP oil spill in the arctic where we can't even go to clean it up half the year.
Sea levels have been rising. Erosion of rock/soil into the ocean will tend to do that. The *rates* of change are a lot more important than denying things are changing.
Wind turbines do not kill birds anymore. By using larger rotors and gearing they spin much more slowly and are no longer a threat to birds. Bats may still be affected, not by strikes but by the pressure difference as they fly past the wing edge - this is still being studied I believe.
Solar panels do not *reflect* solar energy into space. They are almost uniformly dark in color thus absorbing thermal and photon energy better than, say, grass. Large scale paneling would likely increase temperatures locally if nothing else, but certainly not cool them. Since many of these panels will be on roofs, well , same color, same shape, same size, no difference in effect.
Global warming is happening, the science is sound and tested your protestations not withstanding. Each decade of the last five has been the highest rate of change since we've been keeping records. Hard to argue with real data.
What you don't seem to understand is that fossil fuels and even nuclear, *will* run out. There is simply a finite supply of them. So there costs will only go up. Renewable source pricing won't go up because the fuel is effectively unlimited.
Renewable sources are not cost effective today that is certainly true. But that is because of two factors. Subsidies to the fossil fuel companies (10s of billions of dollars) and the lack of a cost for putting CO2 into the atmosphere. Once you price that in, renewable sources are competitive and even more economical. Renewables will never be the same prices as fossil fuels are today. Neither will fossil fuels. Only the fossil fuels are going up in price.
Checked the latest gas station yet? Shame we have to buy our energy from people who can sell it for whatever they want. And this year we're expected to have demand exceed available supply for the first time (90 billion barrels). Prices today are just markets diddling...when actual scarcity shows up, what do you think will happen to prices?
Yeah those 'Tax and spend' Democrats, oh wait, that's actual fiscal responsibility, PAYING for what you want to spend.
The GOP is bankrupt (pun intended). We've seen their policies not work for almost 2 decades. Tax cuts are not the solution. They are a tailored thing that can have some benefit but that is few and far between.
Tax cuts do not create jobs. Period. DEMAND for products & services creates jobs. And stimulus is how you get that demand when you're in a recession. Except the GOP was against any of it.
I'm not sure 95% extinction is palatable to most people. Survive? maybe, but society as we know it is over. Personally I don't call that a 'successful' outcome.
The point being that if we have permanent habitable colonies on *other* planets or even the moon, our society can continue as well as our genes.
I don't feel compelled to send some government selected Aryan to populate space.
You don't 'feel' compelled, but you will be compelled:) It's the democratic process, the majority wins. If you don't like the idea, feel free to recruit others to your ideas and vote in people to implement them.
Of course, the slogan "We're screwed, just deal with it" I never thought would be very popular. Then I met the new GOP.
The Earth is a lot tougher than we are, and will be here for a long long time, so "man is destroying Earth" isn't a reason.
If you mean that the pile of crushed metal is still 'technically' a car sure we aren't destroying the earth. We are destroying the environment we absolutely need to survive. That's pretty much what people mean when "we're destroying the earth".
Slashdot Mirror
And if you don't have a credit rating to get a loan? How about if your leg was cut off? Not likely to get a loan since you're construction industry future is pretty bleak now...
My point is that you can say the 'market' will take care of it, but it won't. The 'market' simply casts off those who it finds inconvenient or costly. That's not a society I want to live in.
Married to one, but born and raised here in America 'Land of the Corporations'. That's not a compliment...
Actually the Progressive Caucus in the house has a plan to balance the budget in 10 years...by doing just such progressive types of expenditures and tax reforms. Nobody else even comes close to that, Obama or the GOP.
Food stamps are a net gain for the economy, for every dollar you put in you get $1.60 of economic output or there abouts. Unemployment payments are likewise positive budget factors. You get more out than you put in because of economic cascading effects. That is actual studied and proven by the CBO. The worst way to 'stimulate' the economy? tax cuts to the wealthy.
My point is that people aren't going to just stop lending to us overnight or for the foreseeable future - Defaulting on the debt, will cause them to stop lending to us pretty damned quick. So one step is guaranteed to cause financial disaster, the other might in time. Why the hell would you choose defaulting on the debt of those two options.
Investing in our country (and in others) so we can compete globally is the only way to grow ourselves out of this, we simply can't cut enough to solve the problems we face. It's funny how the GOP conservatives who usually 'rah rah' the American small businessman, seem to think they can't grow enough to help so we must cut our way to budget balance.
We still seem to have high unemployment. That means that both unemployment payments and food stamps will still be effective at stimulating the economy. Certainly more than tax cuts will be. Infrastructure spending *has* to be done or we can't have a modern economy. Something like 75% of all our bridges are at or about to be at expected lifespan (50 years). Funny how things will grind to a halt when you can't move stuff around.
The debt and the deficit are different things and need different solutions. The debt, all the world has to see is reasonable action towards financial sanity. They don't need to see it erased in 5 years. It's about confidence and not absolute numbers. Granted with the Tea Party 'patriots' driving us to a shut down/default, the world is rightly concerned that we don't have leadership they can have confidence in. Hence why there is panic in the financial markets towards the future.
The deficit is perfectly solvable provided we account for things we spend and actually pay for them unlike the GOP of the last 10 years. 'Tax and spend' is an epithet against the Dems, and yet it also is the very definition of fiscal responsibility. Funny how the GOP claims the Dems actually do what the GOP says they are better at.
If you think we'd be better off with a worldwide economic depression of the kind we've never seen (i.e. US defaults on its debt) versus deficit spending now so the economy can grow and start to actually pay things back, well more power to you.
To use your example, you are that person falling from the sky in a jet with stopped engines saying we just have to hit the ground at full speed, rather than trying to adjust the glide slope to give us more times to restart the engines.
Exactly, there are none left on earth. There would however be some left in the off-earth colony.
Even if there are plumbers, they don't know how to smelt metal into pipes or make plastic that isn't poisonous to the water running through it. You need a whole lot of different skills before you get even the basics of modern life. And with 5% scattered, even if you manage to keep each skill set survived, you won't have them in the same place anyway.
Well, that's a fair statement, but given the idea of setting up a new livable environment (biodome's etc) resources will be quite scarce so we'll be living much more within our means in that situation.
So because its hard we shouldn't try? there's a winning evolutionary strategy right there
More questions for you:
Would a for profit insurance company even bother to insure elderly people? They cost the most, so why bother, better to insure healthy people for the bottom line right? Even if they did, obviously the costs would be very high. Free markets don't work when you have to cover 'everybody'. Same reason Fedex doesn't ship everywhere but the Post Office does. Companies will drop unprofitable clients - which sucks when it's Grandma.
We need oil now and for many decades to come. Producing it here can only benefit us.
Spoken like the true addict that we are :) Actually it can harm us. If we use it now while oil is cheap we won't have it available when peak oil hits and it gets really expensive. 'Conserving' your resources is better than just using them up as fast as possible.
Now the other argument to be made is that if we don't start drilling right here right now, it won't be online when peak oil hits. A fair argument, except for the fact that the 'drill here drill now' people also claim peak oil is either a myth or hundreds of years away...thus invalidating their argument for doing it right now.
Better to do what this article is about and start spending that money on alternative sources so that they are ready to pick up the slack when peak oil hits.
And if you break you leg the first day on the construction job? You haven't had time to 'provide' for yourself yet. What do you do?
Life has always survived and adapted, and it will do the same regardless of what we throw at it.
That is life reacting to the environment and yes, will continue to do so. The key difference is *we* are changing the environment not that the environment is changing.
A parasite shouldn't kill it's host if it expects to survive.
As for your car analogy, how exactly is causing global warming like a boat? If it doesn't do what you need it to do, then car/boat/whatever the outcome is failure.
Nothing we can do will destroy all life on the planet
Well global thermonuclear war is a pretty good way to try :)
Would. You. Like. To. Play. A. Game?
We can't just print money and use it to pay off the debt.
I love how your next 2 sentences explain how we can do exactly that :) Not a great idea, but inflation is exactly how you make your debts worth less and therefore cheaper to pay off. Do T-bills get adjusted for inflation? Outstanding 'debt' is priced in dollars, if we inflate our currency that doesn't change the 'amount' we owe people.
As I said this is not a good idea, especially radically fast, but inflation over time causes the original debt to be worth less and thus now easier to pay off.
If you are a Democrat, you are an idiot....Democrats cry that we just need to raise income tax on the rich (or return to where they were a few years ago) and things will be hunky-dory.
You do realize the Dem's have agreed to reforms of Social Security and Medicare right? They aren't saying taxing the rich will fix everything just that it's crazy to give them tax cuts when cutting other major pieces of the budget.
If you think providing a social safety net is 'stupid', well I don't have a lot of sympathy for you. Your parents use it or will use it, just the same as Medicare. These are *necessary* programs for the health of our society. Imagine how bad the economy would be if everybody was saving to buy private insurance when they are 65+. It's ridiculously expensive to buy insurance when you're healthy, let alone when you're elderly. How about retirement? Again lots more money out of the economy as people have to save for their entire retirement.
Next, what do you do with people who lost their savings in the recession? They don't have any money to pay for health insurance or retire. If you say 'tough', well I have no sympathy for you.
Being in favor, and paying for, social programs is not stupid. It's the fabric that keeps this the best country in the world.
Way to be an ignorant dittohead!
Your an idiot. Your household budget doesn't work like the governments and shouldn't. We don't have money to spend on stupid things, but we can print our own money and people are still lining up to lend us money.
If we keep playing political games with the deficit and the debt limit though, they won't keep lending us money because they'll see we're completely taken over by a crazy party (GOP).
If you could spend $100,000,000 and get back $160,000,000, would you spend it? or would claim we are broke and not spend the money to make that $160 million?
Food stamps, unemployment insurance and infrastructure spending all return more money into the economy than they cost. Tax cuts do not.
So we can invest in our economy and country and grow our way out of this, or we can cut to the bone and just keep sinking lower and lower. We have some things to reform, but our budget was close to being balanced a decade ago. The only thing that changed was massive debts run up by the GOP.
The reason ANWR is useless is because there isn't much there. Estimated recoverable oil is only about 1 year's worth at today's usage levels. Say we split that over 20 years for production. That's 5%. Lowers gas prices a whopping $0.40 for twenty years and then is gone, and we have a BP oil spill in the arctic where we can't even go to clean it up half the year.
It's not worth it.
Sea levels have been rising. Erosion of rock/soil into the ocean will tend to do that. The *rates* of change are a lot more important than denying things are changing.
Wind turbines do not kill birds anymore. By using larger rotors and gearing they spin much more slowly and are no longer a threat to birds. Bats may still be affected, not by strikes but by the pressure difference as they fly past the wing edge - this is still being studied I believe.
Solar panels do not *reflect* solar energy into space. They are almost uniformly dark in color thus absorbing thermal and photon energy better than, say, grass. Large scale paneling would likely increase temperatures locally if nothing else, but certainly not cool them. Since many of these panels will be on roofs, well , same color, same shape, same size, no difference in effect.
Global warming is happening, the science is sound and tested your protestations not withstanding. Each decade of the last five has been the highest rate of change since we've been keeping records. Hard to argue with real data.
What you don't seem to understand is that fossil fuels and even nuclear, *will* run out. There is simply a finite supply of them. So there costs will only go up. Renewable source pricing won't go up because the fuel is effectively unlimited.
Renewable sources are not cost effective today that is certainly true. But that is because of two factors. Subsidies to the fossil fuel companies (10s of billions of dollars) and the lack of a cost for putting CO2 into the atmosphere. Once you price that in, renewable sources are competitive and even more economical. Renewables will never be the same prices as fossil fuels are today. Neither will fossil fuels. Only the fossil fuels are going up in price.
Checked the latest gas station yet? Shame we have to buy our energy from people who can sell it for whatever they want. And this year we're expected to have demand exceed available supply for the first time (90 billion barrels). Prices today are just markets diddling...when actual scarcity shows up, what do you think will happen to prices?
How many years would it take for 5% scattered in a nuclear winter to even have running water again?
At least from a functional society on another planet we have a shot. You don't have one if you're 5% scattered across a devastated planet.
And to answer your question, zero if we don't actually try. We could do quite a bit with the proper motivation.
Yeah those 'Tax and spend' Democrats, oh wait, that's actual fiscal responsibility, PAYING for what you want to spend.
The GOP is bankrupt (pun intended). We've seen their policies not work for almost 2 decades. Tax cuts are not the solution. They are a tailored thing that can have some benefit but that is few and far between.
Tax cuts do not create jobs. Period. DEMAND for products & services creates jobs. And stimulus is how you get that demand when you're in a recession. Except the GOP was against any of it.
I'm not sure 95% extinction is palatable to most people. Survive? maybe, but society as we know it is over. Personally I don't call that a 'successful' outcome.
The point being that if we have permanent habitable colonies on *other* planets or even the moon, our society can continue as well as our genes.
I don't feel compelled to send some government selected Aryan to populate space.
You don't 'feel' compelled, but you will be compelled :) It's the democratic process, the majority wins. If you don't like the idea, feel free to recruit others to your ideas and vote in people to implement them.
Of course, the slogan "We're screwed, just deal with it" I never thought would be very popular. Then I met the new GOP.
The Earth is a lot tougher than we are, and will be here for a long long time, so "man is destroying Earth" isn't a reason.
If you mean that the pile of crushed metal is still 'technically' a car sure we aren't destroying the earth. We are destroying the environment we absolutely need to survive. That's pretty much what people mean when "we're destroying the earth".
How about something catastrophic that is actually due *now* by geologic standards?
Not all world changing events come from above...