There's a huge difference between "transact" and "take" which you miss here. Following the rules of a market means you voluntarily enter into agreements. Following the rules of a socialist system, means stuff gets taken from you and stuff is given to you without said local agreement. Whether that involuntary exchange is worth more than it loses depends on the situation and how politically connected you are.
America is shedding jobs at an epic rate so that the rich can get slightly richer. The only reason these corps "can't afford" a higher minimum wage is because they need to protect their obscene profits. We're all in this together and we're all headed to the same grave. Let's try helping each other out instead of seeing who can amass the biggest pile of cash at the expense of other people. A revolution is brewing.
You are the problem. The reason you don't have pricing power to demand higher wages is because of retarded policies like high minimum wages. And you exhibit the same venal shortsightedness you claim the "the rich" have.
Finally, when you can't realize your current destructive fantasies, you escalate to the next level and speak of revolution. Theats and bullying don't work on me and certainly won't work on anyone who can easily move to another country (including a comfortable amount of assets).
I have an alternative here. Let's make hiring people easier and less costly. Let's make starting businesses easier and less costly. As a worker, you are not important. There are too many workers in the world and not enough employers. let's stop being stupid here and make more of what we actually need rather than continue on a path to collective poverty.
If you read the IPCC report, you'll notice lots of things listed with various degrees of confidence.
Which if you read the IPCC reports, you'll notice that the degrees of confidence often have little to do with what the confidence should be. There is a factor of three difference from lowest to highest bound on the estimate of the long term temperature forcing of a doubling of CO2, with a corresponding physical difference of centuries in when temperature rise effects occur.
Then you have claims of severe harm coming from modest rises of temperature which could merely be alleviated by moving towards the poles and uphill a short distance to maintain the current temperature range and the current height above sea level. Moving more than seven billion people (which let us note, we don't actually need to do) is not a trivial cost, but they will be moving a bunch anyway.
I think that exposes the fundamental dishonesty of the IPCC rhetoric. There is no hint that their claimed temperature rise say at 2100, might actually happen in say 2050 or 2200.
We do know that they're going to be significantly greater than zero, and we can come up with some sort of reasonable guess of about what a reasonable carbon tax would be.
Even so, those effects are grossly exaggerated and then exaggerated again via low time value modifiers. Meanwhile the cost of mitigation strategies are routinely downplayed. Where is there a discussion of the considerable costs and minimal impact of contemporary climate change mitigation?
Cheap energy is not an externality.
Patently false. It is a considerable positive subsidy because it not only provides a direct value to parties purchasing the cheap energy, but also considerable indirect benefit via a better-functioning society and a more active economy.
That's why energy has routinely been subsidized in the first place. Almost every economic policy maker goes off of GDP as a thing to improve and cheap energy boosts GDP.
Only if you take this single statement out of context and ignore all of the other times I have said they do not get better all by themselves. But that's the desperation your argument has sunk to.
Well, come up with an example then.
And as I have noted before, your "evidence" consists of a single discredited crank with no economic credentials whatsoever.
Excuse me? Do you even know what you're speaking of? My evidence consists of a) comparisons with past recessions, most which have recovered more abruptly than the current recession, b) the behavior of the Obama administration, and c) projections by the Obama administration's own economists. You are conducting a typical ad hominem argument.
You have a nasty habit of making assertions without backing them up. Specifically how have I "misrepresented your side of the argument to a ridiculous extent"?
Another assertion in the face of evidence to the contrary. I guess psychological projection is yet another mighty weapon in your rhetorical arsenal.
I happen to believe that contrary to your assertion one can make predictions about the near future with reasonable and useful accuracy
That's wonderful that you BELIEVE this. How about some proof?
Suddenly you're interested in "proof"? Ok, what near future thing do you want a prediction about?
Ah. Conspiracy! Perhaps you might supply some sort of evidence to support your opinion?
Already did with the remarkably bad projection about the economic benefits of the stimulus spending.
All recessions show "similar" curves. Things get bad. Then they get better. That does NOT make your argument.
You needn't write anything else. You just agreed with my primary assertion that recoveries happen. Thus, we can now move to the question of whether Obama made that better or worse. As I have noted before, I provide evidence to indicate he made that recovery worse.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. My claim is that nobody can predict the future. Your claim is that economic models made in the opening days of the great recession should have been accurate in every way required to craft exact, specific public policy. I will leave it up to the audience to determine which of our claims is axiomatic and which is extraordinary.
And once again, you misrepresent my side of the argument to a ridiculous extent. Further, we can make all sorts of prediction about the future. The matter is how accurate those predictions are. I happen to believe that contrary to your assertion one can make predictions about the near future with reasonable and useful accuracy. And once again, I note the lack of evidence for your assertion that the future was unusually unpredictable at this time due to existing economic factors.
I think rather the economists in question were paid to ignore the negative effects of the administration's policies, and that's what resulted in the huge gulf between reality and fiction.
That's me politely trying to tell you that your argument is inconsistent and that you have moved your goalposts in exactly the way I described, first by claiming President Obama did nothing, and then by claiming he DID do something, but that those actions made things worse.
I never claimed Obama did nothing nor do I consider that a reasonable interpretation of my words. And your previous statement didn't claim that else I would have made the obvious rebuttal then. Let's look at that again:
you claimed President Obama deserved no credit because the economy was going to improve anyway
See. You didn't write what you claimed you wrote.
This claim is both irrelevant to the GP you replied to, since the argument was about action, not inaction, and flat wrong -- ask the Japanese how their economy is doing after more than a decade of active government stimulus policy. Recovery is not a guaranteed thing.
There are three things to note here. First, your assertion is patently false in two ways. First, inaction is just another choice of action. Second, the whole point of the sky dragon thing is that you ignore outcome here. I have provided evidence that Obama's actions were worse than inaction. So it is bad to credit him with something for which he hindered not helped.
Finally, the Japanese "lost decade" is yet another example where the attempted action was worse than inaction.
So sure, the economists in question didn't "know" the full extent of the disaster because in large part they were way over-optimistically projecting the effects of their own administration's actions on the economy
My understanding is that they worked with the outgoing Administration to develop those models using the best data they had at the time. If you have evidence to support your assertion that they were unduly optimistic in their projections, now would be the time to show it. You're trying to make the case that the Administration was incompetent, and so far you've only made the case that their projections were incorrect (which we all know; we all know that economic projections are almost NEVER correct).
Speaking of relevance, your understanding is completely irrelevant.
Calling their projections "incorrect" deceptively downplays how glaringly divergent those projections were. Nor do we have here any indication that the data was inadequate, that's just something you choose to assume is true - a classic symptom of confirmation bias. It's worth noting that we have many other recessions to compare the present one to. And most of those show curves similar to the two presented in the projection.
I think that deserves repeating here. Where's the evidence that the future was significantly unpredictable here for the projections that were being made?
However, none of them are claiming the recovery was inevitable -- that's YOUR assertion, and you've yet to provide any evidence to support it.
The obvious rebuttal to this is that there is no evidence for the contrary assertion. Show me that unrecovered recession.
Second, there are more than two Japanese citizens here. It's not killing one to save a second. Instead, it's killing 250k to save about ten times that number in direct war deaths and the remaining modern infrastructure in Japan (which in turn saved about 100 million Japanese from even greater privation).
If Japan hadn't surrendered, it'd have been months after Nagasaki to the next bombing.
An invasion of Japan wouldn't have happened overnight.
There is no plausible argument that the US would have held up military action waiting on an atomic bomb after Nagasaki. Sure, if the war lasted more than 1 more year, we'd end up dropping them again, but that's unrelated to whether Nagasaki was a bluff.
The US wouldn't have to. The atomic bombs that were made, were ready when the US would need them to be ready.
Global warming is not frivolous crap. Many other countries around the world are retiring their coal plants, including even China, which until recently had been expanding their installed base.
Then where's the evidence to support your assertion? China has a huge pollution problem which has nothing to do with global warming. They have to deal with the pollution from their coal plants or many people will die.
I'm a bit confused. Previously you claimed President Obama deserved no credit because the economy was going to improve anyway. Now you're claiming he deserves no credit because the economic models that were created prior to understanding the full severity of the recession underestimated how bad things were AND you're claiming he actually made things worse. That's an impressive distance you've moved those goalposts in such a short time!
Even if those were all my claims, what's confusing about them? They are consistent with each other. And what goalposts were being moved again?
But let's look at the context of my argument. An AC claimed among other things that Obama was responsible for "economy turned around from the tailspin it fell into under Bush". I merely noted at that time that it would have anyway. And that this is of the sort of confirmation bias fallacy as claiming one ends solar eclipses by banging drums.
In my second post, I note Obama economists agreed with me that the economy would turn around and they even gave a date.
As I have previously mentioned, those forecasts were prepared from data in December, prior to knowing how bad the recession was. This may come as a surprise to you, but economic models prepared from today's data will disagree with economic models prepared from data taken four months ago. This is not a sign of "incompetence", it's a sign of "the passage of time". You must have conniption fits every time the BLS updates their labor reports from 3 months ago because more data has come in and *GASP!* THEY CHANGE!
A key bit of missing data here was the actions of Obama's administration. They started with huge, capricious changes in the economy via stimulus and favoritism (such as the General Motors takeover). That creates massive uncertainty in the business world and dampens economic activiy. So sure, the economists in question didn't "know" the full extent of the disaster because in large part they were way over-optimistically projecting the effects of their own administration's actions on the economy.
Also, we all know drum beating scares off sky dragons. We just didn't have enough drum this time.
Your words are a typical confirmation bias excuse for why something didn't turn out as expected. You just assert that things were worse than the original data indicated and that we just didn't try hard enough. Reality is always worse than expected for fools.
Here's the thing. Who had the hugely divergent projections, right from the start? Who is claiming that the Obama administration was instrumental in doing something which was inevitable? Not I.
Since, with all costs internalized, the desirable stuff wins anyway, this is mostly a matter of accounting for the full price of things. Coal power imposes sizable costs on the community in general that solar and wind do not, and solar and wind subsidies more or less compensate for that.
Well ok, Soviet-style planning wouldn't have much reliance on market manipulation because there wouldn't be much markets to manipulate. But they would have the same flimsy rationalization. You speak of the sizable negative externalities (which I can't help but note have not been quantified in any way, much less by a market approach) and not the sizeable positive externalities. There are huge positive externalities to cheap energy.
And it's worth noting here that the costs of the scheme are dumped on the small customers with apparently certain large customers still allowed to tap into electricity without the subsidy mechanism driving up their costs. That makes the scheme also a subsidy of large consumers of electricity by small ones.
You know, you come off as a pretty stupid shit. Let's suppose hypothetically, that American stormtroopers invaded your piece of shit country (like the Japanese did so many countries in the 1930s and 40s). Would you suggest that your side's soldiers march their butts away as the solution? Maybe if we don't fight, they won't invade? Somehow I doubt it.
But moving on, suppose your side has licked the American stormtroopers for the time being, but those damn Americans are still invading places and likely to return to invade you again. What makes more sense? Defeating the Americans once and for all, or allowing the global problem of the day to continue killing people and causing great harm?
Japan called the bluff of the first one (that wasn't a bluff) and didn't call the bluff of the second (that really was a bluff). That they were so absurdly wrong on both counts leads to both sides lying about it as much as possible to spin reality.
The US made more atomic bombs. They tested two more of them in 1946 less than a year after the two dropped on Japan. If Japan hadn't surrendered, it would have experienced more of them and the US would have had reason to build an assembly line for making them in bulk.
The lobbyist is saying that even without Obama's actions, coal would be suffering greatly.
Yes, and? It still remains that here's another area where the Obama administration's frivolous crap was deemed more important than an economic recovery from a bad recession.
The thing is, why should anyone build a superconductor grid, when the regular grid works just fine? The real problem here is not enough transfer capacity between the various regional grids.
Get your head out of your ass and read about the Bakken Formation which we are exploiting. If Obama wanted to hinder it, he could send the EPA in to audit every player there.
Or he could block the Keystone XL pipeline with far less political fallout. Guess what he did?
Again, you don't get it. The EPA decreed that CO2 was a pollutant. Coal releases considerably more CO2 per unit of energy produced. It's not rocket surgery to see that the resulting burden of regulation will drive up cost of coal power more than natural gas power.
Higher regulatory costs relative to natural gas means more coal plants shut down.
Nonsense, I don't like Bush but I do admire the way he worked with Obama and treasury in his final days of his term to stop the toppling dominoes with a massive wall of cash. I think the history books will say both sides of politics realised the gravity of the situation and actually came together with an (ultimately successful) plan to prevent another great depression.
Of course, they will. But it will be to rationalize yet more rounds of massive Keynesian-like spending for future recessions not because the stimulus spending actually worked.
In addition to my previous remarks on this subject, I found out that administration economists had projected that the US unemployment rate would recover by the beginning of 2014, if nothing was done. Actually performance under the Stimulus ended up considerably worse than that. The excuse for why they were so brazenly wrong was, of course, that things were "worse than expected".
Slashdot Mirror
There's a huge difference between "transact" and "take" which you miss here. Following the rules of a market means you voluntarily enter into agreements. Following the rules of a socialist system, means stuff gets taken from you and stuff is given to you without said local agreement. Whether that involuntary exchange is worth more than it loses depends on the situation and how politically connected you are.
America is shedding jobs at an epic rate so that the rich can get slightly richer. The only reason these corps "can't afford" a higher minimum wage is because they need to protect their obscene profits. We're all in this together and we're all headed to the same grave. Let's try helping each other out instead of seeing who can amass the biggest pile of cash at the expense of other people. A revolution is brewing.
You are the problem. The reason you don't have pricing power to demand higher wages is because of retarded policies like high minimum wages. And you exhibit the same venal shortsightedness you claim the "the rich" have.
Finally, when you can't realize your current destructive fantasies, you escalate to the next level and speak of revolution. Theats and bullying don't work on me and certainly won't work on anyone who can easily move to another country (including a comfortable amount of assets).
I have an alternative here. Let's make hiring people easier and less costly. Let's make starting businesses easier and less costly. As a worker, you are not important. There are too many workers in the world and not enough employers. let's stop being stupid here and make more of what we actually need rather than continue on a path to collective poverty.
If you read the IPCC report, you'll notice lots of things listed with various degrees of confidence.
Which if you read the IPCC reports, you'll notice that the degrees of confidence often have little to do with what the confidence should be. There is a factor of three difference from lowest to highest bound on the estimate of the long term temperature forcing of a doubling of CO2, with a corresponding physical difference of centuries in when temperature rise effects occur.
Then you have claims of severe harm coming from modest rises of temperature which could merely be alleviated by moving towards the poles and uphill a short distance to maintain the current temperature range and the current height above sea level. Moving more than seven billion people (which let us note, we don't actually need to do) is not a trivial cost, but they will be moving a bunch anyway. I think that exposes the fundamental dishonesty of the IPCC rhetoric. There is no hint that their claimed temperature rise say at 2100, might actually happen in say 2050 or 2200.
We do know that they're going to be significantly greater than zero, and we can come up with some sort of reasonable guess of about what a reasonable carbon tax would be.
Even so, those effects are grossly exaggerated and then exaggerated again via low time value modifiers. Meanwhile the cost of mitigation strategies are routinely downplayed. Where is there a discussion of the considerable costs and minimal impact of contemporary climate change mitigation?
Cheap energy is not an externality.
Patently false. It is a considerable positive subsidy because it not only provides a direct value to parties purchasing the cheap energy, but also considerable indirect benefit via a better-functioning society and a more active economy.
That's why energy has routinely been subsidized in the first place. Almost every economic policy maker goes off of GDP as a thing to improve and cheap energy boosts GDP.
Only if you take this single statement out of context and ignore all of the other times I have said they do not get better all by themselves. But that's the desperation your argument has sunk to.
Well, come up with an example then.
And as I have noted before, your "evidence" consists of a single discredited crank with no economic credentials whatsoever.
Excuse me? Do you even know what you're speaking of? My evidence consists of a) comparisons with past recessions, most which have recovered more abruptly than the current recession, b) the behavior of the Obama administration, and c) projections by the Obama administration's own economists. You are conducting a typical ad hominem argument.
You have a nasty habit of making assertions without backing them up. Specifically how have I "misrepresented your side of the argument to a ridiculous extent"?
Another assertion in the face of evidence to the contrary. I guess psychological projection is yet another mighty weapon in your rhetorical arsenal.
I happen to believe that contrary to your assertion one can make predictions about the near future with reasonable and useful accuracy
That's wonderful that you BELIEVE this. How about some proof?
Suddenly you're interested in "proof"? Ok, what near future thing do you want a prediction about?
Ah. Conspiracy! Perhaps you might supply some sort of evidence to support your opinion?
Already did with the remarkably bad projection about the economic benefits of the stimulus spending.
All recessions show "similar" curves. Things get bad. Then they get better. That does NOT make your argument.
You needn't write anything else. You just agreed with my primary assertion that recoveries happen. Thus, we can now move to the question of whether Obama made that better or worse. As I have noted before, I provide evidence to indicate he made that recovery worse.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. My claim is that nobody can predict the future. Your claim is that economic models made in the opening days of the great recession should have been accurate in every way required to craft exact, specific public policy. I will leave it up to the audience to determine which of our claims is axiomatic and which is extraordinary.
And once again, you misrepresent my side of the argument to a ridiculous extent. Further, we can make all sorts of prediction about the future. The matter is how accurate those predictions are. I happen to believe that contrary to your assertion one can make predictions about the near future with reasonable and useful accuracy. And once again, I note the lack of evidence for your assertion that the future was unusually unpredictable at this time due to existing economic factors.
I think rather the economists in question were paid to ignore the negative effects of the administration's policies, and that's what resulted in the huge gulf between reality and fiction.
That's me politely trying to tell you that your argument is inconsistent and that you have moved your goalposts in exactly the way I described, first by claiming President Obama did nothing, and then by claiming he DID do something, but that those actions made things worse.
I never claimed Obama did nothing nor do I consider that a reasonable interpretation of my words. And your previous statement didn't claim that else I would have made the obvious rebuttal then. Let's look at that again:
you claimed President Obama deserved no credit because the economy was going to improve anyway
See. You didn't write what you claimed you wrote.
This claim is both irrelevant to the GP you replied to, since the argument was about action, not inaction, and flat wrong -- ask the Japanese how their economy is doing after more than a decade of active government stimulus policy. Recovery is not a guaranteed thing.
There are three things to note here. First, your assertion is patently false in two ways. First, inaction is just another choice of action. Second, the whole point of the sky dragon thing is that you ignore outcome here. I have provided evidence that Obama's actions were worse than inaction. So it is bad to credit him with something for which he hindered not helped.
Finally, the Japanese "lost decade" is yet another example where the attempted action was worse than inaction.
So sure, the economists in question didn't "know" the full extent of the disaster because in large part they were way over-optimistically projecting the effects of their own administration's actions on the economy
My understanding is that they worked with the outgoing Administration to develop those models using the best data they had at the time. If you have evidence to support your assertion that they were unduly optimistic in their projections, now would be the time to show it. You're trying to make the case that the Administration was incompetent, and so far you've only made the case that their projections were incorrect (which we all know; we all know that economic projections are almost NEVER correct).
Speaking of relevance, your understanding is completely irrelevant.
Calling their projections "incorrect" deceptively downplays how glaringly divergent those projections were. Nor do we have here any indication that the data was inadequate, that's just something you choose to assume is true - a classic symptom of confirmation bias. It's worth noting that we have many other recessions to compare the present one to. And most of those show curves similar to the two presented in the projection.
I think that deserves repeating here. Where's the evidence that the future was significantly unpredictable here for the projections that were being made?
However, none of them are claiming the recovery was inevitable -- that's YOUR assertion, and you've yet to provide any evidence to support it.
The obvious rebuttal to this is that there is no evidence for the contrary assertion. Show me that unrecovered recession.
I see. So you're saying so while enjoying the benefits of those American stormtroopers.
First, what innocent Japanese citizens?
Second, there are more than two Japanese citizens here. It's not killing one to save a second. Instead, it's killing 250k to save about ten times that number in direct war deaths and the remaining modern infrastructure in Japan (which in turn saved about 100 million Japanese from even greater privation).
If Japan hadn't surrendered, it'd have been months after Nagasaki to the next bombing.
An invasion of Japan wouldn't have happened overnight.
There is no plausible argument that the US would have held up military action waiting on an atomic bomb after Nagasaki. Sure, if the war lasted more than 1 more year, we'd end up dropping them again, but that's unrelated to whether Nagasaki was a bluff.
The US wouldn't have to. The atomic bombs that were made, were ready when the US would need them to be ready.
Global warming is not frivolous crap. Many other countries around the world are retiring their coal plants, including even China, which until recently had been expanding their installed base.
Then where's the evidence to support your assertion? China has a huge pollution problem which has nothing to do with global warming. They have to deal with the pollution from their coal plants or many people will die.
I'm a bit confused. Previously you claimed President Obama deserved no credit because the economy was going to improve anyway. Now you're claiming he deserves no credit because the economic models that were created prior to understanding the full severity of the recession underestimated how bad things were AND you're claiming he actually made things worse. That's an impressive distance you've moved those goalposts in such a short time!
Even if those were all my claims, what's confusing about them? They are consistent with each other. And what goalposts were being moved again?
But let's look at the context of my argument. An AC claimed among other things that Obama was responsible for "economy turned around from the tailspin it fell into under Bush". I merely noted at that time that it would have anyway. And that this is of the sort of confirmation bias fallacy as claiming one ends solar eclipses by banging drums.
In my second post, I note Obama economists agreed with me that the economy would turn around and they even gave a date.
As I have previously mentioned, those forecasts were prepared from data in December, prior to knowing how bad the recession was. This may come as a surprise to you, but economic models prepared from today's data will disagree with economic models prepared from data taken four months ago. This is not a sign of "incompetence", it's a sign of "the passage of time". You must have conniption fits every time the BLS updates their labor reports from 3 months ago because more data has come in and *GASP!* THEY CHANGE!
A key bit of missing data here was the actions of Obama's administration. They started with huge, capricious changes in the economy via stimulus and favoritism (such as the General Motors takeover). That creates massive uncertainty in the business world and dampens economic activiy. So sure, the economists in question didn't "know" the full extent of the disaster because in large part they were way over-optimistically projecting the effects of their own administration's actions on the economy.
Also, we all know drum beating scares off sky dragons. We just didn't have enough drum this time. Your words are a typical confirmation bias excuse for why something didn't turn out as expected. You just assert that things were worse than the original data indicated and that we just didn't try hard enough. Reality is always worse than expected for fools.
Here's the thing. Who had the hugely divergent projections, right from the start? Who is claiming that the Obama administration was instrumental in doing something which was inevitable? Not I.
Since, with all costs internalized, the desirable stuff wins anyway, this is mostly a matter of accounting for the full price of things. Coal power imposes sizable costs on the community in general that solar and wind do not, and solar and wind subsidies more or less compensate for that.
Well ok, Soviet-style planning wouldn't have much reliance on market manipulation because there wouldn't be much markets to manipulate. But they would have the same flimsy rationalization. You speak of the sizable negative externalities (which I can't help but note have not been quantified in any way, much less by a market approach) and not the sizeable positive externalities. There are huge positive externalities to cheap energy.
And it's worth noting here that the costs of the scheme are dumped on the small customers with apparently certain large customers still allowed to tap into electricity without the subsidy mechanism driving up their costs. That makes the scheme also a subsidy of large consumers of electricity by small ones.
No, it's the lizaroids. True fact.
You know, you come off as a pretty stupid shit. Let's suppose hypothetically, that American stormtroopers invaded your piece of shit country (like the Japanese did so many countries in the 1930s and 40s). Would you suggest that your side's soldiers march their butts away as the solution? Maybe if we don't fight, they won't invade? Somehow I doubt it.
But moving on, suppose your side has licked the American stormtroopers for the time being, but those damn Americans are still invading places and likely to return to invade you again. What makes more sense? Defeating the Americans once and for all, or allowing the global problem of the day to continue killing people and causing great harm?
You can't justify killing one innocent person to prevent crimes being committed against another innocent person.
Where does this maxim apply in this thread?
Japan called the bluff of the first one (that wasn't a bluff) and didn't call the bluff of the second (that really was a bluff). That they were so absurdly wrong on both counts leads to both sides lying about it as much as possible to spin reality.
The US made more atomic bombs. They tested two more of them in 1946 less than a year after the two dropped on Japan. If Japan hadn't surrendered, it would have experienced more of them and the US would have had reason to build an assembly line for making them in bulk.
The lobbyist is saying that even without Obama's actions, coal would be suffering greatly.
Yes, and? It still remains that here's another area where the Obama administration's frivolous crap was deemed more important than an economic recovery from a bad recession.
I know you're joking, but that is a nice example of electricity usage that can instantly switch on and do something remotely productive.
Not sure where you got the "Classic sovietstyle central planning at work" from.
It's classic central planning. Top down decision-making based on dubious ideological goals with little to no regard for the consequences.
Scandinavian countries for example have more more government regulation and services, and have a happier populations as a result.
For the present. We'll see if it lasts.
The thing is, why should anyone build a superconductor grid, when the regular grid works just fine? The real problem here is not enough transfer capacity between the various regional grids.
Get your head out of your ass and read about the Bakken Formation which we are exploiting. If Obama wanted to hinder it, he could send the EPA in to audit every player there.
Or he could block the Keystone XL pipeline with far less political fallout. Guess what he did?
Again, you don't get it. The EPA decreed that CO2 was a pollutant. Coal releases considerably more CO2 per unit of energy produced. It's not rocket surgery to see that the resulting burden of regulation will drive up cost of coal power more than natural gas power.
Higher regulatory costs relative to natural gas means more coal plants shut down.
Nonsense, I don't like Bush but I do admire the way he worked with Obama and treasury in his final days of his term to stop the toppling dominoes with a massive wall of cash. I think the history books will say both sides of politics realised the gravity of the situation and actually came together with an (ultimately successful) plan to prevent another great depression.
Of course, they will. But it will be to rationalize yet more rounds of massive Keynesian-like spending for future recessions not because the stimulus spending actually worked.
In addition to my previous remarks on this subject, I found out that administration economists had projected that the US unemployment rate would recover by the beginning of 2014, if nothing was done. Actually performance under the Stimulus ended up considerably worse than that. The excuse for why they were so brazenly wrong was, of course, that things were "worse than expected".
I address your concerns here.