Coyote Blog

Tom Nelson has a pretty funny set of articles on the White House vegetable garden.    Michelle Obama told a group of kids it only cost $180.  Tom links a variety of videos and articles showing:

• Five NPS workers digging in the garden, with a tractor, tiller, and hand tools.
• A job posting for a college grad for the position of "White House Farmer."
• A job description of an assistant White House chef who currently overseas the garden.

Farming is cheap if the serfs (ie US citizens) provide all the labor and equipment for free.

I am not sure anyone has actually said this, but that has certainly been the implication, right?  Obama & Pelosi spends a lot of time accusing insurance companies of having profits that are too high, so I have to believe his intention is to reap cost savings by cutting into them.

I have blogged about this before, but Carpe Diem also picks up this thread, observing that health insurance companies are #86 on the list of US industries in terms of profit margins, with a ROS of  3.3%.  As Mark Perry points out, this gives them a profit of about $100 per individual policy.  Not really a very promising source of savings, is it?  But it is very scary for any industry that makes more than 3.3% profits, knowing that the Administration thinks they are making too much money and has shown a willingness to slice into profits it thinks to be excessive.

Tom Selling and Pat Walters are looking for participation in their survey on issues related to IFRS (international accounting rules) and their migration to the US.  Folks knowledgeable about these issues, either from the accounting or management side, are encouraged to participate.  Tom wrote this invitation:

This is a brief announcement of an online IFRS survey that I have prepared with Pat Walters of Fordham University.

I invited Pat to collaborate with me because we have divergent views on the questions being asked.  Thus, I hope that together we have achieved a modicum of balance in the survey's design--particularly in the phrasing of the questions and response choices offered.  There are only 12 multiple-choice questions, and afterwards, I cordially invite you to express your own opinions regarding its design by posting a comment to this blog post.

We are also trying to reach many more stakeholders than any other survey has reached to-date on the IFRS adoption/convergence question.  To that end, we hope you will choose to email the link at the bottom of this post to anyone else whom you think might have an interest in taking it.

Pat and I thank you in advance for clicking here to take the survey, or by pasting this ugly link in your web browser:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=pF0E3UgdSV_2bHMQvdAnXv8w_3d_3d

Cameron Scott argues this when he says:

It's funny how green-haters accuse greens of being catastrophists, and then argue that cutting carbon emissions will destroy our economy and send us back to the Dark Ages. (See the trailer of Phelem McAleer's Not Evil Just Wrong for a prime example.)

Well, the last pooh-pooh is on them: It turns out we're already cutting emissions in the United States. Sure, some of that is due to a sluggish economy. But negative economic circumstances don't account for the 9 percent reduction in carbon emissions since 2007. In fact, the amount of carbon dioxide produced for every dollar of economic output declined by 3.8 percent in 2008.

I responded:

I really wish you would apply your analytical abilities to equities so I would have some way to bet against you.

Had you looked, you would see that the US has been reducing the CO2 intensity for a unit of economic output for decades. Here is the first source I found online but there are zillions.  In terms of improvement, the US has done better on this metric in the last 20 years than nearly any other country in the world, and just as well as the best (e.g. Germany)

So what you tell is not a new story, and has nothing to do with recent governmental dictats or pleas by environmentalists and everything to do with the ongoing incentives of individuals and businesses to reduce costs and be more efficient.

The reason our total Co2 output has not decreased is that while CO2 per unit of GDP (I will call this CO2 efficiency) has improved 2-4 percent per year, our GDP has grown the same rate or faster. So our overall CO2 output is flat to up (and has actually been down the last few years). One of the main reasons Europe has done better than the US in total CO2 reductions is not improvements in CO2 efficiency, but because their economies have lagged. They bent over backwards in Kyoto to make 1990 the baseline year, so they could include the horrible economies of Russia and East Germany which were in the process of crashing, thus giving them an automatic CO2 reduction for nothing.

Anyway, just look at your own numbers. In the year before, we got about 3% improvement in Co2 efficiency and had about 3% economic growth so CO2 output was flat to down. Last year we had about 3% improvement in Co2 efficiency and the economy was down a lot and thus CO2 was down a lot. When there are two variables in a function, and only one is changing, most logical people attribute the change in output of the function (ie changes in total CO2 output) to the variable that changed (ie economic growth). You, for some reason, attribute changes in the output to the variable (co2 efficiency improvements) which basically remained unchanged. Nice analysis.

You can even see it in your numbers. If CO2 efficiency is up 3.8 percent and Co2 output is down 9 percent, then that means the economic growth/size component has to be down 5.4% (.91/.962 - 1). So almost 60% of the "improvement" is due to a very bad recession and 10% unemployment, but you attribute it to the unchanging 40% piece.

Did anyone in the environmental movement study math or economics?

Forget all the BS political posturing about the consumer -- the fact is that in the vast majority of its actions, the government is anti-consumer.  How else can one explain Administration officials criticizing China for selling goods to the US below cost.  "We're sorry, consumers, that you have been burdened with product choices that have had their prices subsidized by the Chinese.   We're working hard to fix this and make sure prices go back up where they should be."

Licensing, trade law, anti-trust, even consumer products laws -- its all become protection of politically connected corporations against smaller and upstart rivals.  Just look at how Mattel, whose sloppy due diligence forced a number of toy recalls last year, became the big winner of the new "consumer" law these recalls spawned.

Google voice is one of the more exciting communication products I have seen in years.  I have a phone number for free, I can have that number ring multiple different numbers while retaining a single voice mail -- with a free transcription service.  Awesome.

So, of course, the FCC is probably going to kill it.  They will find some way to justify it on nominally consumer grounds, but they are really just doing AT&T a favor.  The argument is that Google voice blocks calls to certain high-access rural areas.  So what?  Heck, I use it mostly to receive calls but if I made calls, do I really want my phone bill to go up by four or five times just so I can call some phone numbers I am never going to call.

The graph is large, so you will have to click through to it, but basically it shows employment losses and wage changes by industry in the US from 2008 to 2009.  What confuses me is that all these industries show fairly large hourly wage gains, with gains the largest in certain sectors with the largest employment losses.

I come up with one of two explanations:

• Labor laws, union contracts, and other structural barriers in the economy make it difficult to cut wages in a recession, which in turn probably makes unemployment worse
• The average wage gains are due to mix shift - companies preferentially lay off newer and less skilled employees who make lower wages, shifting the average wage mix upwards.

Not sure which it is.  Probably a bit of both.

I have written frequently that light rail tends to kill transit systems (Randal O-Toole has been a Cassandra on this subject for years).  Rail is so expensive to build and operate, and so inflexible in its routes and service structure, that once constructed it sucks resources from other modes (especially buses).   This leads to the counter-intuitive conclusion that these huge investments actually in the long run end up reducing transit system coverage and service and reducing ridership.  In particular, the poor, who depend on public transit as their lifeline rather than as a publicly subsidized alternative to buying a Prius, tend to get hammered.  Their bus service is cut and the light rail seldom runs where either their work or their homes are located.  Light rail is in effect a shifting of transit focus from serving the poor to serving the middle class (who wouldn't be caught dead on a yucky old bus but who like trains).

Enter Phoenix.  For the capital cost of $75,000 per daily rider, and large operating losses, we built ourselves a light rail line in one of the most dispersed cities in the country.  In other words, we spent $1.4 billion to serve a single 20 mile corridor which represented a tiny fraction of the city's commutes.  I predicted a while back two outcomes:

1) Light rail fares skyrocket to cover their immense operating deficits and capital costs, giving the lie to politicians that sold these systems as helping working poor.

2) Bus service, the form of transit that serves most of the working poor ...  is cut back to help pay for rail.

So, here is what I woke up to on the front page of our newspaper:

Phoenix's bus system, the largest in the Valley, may see a $16 million budget cut next year to avoid a deficit in 2012, transit officials say.

Bus-system officials will discuss the issue with the Citizens Transit Commission today.

The looming deficit is more bad news for bus riders. Cost-cutting in December and July reduced the frequency of some Phoenix routes and eliminated early morning and late-night service. Also, bus fares went up in all metro Phoenix cities and for Metro light rail this year.

Of course, as with all government analyses, the problem is not enough taxes:

Phoenix is going through multiple rounds of belt-tightening because sales-tax revenue, a crucial part of Phoenix's $171 million transit operating budget, continues to drop because of the economic downturn.

Transit 2000, the 0.4 percent sales tax that voters approved in March 2000, is bringing in less than projected. The tax was expected to generate $21.4 million during the first two months of this fiscal year. It brought in $14.3 million, said Lauri Wingenroth, assistant public-transit director.

Here is what they say don't say in the article, but should:  Most of the 2000 sales tax increase was allocated to the capital costs of light rail construction.  Those can't be cut back, because they are already sunk.  That means that most of these taxes are dedicated to paying off light rail bonds for the next 30 years, and those expenses exist no matter what they do.  So with no way to cut back on light rail expenses, buses (which have more variable costs than rail) are cut.  All exactly as predicted.

PS- Hilariously, right next to this article which should have been labeled a light rail fail, is an article about the "tragedy" that Phoenix is not on the Obama light rail boondoggle map.  Everyone else gets to waste a ton of federal money, why don't we have the same right?  If you read the article, you will find that a lot of countries that are orders of magnitude more dense and have much shorter inter-city travel distances than in the US are way ahead of us.  Left out of the article is the much higher percentage of freight that moves by rail rather than road in the US.

via Bruce McQuain:

David Freddoso reports that the CRS's Senior Foreign Law Specialist Norma Gutierrez has completed a study of the Honduran actions as they relate to former president Mel Zelaya and they don't reflect well on the US. Freddoso has distilled them to the following:

* The Honduran Congress appears to have acted properly in deposing President Manuel Zelaya. Unlike in the United States, the Honduran Congress has the last word when it comes to interpreting the Constitution. Although there is no provision in Honduras's Constitution for impeachment as such, the body does have powers to disapprove of the president's official acts, and to replace him in the event that he is incapable of performing his duties. Most importantly, the Congress also has the authority to interpret exactly what that means.

* The Supreme Court was legally entitled to ask the military to arrest Zelaya. The high court, which is the constitutional venue for trials of the president and other high-ranking officials, also recognized the Congress's ouster of Zelaya when it referred his case back down to a lower court afterward, on the grounds that he was "no longer a high-ranking government official."

* The military did not act properly in forcibly expatriating Zelaya. According to the CRS report and other news stories, Honduran authorities are investigating their decision, which the military justified at the time as a means of preventing bloodshed. In fact, Zelaya should have been given a trial, and if convicted of seeking reelection, he would have lost his citizenship. But he is still a citizen now, and the Constitution forbids the expatriation of Honduran citizens by their government.

* The proper line of succession was followed after Zelaya's ouster. Because there was no Vice President in office when Zelaya was removed (he had resigned to run for president), Micheletti was the proper successor, as he had been president of the Congress.

Sure, we all know that a series of carefully edited anecdotes on film constitute better evidence than comprehensive data and statistics, but Mark Perry soldiers on and does what he can anyway to rebut Michael Moore's new movie.  He has lots of good charts, but his summary is:

the evidence clearly demonstrates that along with capitalism and greater economic freedoms come: a) higher per-capita incomes, b) higher incomes for the poorest 10%, c) greater life expectancy, d) less corruption, e) cleaner environments, and f) greater political rights and civil liberties. Not a bad record for a system that Michael Moore portrays as evil, and says did "nothing for him."

I am always amazed at these attempts to portray countries like Cuba as superior to the US for the common man.  One only has to look at immigration patterns (and even better some measure of desired immigration intent, since our ridiculously restrictive immigration laws keep so many people out of this country) to see the common man's preferences.   Moore and his pears are like a man who looks at a river running from north to south and then arguing that the land in the south must be higher.

Just as an aside, there have probably been thousands of states in world history.   Of all those thousands of states and regimes from history, including the hundreds that exist today, there are probably only 15-20 that would have  social, economic, and political systems that would allow a man born to modest circumstances to make a fortune through criticism of the government and the social elite.

...because the US Fish and Wildlife service has a SWAT team and is not afraid to use it.   Yet another heavily armed government team making sure our nation does not teeter over the brink of anarchy.  Because if everyone were allowed to freely import orchids, our civil society would come to an end.  Fortunately at least one such miscreant was thrown in jail for a well-deserved two years for having the gall not to fill out his import paperwork correctly on otherwise legal orchids.  Thank god Fish and Game had a SWAT team -- who knows what kind of violence 66-year-old orchid terrorists are capable of.   I sure hope I filled out my clock importation paperwork correctly.

I consider winning the Olympics for one's town to be roughly equivalent to army choosing to quarter itself in my house.  So I am pleased that this particular financial locust will go someplace else to pig out.  I am happy to watch it occur in some exotic locale to which I do not pay taxes.

I am reluctant to pile on Obama, though he certainly would have claimed credit had Chicago won.  I will say that the US managed to win an Olympic bid during even the Carter administration, though because the Montreal Olympics were such a financial disaster, LA really didn't have any competition when it was bidding in 1978.  One other city expressed interest that year - Tehran.  What a disaster that would have been.

Please don't tell me the LA Olympics "made money."  The city of LA and state of California subsidized the games in all kinds of ways that never hit the income statement of the organizing committee, starting with police and congestion costs.  Only in comparison to the financial disaster that was Montreal could the LA Olympics be called a financial success.

I am importing a fairly expensive art clock from Germany.  It hit Fedex in Memphis yesterday, then apparently hit a snag.  The US government demands that certain data on imported clocks be submitted to them before it can clear customs.  Fedex had to pay someone for about half an hour of work (to track me down, interview me on the phone, and submit the paperwork) so that this critical data could be submitted to the Feds:

I kid you not.  This would be one of the dumbest things I have seen from the government had it not been for the egg licenses I have to hold.  This data was probably critical for some program pushed through by a Senator to protect some business in his district that does not even exist any more.  I wonder if anyone in the government even remembers why this data is so vital (seriously, per question 11, how many wind-up clocks are coming through customs nowadays).  Probably part of a program to protect America's essential capacity to manufacture clock movements over 12mm in thickness.

I probably have posted on the electricity generating speed bump more times than it deserves, but Glen Reynolds linked this story and I am seeing it linked uncritically all over.  Here was the email I dashed off to Instapundit:

The speed bump / power device at the Burger King in New Jersey is the silliest technology I have ever seen and I am amazed that so many people praise it or write uncritically that it provides free power.  Energy is never free, it comes from somewhere.  In this case, the energy is actually stolen from the car.  The electricity power produced is equal to or less than the extra power the car has to expend going over the bump.

This electricity might be "free" if it is used where cars are braking anyway, say on a long down ramp in a parking garage, or on a suburban street or school zone where speed bumps already exist.  But the Burger King example, and in fact most of the examples I have seen of this installation, are just vampiric theft, very similar to what the US Government does in many of its programs, creating a large benefit for a single user and hoping that distributing the costs in small chunks across a wide number of people makes these costs invisible.

I wrote more about the technology here.

The Baucus Health Care bill follows in the tradition of many other pieces of recent legislation in raising taxes in ways such that Congress can claim that it didn't actually raise taxes.  Here are four such taxes in the Baucus Bill  (note that no one that I know of has read any actual legislative language, so this is based on the press releases by the bill's authors.  Actual bill language can only be worse).

Employer Penalty is a Tax: In a step right out of Goldilocks, the Baucus bill will impose "penalties" on employers with no employee health care plan as well as on employers who have plans that are "too rich."  Never mind the insanity of the government micromanaging how an employer chooses to structure his compensation package to employees.  These "penalties" are structured as percentages of wages -- the one for having no health care plan was 8% of wages in the last bill.  This is a direct tax on employment, making hiring people more expensive (effectively the same magnitude as doubling the Social Security tax).  So how does this effect the average person?  Think of it this way, for the same wage, you job will be more expensive to a company that it was before the bill, making it less likely you will get hired at that wage.

Insurance Mandate as a Tax: The mandate that everyone must have insurance is a tax on the young and the healthy, as I explained previously:

People focus too much on the penalty itself being a new tax.  But the new tax is actually the requirement that individuals buy a product (in this case a health insurance policy) that they feel has no value (or else they would purchase it of their own free will today).  The government stopped pretending long ago that these younger middle class families will get much value from such a policy.  In fact, if they did get value commensurate with the premiums they will be paying, the mandate would not be achieving its purpose.  The whole point is that healthy people pay more into the insurnace system than they get back to support sick people.  If that payment is mandatory, then it is a tax, even if it is called an "insurance mandate" instead.

In fact, this is made all the more clear when politicians also suggest that cheaper high deductible health insurance plans be banned, as they were in Massachusetts.  Again, the whole point is to get young healthy people to overpay for insurance, and allowing them to buy sensible, cheaper, high deductible insurance defeats the whole purpose.

In fact, the bill's supporters have explicitly discussed requirements that insurance companies raise the price of insurance to the young and healthy to help reduce premiums for the old and, er, politically more active.  This is a redistributive tax, hidden within an insurance rate structure that will be heavily regulated by Congress.  Though don't expect Congress to admit this when young folks start to complain, they will say "blame the insurance companies."  Which is the whole beauty of such a hidden tax.

Corporate Taxes as Consumer Taxes: The plan would place new excise taxes on insurance companies, drug companies, and medical device providers.  But these taxes, particularly in the low margin insurance businesses (Yeah, I know if you only listened to Obama, you would never realize they were low margin but they are) just get passed onto consumers in the form of higher prices.  Congress knows this, but pretends it doesn't happen, so it can tell the economically ignorant that it hasn't raised taxes on consumers, and that rising prices are all the fault of the evil insurance companies blah blah, you know the drill.

Price Controls as a Tax: A large part of the Baucus Medicare savings is instituting price controls on doctors and other medical suppliers --  basically cutting their reimbursement rates.  This, by the way, just confirms what we all have known, that Obama and the Democrats don't have some mysterious win-win way to cut medical costs.  The only levers they have are 1. Price Controls and 2. Denying care.

There is absolutely no difference to a doctor between price controls and a tax.  A cut in the reimbursement rate from $50 to $40 is the same as having a 20% tax put on his $50 reimbursement.  Again, price controls in this context are just a way of hiding a tax.

And this might be the most dangerous tax of all, as such price controls always, by the immutable laws of economics accepted by monetarists and Keynsians alike, reduce available supply.  Doctors, for example, are going to be less willing to stay in the medical profession.  The result is inevitably shortages and long waits, something that should surprise absolutely no one as shortages and queuing are endemic in every government health care system in the world, starting with liberal darling Canada, whose citizens get medical treatment quickly only by crossing the border into the US.

Kevin Drum presents this chart:

Look at the top and the bottom of the chart.  The top says "growth of health care costs" while the bottom says "average annual percentage change in total health expenditures."  Drum goes on in his post to use rising expenditures and rising costs interchangeably.  I responded in the comments:

In the US last year, 754,224 people were arrested for possession (not dealing or production) of marijuana.  By the logic of US drug laws, all of these folks are better off with an arrest record and possible incarceration that they are from the nominal negative effects of smoking marijuana (FBI report here, via Radley Balko).  These numbers are just insane.  And while the report only gives race numbers for total drug arrests rather than for just marijuana offenses, a hugely disproportionate number are black (over 1/3 of arrests).

And speaking of equal protection, the arrest numbers for gambling are eye-opening (table 43).  75% of all people arrested for gambling last year in the US were black, including 90% of the arrests of those under 18 for this offense.  It seems it is A-OK for whites to play poker at home for money (I'm guilty) or to bet in Super Bowl pools (guilty again) or to clad themselves in polyester and head to the casino boat, but blacks who choose to compete with the state gambling/lottery monopoly will get arrested.  As an aside, I have always laughed at the government piously suing tobacco companies for targeting minorities with their advertising and then using the same techniques themselves to target minorities for their lottery sales.

John Scalzi, via Instapundit

A producer of Creation, the film about Charles Darwin and his wife Emma, starring Paul Bettany and his real-life wife Jennifer Connelly, is griping that the film has no distributor in the US, apparently because so many Americans are evolution-hating mouth-breathers that no one wants the touch the thing; it's just too darn controversial.

Well, it may be that. Alternately, and leaving aside any discussion of the actual quality of the film, it may be that a quiet story about the difficult relationship between an increasingly agnostic 19th Century British scientist and his increasingly devout wife, thrown into sharp relief by the death of their beloved 10-year-old daughter, performed by mid-list stars, is not exactly the sort of film that's going to draw in a huge winter holiday crowd, regardless of whether that scientist happens to be Darwin or not, and that these facts are rather more pertinent, from a potential distributor's point of view. . . . Maybe if Charles Darwin were played by Will Smith, was a gun-toting robot sent back from the future to learn how to love, and to kill the crap out of the alien baby eaters cleverly disguised as Galapagos tortoises, and then some way were contrived for Jennifer Connelly to expose her breasts to RoboDarwin two-thirds of the way through the film, and there were explosions and lasers and stunt men flying 150 feet into the air, then we might be talking wide-release from a modern major studio. Otherwise, you know, not so much. The "oh, it's too controversial for Americans" comment is, I suspect, a bit of face-saving rationalization from a producer

If you think Scalzi is exaggerating, sit and actually write down a synopsis of the plot for "Transformers" and see if you get anything that makes any more sense - just substitute "Jennifer Connelly's bare breasts" with "Megan Fox's bare midriff."

"I can make a firm pledge"¦.no family making less than $250,000 will see any form of tax increase"¦..not any of your taxes"-Barack Obama, September 12, 2008

Oops, well, so much for that, as Obama imposes a 35% tax on Chinese tires, requiring higher prices be paid by the majority of Americans.  This is a broad-based tax aimed at supporting one narrow American industry, as a payoff to the United Steel Workers who have been sad that the UAW has been getting all the political gravy of late.

Suppose the Chinese government is massively subsidizing tire exports -- that they are taking Chinese taxpayer money and directly applying it to tire exports to reduce prices in the US.  What should our response be?  Mine would be:  Thanks, suckers.  If the Chinese really want to tax their people to subsidize lower US consumer prices, why in the world would we want to stop them?

Oh, and remember that Obama pledge to be all lovey-dovey with the rest of the world instead of that nasty confrontational Bush administration?  Well, forget that too:

HONG KONG -- Just two days after the United States slapped Chinese tire imports with hefty tariffs, Beijing has hit back by saying it would launch an anti-dumping investigation into automobile and chicken products from the U.S.

[...]

The "protectionist" policy that seems to have triggered the Chinese tit-for-tat investigation was an order signed on Friday by President Barack Obama that imposes a 35% tariff on tires imported from China on top of the existing import duty of 4%.

Can anyone say, "Smoot-Hawley."  I am sure happy we all learned from the one unequivocal lesson that every economist, left-right-Keynsian-monetarist, took away from the Great Depression -- that starting an international trade war is the best way to exacerbate a recession.  Obama has  done just about the only thing everyone agrees shouldn't be done in response to a major economic downturn.

Update: More good analysis here

Postscript: I wrote this hypothetical post from the Chinese perspective a couple of years ago:  From "Panda Blog:"

Our Chinese government continues to pursue a policy of export promotion, patting itself on the back for its trade surplus in manufactured goods with the United States.  The Chinese government does so through a number of avenues, including:

• Limiting yuan convertibility, and keeping the yuan's value artificially low
• Imposing strict capital controls that limit dollar reinvestment to low-yield securities like US government T-bills
• Selling exports below cost and well below domestic prices (what the Americans call "dumping") and subsidizing products for export

It is important to note that each and every one of these government interventions subsidizes US citizens and consumers at the expense of Chinese citizens and consumers.  A low yuan makes Chinese products cheap for Americans but makes imports relatively dear for Chinese.  So-called "dumping" represents an even clearer direct subsidy of American consumers over their Chinese counterparts.  And limiting foreign exchange re-investments to low-yield government bonds has acted as a direct subsidy of American taxpayers and the American government, saddling China with extraordinarily low yields on our nearly $1 trillion in foreign exchange.   Every single step China takes to promote exports is in effect a subsidy of American consumers by Chinese citizens.

This policy of raping the domestic market in pursuit of exports and trade surpluses was one that Japan followed in the seventies and eighties.  It sacrificed its own consumers, protecting local producers in the domestic market while subsidizing exports.  Japanese consumers had to live with some of the highest prices in the world, so that Americans could get some of the lowest prices on those same goods.  Japanese customers endured limited product choices and a horrendously outdated retail sector that were all protected by government regulation, all in the name of creating trade surpluses.  And surpluses they did create.  Japan achieved massive trade surpluses with the US, and built the largest accumulation of foreign exchange (mostly dollars) in the world.  And what did this get them?  Fifteen years of recession, from which the country is only now emerging, while the US economy happily continued to grow and create wealth in astonishing proportions, seemingly unaware that is was supposed to have been "defeated" by Japan.

We at Panda Blog believe it is insane for our Chinese government to continue to chase the chimera of ever-growing foreign exchange and trade surpluses.  These achieved nothing lasting for Japan and they will achieve nothing for China.  In fact, the only thing that amazes us more than China's subsidize-Americans strategy is that the Americans seem to complain about it so much.  They complain about their trade deficits, which are nothing more than a reflection of their incredible wealth.  They complain about the yuan exchange rate, which is set today to give discounts to Americans and price premiums to Chinese.  They complain about China buying their government bonds, which does nothing more than reduce the costs of their Congress's insane deficit spending.  They even complain about dumping, which is nothing more than a direct subsidy by China of lower prices for American consumers.

And, incredibly, the Americans complain that it is they that run a security risk with their current trade deficit with China!  This claim is so crazy, we at Panda Blog have come to the conclusion that it must be the result of a misdirection campaign by CIA-controlled American media.  After all, the fact that China exports more to the US than the US does to China means that by definition, more of China's economic production is dependent on the well-being of the American economy than vice-versa.  And, with nearly a trillion dollars in foreign exchange invested heavily in US government bonds, it is China that has the most riding on the continued stability of the American government, rather than the reverse.  American commentators invent scenarios where the Chinese could hurt the American economy, which we could, but only at the cost of hurting ourselves worse.  Mutual Assured Destruction is alive and well, but today it is not just a feature of nuclear strategy but a fact of the global economy.

I couldn't really get up enough energy to post about the whole Van Jones kerfuffle.  Apparently, as one of Obama's 129 czars, this guy whose job it is to redistribute billions of dollars from one group of individuals to another and issue diktats to be followed by private citizens and businesses, is *gasp* a communist.  Well, no sh*t.  All of these various czars have communist roles so why is it surprising Obama might have picked a communist to hold one of them.  The only surprise was that Van Jones was dumb enough to admit it in print rather than hiding it in leftish double-speak like most of the rest of the administration.

Anyway, all that aside, you gotta love the NY Post, which has no problem dropping any pretense of statesmanship and is perfectly willing to skewer its cross town rival.  This editorial is pretty dang funny.  An excerpt:

Newspaper of record? The Times isn't so much a newspaper as a clique of high school girls sending IMs to like-minded friends about their feuds and faves and raves and rants. OMFG you guys! It's no more objective than Beck is....

The Times continues to treat communism as a cute campus peccadillo like pot smoking or nude streaking. A Times think piece (Sept. 9) worried that Jones' fall was "swift and personal." Being a communist is personal but being the pregnant teen daughter of a vice presidential candidate is public business?

In a quasi-related post, Virginia Postrel says the Washington Post lost $1.10 per copy of their newspaper last quarter.  Wow!

I have to disagree with Ed Driscoll, though.  He like many conservatives argues that this economic problem of newspapers is somehow because the Times has dropped its objectivity.  I am not sure anyone has evidence that is true.  One could make, I think, an equally strong case that the Times should be less objective and go openly partisan.  After all, this notion of politically neutral newspapers is a pretty recent phenomenon in the US.

I actually think the problem with newspapers like the Washington Post is the "Washington" part.  Local business models dominated for decades in fields where technology made national distribution difficult or where technology did not allow for anything but a very local economy of scale.  Newspapers, delivery of television programming, auto sales, beverage bottling and distribution, book selling, etc. were all mainly local businesses.  But you can see with this list that technology is changing everything.  TV can now be delivered via sattelite and does not require local re-distribution via line of sight broadcast towers or cable systems.  Amazon dominated book selling via the Internet.  Many of these businesses (e.g. liquor, auto dealers, TV broadcasting) would have de-localized faster if it had not been for politicians in the pocket of a few powerful companies passing laws to lock in outdated business or technological models.

Newspapers are ripe for a restructuring.  How can one support a great Science page or Book Review section or International Bureau on local circulation?  How much effort do the NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, SF Chronicle, etc. duplicate every day?  People tell me, "that's what the wire services are for."  Bah.  The AP is 160 years old!  It is a pre-Civil War solution to this problem.  Can it really be that technology and changing markets have not facilitated a better solution?

The future is almost certainly a number of national papers (ala the WSJ and USA Today) printed locally with perhaps local offices to provide some local customization or special local section.  Paradoxically, such a massive consolidation from hundreds of local papers to a few national papers would actually increase competition.  While we might get a few less stories about cats being saved from trees in the local paper, we could well end up not with one paper selection (as we have today in most cities) but five or six different papers to choose from  (just look at Britain).  Some of these papers might choose to sell political neutrality while some might compete on political affiliation.

If I were running the Washington Post, I would think very seriously about creating a national news offering, a USA Today with substance.   If you offered me a Washington Post re-branded as a national paper, with some strong side offerings like the NY Times Science section and a good local sports section and a local news section, I'd toss my Arizona Republic in a second.  Its going to take some good thought as to how to weave together the national offering with locally customized content and to manage local vs. national advertising accounts, but with technology this is doable -- Clear Channel does something similar in radio.

I wonder, in fact, why no one has done this yet -- when you look at the circulation numbers, only the USA Today and WSJ, the two papers pursuing this path, are seeing growth.  My only thought is that news is one of those businesses dominated by passionate people who are tied deeply, emotionally into the industry in a way that makes it impossible to envision or consider new models (aviation is another such business, in my opinion, and the US auto business is probably another).  What we need is for the Post and a few other major papers to fail and then let some really bright, right people from outside the business come and shake it up.  This is, by the way, one of the unsung benefits of bankruptcy, is that it takes assets out of the hands of the people who got the company in the mess to begin with -- a benefit we short-circuited when we spent billions of taxpayer dollars in the auto industry to keep GM and Chrysler assets out of new and potentially more innovative hands.

I posted the other day that one explanation of rising health care expenditures in the US is rising wealth.  As we are wealthier than other Western nations, doesn't it make sense we would spend more on our health than other nations.

James DeLong adds:

Robert Fogel, in his NBER paper, which has more detail than his American article (and will cost you $5), looks at changes in U.S. consumption patterns from 1875 to the present. A striking number is the reduction in the costs of the basics -- food, shelter, clothing took 74% of income in 1875; 13% in 1995. This has freed up a lot of income, and one of the great gainers has been health. In 1875, it took only 1% of consumption, largely because there was little to be bought, except for patent medicines loaded with alcohol and opiates, or a saw to lop off an injured limb. By 1995, it was 9%.Leisure was another big gainer -- 17% in 1875; 68% in 1995.

So if improvements in medical technology lead people to reallocate money toward health, fine.

Like Franken, I can freehand draw the US with all fifty states from memory.  But I start from the opposite corner, in Washington state.  But, I can also drink a beer while standing on my head, and used to (when I played rugby) race people saying I would drink one upside down in the time they drank two normally.

Kevin Drum shows this chart as evidence we need government health care like the rest of the "civilized" world:

I write back in the comments:

I wonder if the graph you show is a bug or a feature.  My guess is that you could draw the same chart in the same shape with the US on the far left for consumption of items as diverse as "big screen TVs" and "pro sports tickets."  We would chalk up spending in any other area as simply a result of wealth.  Why not on health care?  Why is it so bad that we spend more money on something like health care which is arguably less frivolous and more critical than TV's or baseball games?

I would understand it if the argument was that we are not getting our money's worth, but that meme is just about dead.  The evidence is pretty clear that though life expectancy in the US is lower than some of these other countries, this is due to issues unrelated to health care (specifically murders and auto accidents).  When the cause of death is limited to things amenable to the health care system, the US ranks #1 in the world in life expectancy.  This is not even to mention the customer experience in accessing the health care system, which for all its irritations, is still ranked the best in the world.  We pay the most, and get the best results, because we can afford the best.

It makes me nervous that you think this is a problem.

PS- I certainly think there are efficiencies that could be wrung out from the health care system if people actually shopped with their own money for their own health care, as they do for every other product and service they buy.  This is proved out in the falling prices for non-insurance covered health procedures, such as laser eye surgery.  But it is a laugh to think the government will wring these savings out.  The government has never, ever, ever made a process more efficient.  All it can do to cut costs is a) institute price controls on suppliers, which eventually lead to shortages and reduced R&D and/or b)  Eliminate services.

Update: OMG, we need government take over of the automotive sector, because we spend more money on cars than any other country, and by the left's logic that is a sign of failure of the status quo.

Via Steve Chapman at Reason:

[President Obama] says though the United States spends more per person on medical care than any other nation, "the quality of our care is often lower, and we aren't any healthier. In fact, citizens in some countries that spend substantially less than we do are actually living longer than we do."

That's one of the favorite rationales for a government-led overhaul. But it gives about as realistic a picture of American medicine as an episode of Scrubs.

It's true that the United States spends more on health care than anyone else, and it's true that we rank below a lot of other advanced countries in life expectancy. The juxtaposition of the two facts, however, doesn't prove we are wasting our money or doing the wrong things.

It only proves that lots of things affect mortality besides medical treatment. Heath Ledger didn't die at age 28 because the American health care system failed him.

One big reason our life expectancy lags is that Americans have an unusual tendency to perish in homicides or accidents. We are 12 times more likely than the Japanese to be murdered and nearly twice as likely to be killed in auto wrecks.

In their 2006 book, The Business of Health, economists Robert L. Ohsfeldt and John E. Schneider set out to determine where the U.S. would rank in life span among developed nations if homicides and accidents are factored out. Their answer? First place.

That discovery indicates our health care system is doing a poor job of preventing shootouts and drunk driving but a good job of healing the sick. All those universal-care systems in Canada and Europe may sound like Health Heaven, but they fall short of our model when it comes to combating life-threatening diseases.

One of the justifications for diverting highway money to ridiculously expensive light rail systems is that light rail supposedly reduces energy consumption.  Really?  This is via the most recent report from the DOE's Transportation Energy Book, as highlighted by the Anti-Planner (click to enlarge):

The figures for cars are from tables 2.12 and 2.13 of the same report.  Even the best light rail systems are not substantially more efficient than cars, and this gap will likely continue to close, as it has for years, as cars get more efficient.

A Note on Freight: By the way, passenger rail promoters in the US always point to the Europeans as having a better rail system.  But while the Europeans put more of their passengers on rail than does the US, they put less of their freight there.  I would argue that the US system is much more "green", as the differences in energy use between a ton mile of freight on road vs. rail is much larger than the difference in energy use of a passenger mile on road vs. rail.  And besides, from a lifestyle standpoint, would you really want more freight on the roads?  (This is a real tradeoff -- unless one spends the absurd amount of money to build two separate systems, a rail network can be optimized for freight or passengers -- the two do not coexist very well on the same tracks).

Postscript: Just to head off the obvious rhetorical battles -- the incremental energy efficiency of moving one driver to a light rail rider of an existing system is very high.  The car consumption goes away and the train does not incrementally increase its energy use much with one more passenger.  So at the margin, it is correct when someone tells you that it saves energy to shift your commuting to an existing light rail line.  However, it does not make sense, from an energy perspective, to build a light rail line in the first place.  The investment is too high, the energy savings are negligible or non-existent, and the operating cost are so high that light rail tends to crowd out bus operations that help the poor.  As I have written before, for every light rail system I have checked, the cost to build the system is enough to buy every daily rider a Prius and the operating deficit enough to keep every one of these Prius's filled with gas.

Update:  I further understand that cars in the city likely have lower gas mileages than these averages, particularly for commutes that might be substituted by light rail.  But light rail is sold as if it is substantially more energy efficient, and it really would have to be orders of magnitude more efficient to justify the capital costs that are so much higher than for an equivalent capacity of roadway.  The efficiency is just not there.

In case you weren't sure what progressives were after:

The outgoing leader of Greenpeace has issued a call for the suppression of economic growth in the U.S. and Western nations. Under questioning by BBC reporter Stephen Sackur on the August 5, 2009 "Hardtalk" program, Gerd Leipold, the retiring leader of Greenpeace, said "the lifestyle of the rich in the world is not a sustainable model.

Excerpt from NotEvilJustWrong.com: "Leipold told the BBC that there is an urgent need for the suppression of economic growth in the United States and around the world. He said annual growth rates of 3 percent to 8 percent cannot continue without serious consequences for the climate."

"We will definitely have to move to a different concept of growth. ... The lifestyle of the rich in the world is not a sustainable model," Leipold told the BBC.

"If you take the lifestyle, its cost on the environment, and you multiply it with the billions of people and an increasing world population, you come up with numbers which are truly scary," Leipold explained.

Left unexplained by Leipold is how environmental conditions in the US have improved substantially over the last 100 years, not just coincident with but because of economic growth and growing wealth.   Our country looked like China 100 years ago, but growing wealth gave us the ability not only to produce, but to produce much more cleanly.   On virtually every metric you can name, the US is cleaner than it was even 30 years ago.  On many key metrics, like water quality and sulfur dioxide production, we are cleaner even than Europe and certainly cleaner than most Third World nations.

By the way, if you really want to tick someone off at Greenpeace, you should observe that the person most responsible for saving the whales was not anyone at Greenpeace, but was John D. Rockefeller.  Greenpeace may have saved a few by jumping their boat in front of some Japanese or Russian harpoons, but Rockefeller made whaling unprofitable.

Which brings us full circle to the "growth killing the planet" issue.  I made fun of this static view of man and technology here when  I wrote a hypothetical 1870 post on the Peak Whale Theory

As the US Population reaches toward the astronomical total of 40 million persons, we are reaching the limits of the number of people this earth can support.    If one were to extrapolate current population growth rates, this country in a hundred years could have over 250 million people in it!  Now of course, that figure is impossible - the farmland of this country couldn't possibly support even half this number.  But it is interesting to consider the environmental consequences.

Take the issue of transportation.  Currently there are over 11 million horses in this country, the feeding and care of which constitute a significant part of our economy.  A population of 250 million would imply the need for nearly 70 million horses in this country, and this is even before one considers the fact that "horse intensity", or the average number of horses per family, has been increasing steadily over the last several decades.  It is not unreasonable, therefore, to assume that so many people might need 100 million horses to fulfill all their transportation needs.  There is just no way this admittedly bountiful nation could support 100 million horses.  The disposal of their manure alone would create an environmental problem of unprecedented magnitude.

Or, take the case of illuminant.  As the population grows, the demand for illuminant should grow at least as quickly.  However, whale catches and therefore whale oil supply has leveled off of late, such that many are talking about the "peak whale" phenomena, which refers to the theory that whale oil production may have already passed its peak.  250 million people would use up the entire supply of the world's whales four or five times over, leaving none for poorer nations of the world.

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