Operational Experience with an Electric Vehicle

An employee of mine had their car viciously damaged in a theft in Prince George's County, Maryland.  All of the windows on the passenger side were broken and the passenger side mirror was destroyed.  An EZ-Pass was stolen.  The repair is taking weeks.  The owner decided to rent a car for the duration.  

A Manager's Special was much less expensive than normal prices.  The Manager's Special was a Volvo C40 Recharge, a totally battery driven vehicle.  The EPA rates it as having a full charge range of about 226 miles.  The car reports its own range at 100% as being 185 miles, perhaps based on its actual history of use.  Reviews say it has a quick recharge.

The employee drove the vehicle to work, a distance of 16.2 miles.  The outside temperature was in the low 40s Fahrenheit.  This used 11% of the battery charge, implying that the 100% range was 147 miles.  The user recharged the battery at home using a regular 120V outlet and a heavy-duty 25 foot power cord.  In 13 hours of charging time, the C40 Recharge battery charge increased 21% or 1.6% per hour.  This is a bit short of allowing the user to drive to work and return, with no stops at the grocery store or other diversions from the shortest route.

A grocery store near work has two recharging stations that are rated to provide recharging power of about 8 KW, though people report that the rate is more like 6 to 7 KW.  This compares very favorably with the home recharging rate of 0.0763 KW, assuming the long extension cord is not dropping that rate of charge further.  Nonetheless, the grocery store recharging station is often not available and using it still means sitting there for about 35 minutes to charge the batteries from 0 to 100%, when the station is actually at 8 KW.

I have many, many better ways to spend my time than dealing with the recharging issues of an electric vehicle.  These vehicles are in no way desirable and any government that wants to force me to waste my time on their idiot idea that these vehicles are to be mandated will earn nothing short of my hatred.  Of course, anyone who wants to drive such vehicles is welcome to do so, but I see no reason for governments to subsidize their use.

Phillip Pilkington: The green-energy bubble is about to burst — and thanks to Biden, taxpayers will suffer

Phillip Pilkington has written an admirably rational evaluation of the IRA, the fragility of the renewable energy industry, and the horrible consequences for the American people. I recommend reading his NY Post opinion article entitled The green-energy bubble is about to burst -- and thanks to Biden, taxpayers will suffer.

This calamity is perpetrated based on the failed hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming. That hypothesis has made prediction after prediction that failed actual observation. By the scientific method, this means the hypothesis is itself false.

This is not surprising, since the physics behind the argument is wrong. Additions of CO2 to the atmosphere do not provide added warming at present levels of CO2, since its cooling effects are about equal to the warming effects at the present CO2 concentrations. Almost everyone ignores the cooling effects. Modest warming would actually be good. Added atmospheric CO2 is highly beneficial to plant growth and therefore to all animal life, including humans.

How can so many scientists and economists get so much wrong? But they sure have. Note that contrary to claims, there is no real consensus. Only warming projections get published, but even those projections do not agree well with one another. This is not consensus. This is confusion. It is proof of ignorance.

Subsidies for Electric Vehicles and Wind and Solar Power

In today's Cooler Heads Digest from Myron Ebel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, comes this from the lead article by Ben Lieberman:

On electric vehicles (EVs), Rep. Dan Kildee (D-MI) of the House Ways and Means Committee is pushing to change the provisions that capped the $7,500 per vehicle tax credit once a manufacturer sold 200,000 such cars. H.R. 2256 proposes raising the cap to 600,000 vehicles but only slightly reducing the credit to $7,000. For Tesla, which has exceeded the 200,000 vehicle limit, and General Motors, which is nearing it, the extra 400,000 qualifying vehicles could generate $2.8 billion each for their EV purchasers, nearly half of which are wealthy Californians. Given that other automakers would have eventually reached and exceeded 200,000 in EV sales, the revised cap could be worth tens of billions of dollars in the years ahead. EVs are way past the point of the “infant industry” rationale for these tax credits, but that does not seem to matter. 

Also under discussion for eventual inclusion in a big energy tax package are additional years for solar and wind production tax credits promised by Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal (D-MA). These tax credits had been made more generous by the 2015 bill in exchange for ending them once and for all. It is not yet known how many post-sunset years the latest extension will provide. 

One fringe benefit of the debate is that it provides a brief respite from the drumbeat of claims that wind and solar have plummeted in cost and are now cheaper than conventional electricity. If true, there would be no need for yet another extension of favored tax treatment for them.

So even after all these years, electric vehicles are not ready for prime-time consumers and even wealthy Californians have to be bribed by the government to buy them.  Seems to me, I have heard Democrats complaining a lot about their conjurings of a bribe in one context, yet they are constantly bribing Americans to do their bidding.  A bribe to the advantage of socialism is no bribe, just as a lie to the advantage of socialism is the truth.  You just have to understand their reality-free context.

That last quoted paragraph is a humdinger.  Apparently, the propaganda breaks down a bit when it comes time to claim a subsidy for investments that make no sense in the free market.

The price of electricity in Germany and renewable energy as manipulated by Physics World

According to Physics World on 27 March 2019, a publication of the Institute of Physics, 

between 2008 and 2015 renewable energy deployment “caused an electricity market price reduction of 24% in Germany and of 35% in Sweden”.

Yet, according to Clean Energy Wire:

We see that the average cost of electricity for a German household using 3,500 kWh/year of electricity from 2006 to 2019 went up 55.3%.  From 2008 to 2015, it went up 32.6%, which is a far cry from falling by 24% as stated by Physics World.  The only major component of the household cost that fell from 2008 to 2018 was the Aquisition/sales component and it fell by only 2.4%, not 24%.

The case for "renewable energy" even from the Institute for Physics and Physics World is much akin to the magician's use of misdirection.  There no doubt is some way to parse out energy costs that allows one to claim that an electricity market price reduction of 24% occurred in Germany between 2008 and 2015, but this is highly irrelevant to the consumer who has to pay for electricity.

Note in the graph above that the grid fee has gone up, which is exactly what one expects when one has to collect energy from many small sources such as wind generation and solar panels tend to be.  The value added tax went up, no doubt in part so the German government could use a part of that tax money to enforce a transition away from hydrocarbon fuels, pay for its own higher operational costs due to its higher electricity costs, and to pay for its extensive propaganda about how catastrophic man-made global warming justified forcing the nation to use more expensive and unreliable wind and solar power.

Note that the Renewables surcharge went up from 2008 to 2015 by 532%!  What was the purpose of that fee?  Why its purpose was to subsidize wind and solar power generation.  Why is there a need to subsidize renewable power generation if the cost of electricity is falling as Physics World claims it is?  The answer seems clearly to be that they are quoting a cost that has the subsidy paid out by the Renewables surcharge built into it.

So, let us just focus on the sum of the Acquisition/sales cost and the Renewables surcharge cost from 2008 to 2015 to get a more realistic understanding of the effects of the governmental push for renewable energy on the German consumer.  The sum of these costs in 2008 was 8.38 Euro cents per kWh/yr.  In 2015, the cost was 13.22 Euro cents.  From 2008 to 2015, the cost to the consumer went up by 57.8%, which is a very different story from going down by 24%.  From 2006 to 2019, this measure of the cost of the electricity went up by 227%.

No fear that the Physics World magician will saw the case for renewable energy in two.  Physics World will not spill any of its blood, no matter what measures of reader misdirection are required.  Note that it is most curious that an article published in 2019 terminated its cost claim with data from 2015.  But that is itself a small act of misdirection compared to ignoring such costs increases as the Renewables surcharge or the increased grid costs, which I am sure are among the added costs that make wind and solar possible at all on the grid.

I sure do hate to see the dishonesty of such institutions as the American Institute of Physics and the Institute of Physics, based in the United Kingdom on all matters pertaining to catastrophic man-made global warming.  The major institutions of physics have become sorry prostitutes, with far less necessity to justify their behavior than most prostitutes probably have.  There is no heart of gold there.  You only have to look at what they are perfectly happy to do to the German household consumer and how they want to extend that to everyone else in the world.

Who can you trust?  Not the major scientific institutions.  Real evil resides in the Institute of Physics, as it also does in the American Institute of Physics and many another professional scientific organization.  

US Postal Service Subsidizes Chinese Package Delivery

Edward Hudgins, Ph.D., Research Director of the Heartland Institute, has written a very interesting article on how the Universal Postal Union (UPU) agreement forces the US Postal Service to subsidize the delivery of small packages sent from China to American addresses.  The USPS lost about $75 million in 2014 due to it having to deliver small packages from China.  It costs less for a Chinese business to send a package thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean to most American addresses than it costs an American business to send a similar package 600 miles to an American address.  This is an unfair trade practice.  The Trump administration tried to get the UPU to change its archaic rules, but the US gets only one vote among 192 nations in the UPU.  The UPU basically shrugged the US off.  The Trump administration has responded with a termination of our membership in one year if the problem is not corrected.

My Reply to "Sustainability is an Economic Boon Not a Liability"

Richard Matthews posted Sustainability is an Economic Boon Not a Liability at the Green Market Oracle.  Here is my comment in response:

There is no scientific consensus that the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis is correct. Most scientists who do say they believe in catastrophic man-made global warming cannot offer a clear explanation of the scientific theory that claim is based on.  Those who offer a theory very often disagree with one another.  Then there are many scientists who see the hypothesis as false, though many of them believe that carbon dioxide does cause some warming, which may be regarded as beneficial, not catastrophic.  Then there are still other scientists, including myself, who understand that the effects of carbon dioxide on the surface temperature are many, all of them very small, and more of them cooling effects than warming effects.  The net result is that CO2 has an insignificant effect. This is why the effect of CO2 has not been measurable to date.

There are many benefits to conserving energy.  Those real benefits are best achieved by people individually choosing them, not by government mandates and subsidies.  Real benefits will be pursued in the free market.  It is only harmful energy policies that need to be imposed by government.

The EPA ruling that CO2 is a pollutant is scientifically unsupported.  Its claims that mercury emitted by coal-fired power plants was a real danger were also without scientific justification.  Years of mercury precipitation data have failed to show any downwind mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants that can be seen above the dominant natural sources of mercury in the USA.  If mercury is such a hazard, there are huge swathes of land in the southern American West and Great Plains states that have to be evacuated due to natural sources of mercury.  Yet even in those areas of relatively high natural mercury contamination in the USA, there is no epidemiological evidence of harm to people.

The last sentence in blue was not in the original comment.

Repealing ObamaCare Costs How Many People Coverage?

Those who advocate the retention of ObamaCare are claiming highly exaggerated losses of coverage due to its repeal.  They assume that no new coverage will come into play upon its repeal.  HHS Secretary Burwell cited a claim that 30 million Americans will lose their coverage.  Many others are claiming that 20 million will lose their coverage.  These exaggerations are exactly as I predicted here.

First, as I noted here, only 11.1 million people were covered for the year in 2016, though 12.7 million signed up for coverage on ObamaCare health insurance websites.  They are very trusting people to sign up and to provide their social security numbers on those very incompetent exchanges.  But I digress.  The lower 11.1 million people number is found by adding up the monthly premium payments and dividing by 12.  But you can be sure that the advocates of ObamaCare use the 12.7 million number and have no regard for the fact that the 6 million who lost coverage due to ObamaCare are now proportional to the population growth as 6.1 million who would have been happy to stay on their old plans, especially now that they will have to soon make more changes due to the many instabilities that ObamaCare has introduced.  Subtract 6.1 million whose loss of insurance the ObamaCare advocates originally did not care about from 11.1 million and one has only 5.0 million on ObamaCare of new enrollees.

The ObamaCare insurance loss alarmists count all of the new enrollees on Medicaid compared to 2013 as being covered by ObamaCare as well.  As I noted here, of the 17 million new enrollees into Medicaid in 2014, only 3.3 million were newly eligible for coverage as a result of state expansions of Medicaid benefits as a result of ObamaCare.  It is clear that the claim that 30 million will lose their insurance comes from adding 17 million added people on Medicaid to 12.7 million who paid some portion of their premiums on ObamaCare purchased insurance in 2016.  It is also clear that this is a very dishonest number.

A more honest number is that of adding the additional 5.0 million insured under ObamaCare exchanges from the fully paid premium equivalent number to the 3.3 million added due to the expansion of Medicaid coverage by states under the ObamaCare law.  That gives us 8.3 million people.  But even that is dishonest.

Why?  One of the reasons this is dishonest because in 2014 alone employers dropped the health insurance coverage of 2 million people under their employer plans.  Small businesses alone dropped coverage for 2.2 million people as a result of ObamaCare and some unknown degree of reduction due to the super-extended poor growth Obama economy, some of which is also due to ObamaCare.  What is more, prior to ObamaCare, the number of people covered under employer plans had expanded year after year, so that growth in employer coverage was lost.  So, conservatively, we subtract another 2 million from the number of people who will lose coverage due to the repeal of ObamaCare.  We are now at 6.3 million people.

But in reality, these 6.3 million people will have the option to go without health insurance after the repeal, which may be wise if they are healthy or so rich that they can reasonably be self-insured.  In 2017, the wealthy will not be able to afford to lose 2.5% of their income to ObamaCare penalties, so they will have to buy ObamaCare health insurance no matter how little they need it, unless it is repealed.  Then ending ObamaCare will bring many employers back to offering insurance plans for their employees.  Many more cost effective private plans will come into existence, once the ObamaCare straitjackets are removed.  ObamaCare requires too many doctor visits and doctors offer much less treatment per visit since it was passed.  This is the usual practice with government-controlled health care.  It becomes very inconvenient, so people use it less and get less for the cost of the coverage.  Without ObamaCare, there will be a return to competition in the medical insurance market as well.  Most areas of the country now have only one or two insurers offering ObamaCare health insurance plans.  This is not good for costs.  High costs keep many from enrolling in health care insurance.

So, if the Republicans do nothing to replace ObamaCare, the net number of people losing health insurance will be fewer than lost it when ObamaCare was put in place.  If 6 million people happy with their insurance then did not matter, how can the advocates of ObamaCare claim that the less than 6 million people dependent upon ObamaCare will matter now.  In fact, the repeal of ObamaCare does not mean that those people added to Medicaid due to its expansion in some states will not continue to be covered by Medicaid in those states.  That 3.3 million people were almost entirely the responsibility of the states after 3 years under ObamaCare in any case.  2016 was the third year. Federal subsidy payments were scheduled to plummet in 2017 anyway.  This is why many states did not allow themselves to be hooked into expanding their Medicaid rolls.  So, the repeal of ObamaCare will actually result in fewer than 3 million people losing their health care insurance relative to the before ObamaCare number.

Only Democrat Socialists can get away with pretending that fewer than 3 million people are 30 million people or sometimes only 20 million people.  These are the same people who claimed that 47 million Americans were uninsured before ObamaCare and then in 2014 stopped counting the many millions of illegal immigrants as among those uninsured to make ObamaCare look as though it was much more effective in providing health insurance than it actually was.  Tricky Dicks, these socialists.  Too bad we do not have a free press willing to keep them honest.

A Clearly Rational Federal Court Decision Against the IRS Rule to Offer Subsidies on Federal ObamaCare Exchanges

Among the cases challenging the IRS rule that subsidies for individuals and tax penalties for non-complying individuals and companies would be administered in all fifty states and the District of Columbia, is the case brought by Scott Pruitt, the Attorney General of the state of Oklahoma.  Oklahoma and 35 other states did not choose to establish PPACA or ObamaCare exchanges, as the PPACA law tried to get them to do by taxing every American, but only allowing individual subsidies in those states establishing an ObamaCare exchange.  Non-complying states were to be penalized with taxes and the loss of any partial return of that tax money in the form of subsidies.  That this was the intent was very clear to those who followed the progress of the PPACA legislation through Congress.

Of course, it was also very clear that PPACA was a revenue bill which violated the constitutional requirement that it originate in the House of Representatives.  It is further clear that the only justification for the collectivist claim that the collective gets to dictate how every American maintains his or her body's and mind's health is based on a claim of collectivist ownership of everyone's mind and body.  This is a very clear and certain violation of the American Principle of a very limited government dedicated only to the protection of the equal, sovereign right of each and every individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  I for one am exceedingly furious that the government considers me its slave by depriving me of self-ownership and the right to pursue my own happiness.

United States District Judge Ronald A. White of the Eastern District of Oklahoma ruled on 30 September 2014 that "the IRS Rule is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion or otherwise not in accordance with law, pursuant to 5 U.S.C. [paragraph] 706(2)(A), in excess of statutory jurisdiction, authority, or limitations, or short of statutory right, pursuant to 5 U.S.C. [paragraph] 706(2)(C), or otherwise is an invalid implementation of the ACA, and is hereby vacated."

Judge Ronald A. White provided a very rational decision, which is very much appreciated in light of the three judge panel in King v. Burwell who decided that they would not help the plaintiff destroy the PPACA by ruling in accordance with the language of the law.  No, instead they decided on the basis of how they claimed Congress intended the law to work while not considering the actual history even of constraints on Congress in forcing the states to comply with handing control over health care insurance to the federal government.  Neither did they consider the actual discussions and trades within Congress needed to acquire even sufficient Democrat votes to pass the bill.  Similarly, the dissenting judge on the three judge panel that vacated the ObamaCare subsidies and tax penalties in Halbig v. Burwell for the District of Columbia Court of Appeals exercised a similar flight of fancy in interpreting the PPACA.

The Honorable Ronald A. White read the bill as written and said that if Congress had intended the bill to operate otherwise, it would have written the bill differently.  What is more, if Congress decides that the application of the law as written is not what it wants, then Congress can readily pass legislation to change the law.  This is exactly the way a rational person would expect laws to be applied.  Neither the IRS nor the federal courts are the legislative body and neither has the constitutional power to enact or to change laws.  How the 3-judge panel of the 4th Circuit Court that decided the King v. Burwell case could have decided that the law was ambiguous is incredible.  What is more, if it were ambiguous, then it is up to Congress, not the IRS, to eliminate any such ambiguity.  Ridiculous consequences would result from any other principle and the People would lose all power to control any government operating as the 4th Circuit Court ruled government should work.

Unfortunately, the entire District of Columbia Circuit Court decided to rule on Halbig v. Burwell and the Democrat appointed judges are now in the majority on that Circuit Court.  They will hear the case in December.  What is more, the decision by the Honorable Ronald A. White will be appealed to the entire 10th Circuit Court on which 7 of the 12 judges were appointed by Democrats.  The case of Indiana v. IRS is also yet to be decided.  Given the otherworldly ability of Democrat-appointed judges to misinterpret clear English and to ignore the history of the passage of this law, the People of the United States may not be relieved of the ObamaCare tyranny.

But, the state of Oklahoma, Governor Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, Attorney General Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma, and the Honorable Ronald A. White of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma have all proved themselves Heroes for in their efforts to preserve the rights of the individual in this desperate fight to protect self-ownership against the brutal onslaught of ObamaCare.

Federal Judge Rules Suit Against ObamaCare May Proceed

One of the many ways the Obama Regime is violating its Signature Law is by claiming that the IRS can impose penalty taxes on businesses and individuals in the 34 states that did not set up the State Healthcare Insurance Exchanges that the ill-designated Affordable Care Act tried to encourage them to do.  The federal government did not have the power to order the states to set these exchanges up and many Democrats who voted for the law made it clear they would not vote for it if their state was required to set up such an exchange.

The intrepid Competitive Enterprise Institute is assisting in a case, Halbig v. Sebelius, which is challenging the legality of the IRS and Obama Regime attempt to impose mandates on businesses and individuals in those states that refused to go along with this highly unpopular law.  A federal judge ruled on Tuesday, 22 October, that this lawsuit may proceed and he will rule on it by 15 February 2014.

The law itself makes it very clear that in the federal exchanges set up in the non-participating states that businesses cannot be taxed for not providing healthcare insurance such as is mandated by the government in the state-run exchange states.  Individuals cannot be forced to buy health insurance in the same way either.  Subsidies also are not authorized in the law for lower income people under the non-state run health insurance exchanges.  Excluding the exchanges in the 34 states that did not set up the ObamaCare state exchanges is certain to kill ObamaCare in short order.  With the people of 34 states only seeing higher taxes because of ObamaCare and getting no benefits at all, it is not believable that the rebellion against this tyrannical law will not amplify greatly.

Of course, the federal courts may simply rewrite the law as the Supreme Court did in NFIB v. Sibelius when Chief Justice John Roberts so feared opposing Obama that he claimed a broad power to tax for purposes not enumerated in the Constitution was the basis for penalty taxes in the ACA.  He did this despite the many, many Democrat Socialist claims when they created the law and voted for it that it was not a tax.  So, the weak-kneed federal courts may fail to protect our individual rights once again.  But then again, maybe this time the federal court will stand on principle and the letter of the law.  Perhaps the fact that Obama has in so many ways violated the letter of the law is taking a legal toll on the patience of the courts.  Perhaps the fiasco of it implementation and rising anger among the People will give the courts some courage.  We shall see by 15 February 2014.

Thank you Competitive Enterprise Institute and Sam Kazman, its general counsel, and their allies!

Federal ObamaCare Health Insurance Exchange Website Boondoggles

The Obama administration, even more incompetent than most governments, examined the proposal of only one website developer for the ObamaCare Health Insurance Exchange.  There are very widespread reports of how difficult it is get on to get cost and benefit information from this website, how inaccurate the subsidy information is, and how difficult it is to use if you do get on it.  The Obama regime is not at all transparent in providing numbers on how many Americans have signed up for insurance on the exchanges or what the subsidies will cost the taxpayers.

Now there are reports that the Canadian company whose US subsidiary was given the contract to develop the website was criticized by the Canadian government as incompetent and unreliable.  This company had the American ObamaCare Health Insurance website developed in India using Java script, which was a cheap, but totally inadequate way to set up the website for the necessary volume of traffic.  Despite the cheap approach, the company went way over budget.  Various reports claim that between $400 and $600 million has been spent on the website which is far from capable of doing the job required.  John McAfee claims that 15 good programmers could easily have provided an adequate site for $5 million.

In addition to the fact that many people may never be able to sign up for the mandated insurance and will be hit with outrageous penalty taxes as a result, those who try to set up the required accounts before they can learn anything at all about the costs and benefits of the few mandated insurance plans allowed by our draconian, authoritarian government, risk losing everything in their bank accounts.  There are no security precautions to keep social security numbers and birth dates along with full names and addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses safe from hackers.  Imitation websites can easily be set up and induce people to provide all of this information which are actually easier to find and get on.  No one will be surprised that a fake website only takes the usual information demanded by the real websites to set up and account and then fails to give them insurance information.  That behavior would be a good copy of the real website behavior.  With that required account information, the fake website operators can quickly drain the American citizen's bank account.  What a field day for crooks!

See what John McAfee told Fox News.

For all of these risks, one gets rationed and lower quality medical care, which suppresses future medical developments and discourages good, conscientious doctors and other medical care providers.  Many of the best doctors and best hospitals are systematically excluded from the few plans operating under ObamaCare because they are deemed too expensive.  Of course there is no expense in being killed or inadequately treated by less capable or even incompetent doctors and hospitals!  Since my own father was killed by an incompetent, uncaring doctor, I recognize these costs.

It is not enough for the the Obama regime to force us to give up the ownership of our bodies and minds, the health insurance and doctors and hospitals we wish to use, and control over the benefits and costs we are willing to take in health insurance of our own free will.  No, the Obama and Democrat Socialist Rulers must also put Americans to great expense either with health insurance plans that are not suitable for them, with tax penalties, or with the danger of losing everything in their bank accounts.

The incompetence and the hubris of the tyrant is once again affirmed.  The so-called Progressive Elitists are no better than the monarchs of old, the robber barons, the fascists, the communists, and many a petty dictator or warlord.

Germans Face Skyrocketing Electricity Bills

Let us recall that Obama has promised us skyrocketing electricity bills.  He wants to do to us what is already happening to the German people.  Electricity costs are even worse in Denmark.

The German government is aiming to have 80% of German energy produced by renewable sources by 2050.  It has also decided to close down all nuclear power plants by 2022.  Older fossil fuel plants are being shut down already.  Solar, wind, and biomass energy now are a quarter of the country's electricity supply.  The levy subsidizing the green energy electricity sources instituted with the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG), has caused electricity costs to skyrocket.  Electricity now costs about 85% more than in 2000, when EEG was passed.  The EEG is to be increased by 47% next year to a toll of 5.3 cents per kilowatt hour.  Already, electricity is less expensive in many European and Asian countries by 30%.  It is 50% less expensive in the U.S. and Russia.  This will cost Germany jobs.

The subsidy next year for renewable energy to be paid by German consumers is about 20 billion Euros.  The Technical University of Berlin just issued a study that predicts that the subsidies crushing German consumers will be more than 300 billion Euros by 2030, which is unsustainable.  Already, as many as 800,000 German households are unable to pay their electric bills.  In 2009, German households spent an average of 2,500 Euros a year for energy.  At the 2009 average monthly exchange rate to dollars, this was the equivalent of $3,474 a year.  German households are now paying about 41% of their total bills for heating and hot water costs.  After the electricity rate increases already scheduled for next year, further increases from 30 to 50% are expected over the next ten years.

Costs are not the only major problem.  A very cold period in February 2011, was more than the electric grid could handle.  A number of heavy industry plants in the Hamburg area were forced to shut-down.  There is reason for concern that further shut-downs will be needed this winter and next winter.

The story for investors has been bleak.  Wind and solar power system manufacturers are among the worst -performing stocks in the last few years.  Vestas, the Danish wind turbine manufacturer, had a fantastic 20 times increase in stock value from 2003 to 2008.  The value of the stock has now returned to the 2003 value.  In 2012, Vestas is losing money and has had to reduce its workforce around the world by 3,735.  Vestas America has cut jobs this year, hurting Obama's claim of creating many green jobs.

Solar panel makers have had a similarly hard time.  SunTech of China is the largest photovoltaic panel manufacturer.  Its private equity investors, including Goldman Sachs, made 10 times their original investment.  When SunTech shares were initially launched on the stock market, they went from $20 to $79 in late 2007.  The stock has crashed since to $0.92!  Similarly, First Solar was at $308 in April 2008 and now is about $23.  Falling prices due to a surplus of manufacturing capacity and sinking government subsidies have caused the solar industry to become unprofitable.

Yet, Obama still thinks he is going to create millions of green jobs in America.  If he uses subsidies to do so, they will have to be huge.  Huge subsidies will kill other jobs in greater numbers than those created in the green industries.  The green industries have very brown thumbs.

Deficit Pushes Senate to End Ethanol Thieving of Taxpayers

The monumental deficit has pushed the Senate to repeal the $5 billion of tax credits and subsidies per year for corn growers, ethanol refiners, and gasoline blenders.  A tariff of $0.54 per gallon on imported ethanol would also be eliminated.  38 Democrats, 2 independents, and 33 Republicans voted to end these pointless subsidies which had wrongly been sold as a path to cleaner skies, energy independence, and a means to reduce CO2 emissions.  I have long pointed at these subsidies, along with the mandate for ethanol production still required by the insane Renewable Fuel Standard law, as a clear sign of Congressional and Presidential perfidy and a determination to rob the taxpayers blind for naked political power.  For more than 30 years, the attitude was clearly let the General Welfare be damned as the votes of special interest groups were bought. 

The repeal bill was sponsored by Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Dianne Feinstein of California.  14 Republicans and 13 Democrats opposed the 73-27 vote repeal action.  Obama and his Sec. of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, still oppose the end of these deleterious subsidies, claiming they are needed to reach Obama's imagined plan to reduce oil imports by one-third by 2025. The House has not yet voted on ending these ethanol subsidies and will reject the Senate bill because tax bills are constitutionally required to be initiated in the House of Representatives.  Fortunately, the ethanol subsidies will expire at the end of this year unless the House and Senate renew them.  This Senate vote makes it unlikely that it will renew this special interest travesty.

The ethanol subsidy is a $0.45/gallon of ethanol tax credit given against the excise tax of $0.184 per gallon of gasoline paid by gasoline blenders such as Valero and Marathon Oil.  This allows the blenders to pay more for corn ethanol made by such companies as Archer-Daniels-Midland and to compete for corn used as food or as livestock feed. 

The overall effect of a repeal of the subsidies upon food and feed prices will be minimal, since the mandate for ethanol use in fuel by the Renewable Fuel Standard law passed by the last Democrat Congress requires 12.6 billion gallons of ethanol use in fuel this year and up to 15 billion gallons in 2015.  By 2022, 36 billion gallons of so-called renewable fuel must be blended into gasoline, though only 15 billion gallons of that can be conventional corn-derived ethanol.  The remainder is somehow magically supposed to come from other low-carbon biofuels, such as switchgrass, which as yet produce a negligible 3 to 4 million gallons a year of ethanol or fuel in expensive pilot plants.

This mandate and the subsidies have caused the price of corn to be over $7/bushel all spring, which is twice the price of a year ago.  The subsidy and the high price of oil has caused blenders to use a billion gallons more corn ethanol than they were required to use.  This put still more pressure on corn, corn products, and meat products.  On Friday, buyers bought corn in the Toledo, Ohio grain trading hub at $7.35 per bushel.  A desperate turkey grower even offered $8.37/bushel of corn and got few offers of corn at that price.  Corn supplies are expected to be at a 15-year low in late August.  This may force some makers of corn-derived ethanol to shut down their plants.

The impact of ethanol from corn on the market and on some states can be judged from the graphic below from the 17 June Wall Street Journal:

Note that the food, seed, and industrial use of corn has grown very little since 2000 and the use in feed and residual use has shrunk since 2005 due to the increased cost of corn brought on by the huge increase in ethanol production since about 1998.  Iowa, the first major event for presidential candidates produces 21% of all U.S. ethanol, which is more than twice the production of any other state.  It is no accident that so much of the Iowa corn production is bought for the purpose of ethanol production.  The subsidy takers know how to put the political pressure on.  About 5 billion bushels of corn, or 40% of all corn production, is used to produce ethanol.  The great growth in corn production that has resulted has displaced other food crops and led to price increases severe enough that the World Bank and other international institutions have called for an end to corn ethanol subsidies.

The end effect due to the continuing ethanol in fuel mandate will be continued very high corn prices.  The income tax taxpayer will be relieved of a burden, but that burden will be shifted to the consumer.  It is better that the burden be on the consumer, which is a much broader base of people than the minority who pay federal income taxes.  It would be better yet if we removed the renewable fuel mandate and simply allowed the free market to figure out which fuel resources will be used.  Obama's centrally-planned economy will be a disaster just as all prior central planning has historically led to catastrophe.  The last place a catastrophe will come from will be man-made global warming due to CO2 emissions.

Many of 49% of Americans are Slaves,

while 51% are wastrels responsible for massive government spending they pay no income tax to fund.  Yes, in 2009, the number of Americans not paying income taxes to the federal government became a 51% majority.  For them, it does not matter how wasteful government spending is, because it is not their money.  They can and do ask, "Why should I care what it costs, I do not pay for it."  Obama has succeeded in creating a majority of recipients of his redistributionist theft.  It gets worse, since some of those 49% who pay some income tax, actually do get more in government goodies than the amount they pay in taxes.

For instance, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 1,909,000 civilian federal employees in November 2008, excluding the postal employees.  With their generally high salaries and extremely good benefits, they can be said to mostly be receiving more in government payments than they are paying in taxes.  It is interesting to note that the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides data on total employment in April 2011, but only provides the number of federal employees as recently as November 2008.  Do you suppose they do not want the taxpayer to easily find out how bloated the federal bureaucracy truly is?  On top of this, I have seen numbers for January 2009 civilian federal employees without security clearances reported to be 2,748,978.  The CIA, NSA, and other complete federal agencies were left out of that 2.7 million number.  This number may include the postal employees.  Does the federal government have as much trouble keeping track of how many employees it has as it does of how much land, how many buildings, and how much equipment it has?  I would not be surprised.

Then there are also those many businessmen so cozy with the government who are collecting subsidies and who benefit from mandates, such as those to use ethanol, wind energy, solar energy, and partially electric cars.  There are also crony mercantilists benefiting from many regulations designed to bury their competition, especially that of small businesses, under a mountain of government requirements and paperwork.  These people are often called crony capitalists, but that is a contradiction of terms.  Crony mercantilists have been around as long as there have been governed nation-states, which long predates the day of the capitalists with their philosophy of open markets and freedom of choice.  Capitalism is the manifestation of the equal, sovereign individual right to associate with whom one wants for the purposes of one's choosing.

Just recently, every business in America doing any business with FDA-regulated companies or with FAA and DOD regulated aerospace companies has been hit with a blizzard of quality assurance paperwork and the pressure is mounting for every company to become International Standards Organization (ISO) certified at huge expense both initially and in an on-going way.  This is expensive for large companies and will be the death of many a small company.  The small company that always had to try harder to provide good service or quality products will now be killed in many cases in the name of increased quality.  Ha.  We will see what the monopoly of the few companies that can bear the expense of this extra-governmental regulation required by government agencies will provide in future quality!  Every lab will have calibrated equipment, but will pay no attention to correctly interpreting the data provide to obtain the real properties of the materials investigated.  There will be no quality in the end product analytical report, but every laboratory will be a quality lab because ISO says they are.  As Ayn Rand noted long ago, regulation by government sets up lowest common denominator requirements and no company thereafter has as much pressure as before to exceed those low requirements.  But, many a tired, old, and large company is very happy with such regulations, whether set by the government or by a one-world organization such as ISO.  ISO also serves the function of providing import protection to Europe primarily, but secondarily to the U.S., Canada, and Japan.

If you wonder why it is so hard to reduce the size of government or to reduce its out-of-control spending, this is why.  There are too few people paying taxes and many too many people getting payments, subsidies, and protection from effort.  The many have truly enslaved the productive and wealth-creating few.  But it is these few who create the jobs.  As our society has become most determined to enslave and whip these few, they have responded by laying off many of the employees they can no longer support and by refusing to hire more new employees even as they struggle to increase productivity while robbed of the capital with which to do it.

Building the Progressive Socialist Train from Nowhere to Nowhere

California has long wanted to build a 500-mile long high speed passenger train, a so-called bullet train, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, through the Central Valley.  California voters approved a bond ballot measure for $9.95 billion in 2008 for the project, ten years in the planning, which they were told would:

• Cost $40 billion.
• Have a ticket cost of $55 to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
• Transport 94 million passengers a year.
• The time of travel would be 2.5 hours.
• The rail line would operate with a surplus and no subsidies would be needed.
• 450,000 sustainable jobs would be created.

The Progressive Socialist federal government of the first half of the Obama administration has approved money to assist California in this effort.  The federal and state monies presently approved will build a 65-mile long segment of the railroad for $4.15 billion.  It will go from Corcoran, CA, with a population estimated to be about 25,000, to Borden, CA.  Borden is a tiny suburb of Madera, whose population is about 57,000.  Corcoran is on the less populated side of the Central Valley with complete desolation to its south and west and the small city of Tulare, population 58,000, about 19 miles to its northeast.  Corcoran is best known for the state prison there.  It probably needs bullet train service so the prisoners released from California prisons, because California cannot afford to keep them in prison, can leave the area quickly.

With the Republicans about to take over the money appropriations control in the House of Representatives, there will be no more federal tax money going to this project for quite some time.  I think we can be sure there will be no more for at least the next 6 years, if not for the next 10 years.  The short segment of the rail to be built will not be operated until more is built.  This is likely to help guarantee that if a bullet train is ever built from San Francisco to Los Angeles, the short segment will be obsolete and the route may well be changed.  It will be better if it were never built even in part.  It will be good if it is abandoned even after this segment from nowhere to nowhere is built.  The California authority that planned this line and two years ago made the claims above before the voters approved the bond measure, now says in the best bait and switch fashion:

•  The cost will be $42.6 billion.
•  The one-way ticket cost has increased to $105.

More realistic estimates are:

• The construction cost will be somewhere between $62 billion and $213 billion.
• The one-way ticket cost will be about $190.
• At least $19 billion of federal money will have to be provided if there is to be any hope that the train will not have to be subsidized by California taxpayers, even though the authorizing legislation forbids that.
• The 450,000 sustainable job workers are twice as many as the California government's active work force.  How realistic is it that so many jobs might be created by this rail line? 

The only bullet train railroads in the world having substantial segments of their systems able to operate without subsidies are in Japan and France.  Both are in much more densely populated areas than the comparatively low density Central Valley of California with its farming industry.  As we can see, California's Progressive Socialist central planning bureaucrats are about as competent as central planners always are.  They have done an excellent job of setting California's taxpayers up for a huge fall.

Meanwhile, the Central Valley of California has suffered from severe water shortages for the last several years.  Central planners have a lot to do with this problem also.  California has two major water projects controlled by central planners.  The Central Valley Project of 1933 is a creature of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.  The State Water Project of 1960 began under Democrat Gov. Pat Brown.  These two programs caused agricultural land use to increase from 4.9 to 8.6 million acres.  This huge increase in agricultural water use was based on water subsidies, water user fees rather than prices that fluctuate with supply and demand, water monopolies by the government, and a lack of water property rights.  All of these factors cause the uneconomical use of water.  This generally means that water will of course be used carelessly and wasted.  The effect is not unlike the use of the hard-earned money of California and American taxpayers to pay for a short bullet train track segment from Nowhere to Nowhere which will never be used.

Meanwhile, it is worth our noting that the newly elected Republican governors of Ohio and Wisconsin, have announced that they were returning the high speed train grants given to their states by the Progressive Socialists.  The returned Wisconsin money was for a train route from Milwaukee to Madison and the Ohio line was to go from Cleveland to Columbus to Cincinnati.  Secretary of Transportation LaHood has given the returned $1.2 billion to 13 states that want to build these taxpayer blood-sucking high speed trains.  John Kasich and Scott Walker have no doubt saved the states of Ohio and Wisconsin a fortune in wasted capital expense and subsequent train subsidies.

The returned money is going to the Democrat states of California, Illinois, New York, Washington, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, North Carolina, and Iowa.  The toss-up states of Florida, Missouri, and Indiana are also getting money.  It is really hard to imagine how Maine, Oregon, North Carolina, Iowa, Missouri, and Indiana will find areas with dense enough populations to make their high speed trains pay.  The otherworldly winner of this nonsense has to be Vermont.  Its high speed train will go from St. Albans in the northwest corner of the state to Vernon in the southeast corner of the state.  St. Albans has a population of 7200 and Vernon's population is 2,000.  The biggest city in Vermont is Burlington, with a population of about 39,000.  Yes, this is the state that gave us Howard Dean and Bernie Sanders.  What can you expect.  The 13 states taking the high speed train money will rue the day they did.  No, not the damn politicians, it is the weary and overloaded taxpayer mules who will do the ruing.  At least most of these non-ruminating mules are Democrat asses.

Arizona Encourages Government-Dependent Politicians

29 November Update:  The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the free speech case argued by the Institute for Justice discussed in this earlier post.  Congratulations to the Institute for Justice in its efforts to protect our individual rights!

Arizona has an interesting way of promoting the political career of government-dependent politicians.  Arizona law puts politicians on the dole even before they are elected.  Now, I ask you, how can We the People expect politicians on the dole to government to look out for our interests in keeping the power-lusting governments off our backs?  The answer, of course, is that such politicians are guaranteed to be bought and paid for big government supporters.  The Arizona "Clean Elections" Act is the mechanism for buying big government politicians and putting them in office.  The bias in favor of government doing what it most wants to do, which is to gain more and more control of the People's lives, is huge.

The Institute for Justice has challenged this Arizona interference in elections on the basis of its interference with our freedom of speech in a case called Arizona Free Enterprise Club's Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett.  The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide whether to hear the Institute for Justice's challenge of this law on Tuesday, 23 November.  The Institute for Justice is also representing the Arizona Taxpayers Action Committee, Arizona State Treasurer Dean Martin, and State Representative Rick Murphy.

The Arizona government subsidizes those candidates for office who elect to take a subsidy.  For every dollar an independent candidate brings in, the subsidized candidate is given an equal amount of money.  The candidate on the dole does not have to do any work to acquire donations from those who believe so strongly in his principles that they will donate their own money to the candidate.  The candidate on the dole is then free to be a perfect demagogue and has no need to be persuasive enough to get people who will carefully consider his viewpoints before giving him campaign donations to actually do so.  Those who part with their money often think about why they are doing so before acting.  Those same Arizonans who favor an independent candidate are then forced to subsidize the candidate whose views they may abhor.  This is not just an abridgment of the freedom of speech, but it is an inversion of speech.  If you believe one thing, you are actually forced to say you believe the opposite!

Fortunately, in January 2010, a federal district court ruling struck down the matching funds in elections as a violation of freedom of speech.  But, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the order of the initial federal district court ruling.  In June, the U.S. Supreme Court took the unusual action of reinstating the initial court ruling which had prevented Arizona from matching funds.  As a result, the 2010 elections in Arizona were not sullied by this big government attempt to bias the selection of politicians in its favor by effectively limiting the freedom of speech of the People of Arizona.

Bill Mauer, an Institute for Justice attorney, said

Matching funds violate the First Amendment rights of candidates, citizens and independent groups.  The government may not give an electoral advantage to one candidate by ‘leveling’ the speech of his opponents.  The system is set up to punish those the government believes are speaking too much, while subsidizing those it believes are speaking too little.  In a free society, the government has no business micromanaging how citizens debate, of all things, who should run the government.

Having been so serious for so long, you deserve a break.  The Institute for Justice has a fun cartoon video summarizing their viewpoint on the effects of the Arizona "Clean Elections" Act.



The Institute for Justice has been very effective in protecting our freedom of speech in other cases involving election laws in a number of states.  Most recently, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on a Colorado law that forced six neighbors opposing a ballot issue to register with the state government and comply with very complex campaign election finance laws.  In this case, Sampson v. Buescher, Judge Harris Hartz wrote for the unanimous court that the campaign finance disclosure requirements were too complex for most citizens and simply prevented them from speaking out on political issues.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the federal government could not restrict how much individuals gave to SpeechNow.org or other similar groups in another Institute for Justice case.  That victory was marred by the ruling that the group did have to abide by the difficult rules of operating a political committee, despite the Supreme Court having ruled in Citizens United that corporations did not have to do so.  Go figure.  The Institute for Justice has also won victories in Florida where its very broad "electioneering communications" law was ruled unconstitutional and in Washington where the state tried to regulate talk radio commentary on a ballot issue.

Not only is the Institute for Justice very effective in winning vital cases to protect our freedoms, but it does it very cost efficiently.  It has won the highest 4-star rating from Charity Navigator for the 9th year in a row.  Please consider fighting for your freedoms by making a donation to the Institute for Justice.

YouCut: Vote for the Programs You Want Eliminated in our Bloated Government

Eric Cantor, the Republican Whip in the House of Representatives, has been operating an on-line program, called YouCut, which describes five government programs or expenditures each week and allows the People to vote for the one they most want to be cut.  Cantor then proposes the cut on the House floor and demands a vote.  Each week, the vast majority of Democrats oppose the cut, while the majority of Republicans vote for the cut.  Because the Republicans are so out-numbered, the Democrats are almost always able to keep the spending going.  But, it does put them on record for favoring a program or expenditure many voters and taxpayers oppose.  This provides election time ammunition for a canny Republican opponent, maybe even in a primary where the incumbent Republican voted to sustain the unpopular program.

This program is also valuable for the People, since it makes it easy for them to become familiar with many wasteful programs and identifies many special interest groups taking advantage of them.   YouCut should be maintained whether the Republicans gain control of the House in the November 2010 election or not.  Keeping it in place will help to keep the Republicans focused on making the cuts in government programs that are very badly needed.  The program is already rather popular, with 1.3 million votes cast.  Please add your own votes.

The programs which won the People's votes in previous weeks and were brought up for a vote in the House are listed below.  The votes are given as cast by each House member, but after week 3, the final tally is not given at Eric Cantor's YouCut website.  I was not willing to count the Yes and No votes to get the total, but look up the vote of your representative.  For the first 3 weeks, the vote on the cut is given as [Yes, No].

Week One: Cut the New Non-Reformed Welfare Program ($25 Billion Savings) [177-240]

Week Two: Eliminate Federal Employee Pay Raise ($30 Billion Savings) [183-227]

Week Three: Reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ($30 Billion Savings) [180-230]

Week Four: Sell Excess Federal Property ($15 Billion Savings)

Week Five: Prohibit Hiring New IRS Agents to Enforce Health Care Law ($15 Billion Savings)

Week Six: Taxpayer Subsidized Union Activities ($1.2 Billion Savings)

Week Seven: Prohibit Stimulus Funding for Promotional Signage (Tens of Millions)

Week Eight: Prohibit Sleeper Car Subsidies on Amtrak ($1.2 billion Savings)

Week Nine: Bipartisan Proposal to Terminate AEITC ($1.1 billion Savings)

Week Ten: Require Collection of Unpaid Taxes From Federal Employees ($1 billion Savings)

The Democrats just voted against collecting unpaid taxes from Federal employees, thereby allowing federal employees to receive taxpayer money without paying their own taxes. I suppose that just warms your heart to know that the Democrats think so highly of "public service" and so little of the People who serve as hosts to many of the public servant parasites.

One might argue in this day of trillion dollar programs that cutting programs which are only a few million or tens of millions of dollars a year does not matter.  But, the accumulated effect of the cutting of such programs on a weekly basis over a few years time will be very significant.  It also sends a message in a clear way to our Congressmen to keep them focused on better and leaner government.  Finally, it puts a great many special interests on notice that their subsidies and special treatment are subject to being cut at any time because the People are finally paying attention to their games to take advantage of the People.  This is a step in the right direction toward getting Congress and the special interest groups to take the American People seriously.  We need to be on watch and make it known that we are watching and then acting to take our government back!

How did Obama's Green Jobs Model Work for Spain?

Obama believes a "green economy" should be a principal goal of his economic and environmental policy.  He claims he will produce high quality jobs to put Americans back to work with his plans to subsidize alternative energy generation, while driving the coal industry into bankruptcy.  He also claims that this is a substantial path toward energy independence.  Eight times he has said that the model for his alternative energy economy is Spain.  So, let us see what the Spanish have concluded from their experiment in a green economy based on subsidized alternative energy such as solar and wind power.

The Socialist government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has been behind the Spanish "green economy."  From 2004 to 2010, the subsidies for alternative power were increased by a multiple of 5.  In 2009, the subsidies were doubled compared to 2008.  These 2009 subsidies were about equal to the entire government budget for all research, development, and technological innovation for Spain.  Electricity from solar plants is 12 times more expensive than that from fossil fuel combustion.  The cost of electricity generated in Spain from traditional fossil fuel plants has been dropping, but the cost of the alternative fuels has been going up so fast that consumer bills have gone up, rather than down.  You see, most of the subsidy costs are charged to the consumer.  The government says that the alternative energy industry will receive 126 billion euros in the next 25 years.

The Spanish newspaper La Gaceta on 21 May 2010 reported on the developing consensus that Spain's alternative energy, "green economy" has failed miserably.  Gabriel Calzada and other authors from the Juan de Mariana Institute produced a study that the Spanish 'green economy" had failed.  The Socialist government bitterly denounced the study.  The Spanish Embassy in the U.S. got the Democrat Congress to denounce the Calzada study in an act of Congress!

But now, the Minister of Industry, Miguel Sebastian, is worrying about the huge debt which is the result of the so-called investment in "clean energy."  Some in the Spanish cabinet believe the debt is worsening and delaying the recession for Spain.  An internal document of the Spanish cabinet has been leaked and its conclusions are even more pessimistic than the demonized Calzada study's.  The government now admits that every 'green job" created cost Spain more than 2.2 traditional jobs, in agreement with the Calzada report.  This is not good in a country with 20%, and still rising, unemployment.  The internal cabinet report backs every claim made in the Calzada study about the failure of the "green economy" experiment.

Obama, just last week, recommended that Zapatero change his strategy because it was hurting the Spanish economy and threatening the stability of the entire European Union, which is likely, with help from the U.S., to be asked to bail Spain out of its financial crisis.  One has to conclude that Obama knows the "green economy" model does not work.  Yet, this is the essential model of the newest attempt to create such an economy in the U.S., the Kerry - Lieberman version of carbon cap and tax which was just introduced earlier this week.  Obama is all for that.  This means he is knowingly putting his and the Democrats quest for power over the economy ahead of American prosperity.  He is knowingly seeking to create "green jobs" at a cost of more than 2.2 traditional jobs, he is knowingly seeking to add hugely to the national debt, and he is knowingly acting to greatly increase the cost of energy use in the U.S.

Is this guy Satan or what?

Americans Demand Smaller Government

While our socialist federal government is busy expanding the powers and the many intrusions of government, the American People are clearly saying they want smaller government.  The latest Fox News poll says that 65% of American voters think the government is too big and is restricting American freedoms.  30% say they are comfortable with the size and role of the federal government.  So, by more than a 2 to 1 margin, the American People want to be free to exercise more of their individual rights than the government now allows them to.  84% of Republicans think it is too big.  [Who on earth are the 16% of Republicans who do not think it is too big?  Why are they Republicans at all?  I suppose these are the people who just have to have the political party of their parents or of the majority of people who live around them.  These are the social metaphysicians, as Ayn Rand called them.]  Wonderfully, 74% of independents also think government is too big.  Woefully, 51% of Democrats believe the size of the government is OK, but this is, for the socialist party, a very weak level of conviction in favor of big and bigger government!

Overall, this is very good news, but it comes with some hints that many Americans who want smaller government and who say they want to be more free to live their own lives, may still hold some contradictory views.  Let me set up the argument that this is the case by noting a few more results of the poll.

78% of voters believe the government is "larger and more costly" than it has ever been before.  65% think the national debt is a bigger problem than terrorism (23%).  79% of voters believe it is possible the economy may collapse.  Republicans believe this the most at 84%, but independents are almost as inclined to worry about this at 80%.  Democrats lag the independents on this concern by 8%, but 72% is still a large majority of Democrats with major concern over the economy.  62% of voters believe Obama has no plan to deal with the severe weakness of the economy, while 35% think he does.  Republicans at 88% know he has no plan and 67% of independents know he has none.  Even 33% of Democrats have at least one eye out of the sand.

The people think Congress is even more clueless.  24% think the Democrats in Congress have clear plans to fix the economy.  These must be all Democrats who think this nonsense.  But, only 16% think the Republicans have such an economy fix-up plan.  Well, we cannot expect that any Democrats are likely to think the Republican Congressmen have a plan.  They do not even think their party in Congress has a plan!  So, the implication is that the mere 16% of the voters who think Republican Congressmen have a plan are probably all Republicans.  I would guess few, if any, independents are included in the 16%.

What should the Republican plan for the economy be?  It is simple to state.  The Republicans should seek to make government smaller and make it protect, rather than violate, the rights of the individual.  This is what 65% of the American voters want.  It is about time the Republicans actually make a concerted effort to do this.  This is not just a plan for the economy, but it certainly includes a plan for the economy, in the very limited way it is appropriate for government to play a role in the economy.  There is little the government should do for the economy other than to get out of the way and let a free and hardworking people do their thing.  Now even though this is exactly what most American voters want, most would probably say that this is no plan.  There is always that expectation that government must have a plan for every problem and every issue, even if the best plan is for the government to get out of the way.

So, the Republicans do need a plan.  Here are some components of my proposed plan:

• Republicans have cut taxes in the past, but start this time with cutting spending and follow that with some tax cuts.  Cut spending where it will remove as many obstacles for the private sector as possible.
• Repeal ObamaCare, which at once will restore our freedom, cut the deficit, and improve health care.
• Tell the EPA it cannot regulate CO2 emissions.  These emissions do more good as plant food than they do any harm in warming the Earth.  That bit of warming is probably good anyway.  Insist on rational benefit analyses to back up any EPA chemical tolerance claims.
• Open up most federal lands for oil and gas exploration and field development.  Open up most off-shore areas for similar development.  This will create jobs and tax revenues, while providing reliable energy.  Use any income to reduce the deficit.
• Sell much of the western lands held by the government and use the income to reduce the deficit.  The point of doing this is not actually so much to reduce the deficit now as it is to put the land to more productive uses in the private sector, which will further reduce deficits by generating more tax revenue in the future.  One benefit will be more energy production.
• End the wasteful biofuels and alternative energy development projects.  Some research funding may be retained, but if the use of these fuels makes sense, let the private sector develop them.  End the subsidies and the mandates for their use.  The end of the ethanol subsidy and mandate programs will save consumers a bundle.
• OHSA should be kept away from companies that do not have high accident rates.  Since companies are subject to liability lawsuits, there is really no need for OHSA anyway.
• Contract out more government services.
• Work up a comprehensive plan to end crop subsidies and restrictions.  These should be ended with a rational phase out plan.  Consumers will save a bundle.  Animal husbandry will save money also.  American exports will expand.
• End federal programs for financing exports, but work up agreements with as many other countries as possible to encourage free trade between our countries.
• Fold the Dept. of Labor into the Dept. of Commerce.  The class warfare between labor and management is only encouraged by this archaic separation of functions.  There is no reason to encourage labor unions as a special interest group anyway.  The resultant cabinet department should be much smaller than the two combined are today.
• Push the approval of Yucca Mountain through so we can finally get started on cleaning up and consolidating nuclear waste.  Nuclear power should not be discouraged with the many harassments it puts up with today.  The cost of nuclear power will come down with rational government policies.
• Reduce the excessive accounting and tax record-keeping requirements that put a very serious drain on the resources of business, especially small business.
• The highest individual income tax rate should be equal to the tax rate of the median income person.  Joint returns should have taxable income divided by 2 with the tax calculated on that amount and twice the individual tax then is to be paid.  I am willing to allow a somewhat progressive set of rates for those with less than the median income, but not too progressive.  Everyone should pay something because everyone is deriving the benefits of a properly limited government and should have an interest in its expenses.  There really should be no corporation income, but if there is, the rate should also be equal to that of the median income earner's rate.
• A near moratorium on new laws should be invoked, while Congress does a serious re-evaluation of the excessive number of laws already on the books.  Cutting back the irrational laws of the past will remove obstacles for the private sector and allow the paring of government watchdog agencies that are no longer needed to enforce those laws.  New mischief will be minimized, while old mischief is eliminated.
• The Dept. of Education should educate the American public on what the public schools really cost on a per student basis.  The vast majority of school systems say the cost is much less than it really is.  Then the Dept. of Education should point out that in most cases what is spent greatly exceeds the per student cost of private schools and push for vouchers for students allowing them to choose either a public school, a private school, or even home-schooling.  The vouchers should be for somewhat less than the cost of the local public schools per student, so the local government will save money for each student who opts for a private school education.  This would lighten the load greatly on many local and state government budgets.  Many of these local governments are in serious trouble now and this is a painless way to relieve that problem, while improving education and reducing the burden of local and state taxes on the private sector.  [It will also reduce the power of the teachers unions and ultimately shrink them.  This, and the shift to private education, will weaken the socialist indoctrination of our children.]
• Congress should stop writing tax laws with special taxes for special groups.  They love to penalize some groups and reward others.  Tax law should not be used this way.  It and other regulatory actions have clearly become tools of extortion.  The extortion must stop.  Tax laws should be reviewed to eliminate such provisions.  This will simplify the tax code and allow the reduction of IRS staff.
• The inheritance tax should be eliminated.  This tax now kills many businesses and anyone who has spent a lifetime of productive work and built up wealth, should have the right to give it to whomever he pleases.  The government will get more tax revenue in the long run anyway by eliminating the death tax, which is just an envy tax.
• The Commerce Clause of the Constitution should be used as it was intended:  to protect trade and commerce between people and companies in different states, not to inhibit it.  The elimination of federal government restrictions on interstate commercial activities would have a huge benefit for the private sector growth and health.
• Anti-trust laws should be revoked.  The only monopolies and cabals able to take advantage of the People for any significant time and to any significant extent, are those supported by governments.  That government support for such monopolies and cabals should be ended.  That support frequently hides under the umbrella of a regulatory agency.  The free market is especially dynamic now and the Internet makes it easy to gather information on products and services and to make sales across the country, with special advantage to small competitors, so that monopolies locally or nationally are harder than ever to support.

The Republican party should come up with such a plan and start promoting it early and frequently.  For once, there appear to be plenty of Americans interested enough in government and its shenanigans that we may be able to sell them on real reform of our overblown government.  Right now, we have a socialist government and that must be corrected so we Americans can regain our freedom to choose our own values and manage our own lives in accordance with our self-chosen values.  The Constitution, the Supreme Law of the Land, was intended to allow us just this individual freedom.

Health Care Reform Effects on Small Businesses

The Council of Economic Advisors released a report entitled "The Economic Effects of Health Care Reform on Small Businesses and Their Employees" on 25 July 2009. This report is an effort to enlist support from small businesses for the Obama - Democrat Congress health insurance reform plans.

Much of the report is about how many people are employed by small businesses and that a smaller fraction of small business employees are covered by company provided health insurance plans than are by bigger companies. It says that the "U.S. health care system imposes a heavy 'tax' on small businesses and their employees." What does it mean by this? Well only that small businesses pay up to 18% more per worker than large firms do for the same health insurance coverage. First, I wonder what the average % additional cost is. This up to 18% more is meaningless. In fact, I am sure there are small companies paying much more than 18% more, just as there are apparently small companies paying a smaller than 18% differential with respect to large companies. If my house costs more because I live in the Washington, D.C. area than it would if I lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, should I run around saying I am paying a home tax because of that? Well, maybe I should since so much of the cost differential is due to government restrictions on housing in the Washington area. As we will see, small business is to be offered a subsidy for providing health insurance to its lower paid employees to offset this so-called 'tax.'

It turns out, that in order to get the nationalization of our health insurance system done, the initial offering from the Obama crew is a bribe to small businesses. The 'vast majority' of small businesses will not be subjected to the 8% payroll tax if they do not offer employee health benefit plans. But, if they do, they will be given a 'tax credit' which is a higher percentage of their health benefit costs the lower the average pay of their employees. Hmmm.... seems like a good reason to hold down your employees pay, well except that market supply and demand do not really allow that. This brings up some interesting questions.

You see, Washington always thinks of every business as being a corporation. Corporations pay taxes on their net income. But, almost all small businesses report their income on the owners' personal tax returns. Does this mean that each business partner or stockholder must submit all the proof of payouts on employee health plans and on their average compensation to the IRS? How does the IRS then pay out the tax credit? If the company has no net income, as many small businesses do not, is the tax credit paid out? Is it paid out proportionately to each business owner as a check to them personally? Or, will there now be a whole new tax filing system for small businesses under which the money will be sent to the business directly? No matter what, this will be another government nightmare of paperwork for small businesses. This alone will be good reason to drop health insurance coverage for employees. Governments will never understand how heavy the hand of their paperwork lies on the head of the small businessman.

Now, there will be many small business owners naive enough to buy into this bribe, but in time this system will surely be changed and it will be changed to be more and more burdensome to small businesses. Just as the carbon cap and trade bill proposes expense offsets to many and attempts the really big energy reductions only after 2020 in order to get that program established, we can be sure the deal on health insurance will become more bitter with time.

There is no mention of reforming one of the big problems that small businesses have today with respect to offering health insurance to their owners, who are a substantial part of the workforce of small businesses. If an owner owns more than 2% of the stock of his company organized as a S-corporation, he is not allowed to treat company payments for his health insurance as a tax deductible expense of the company, though he does so for his employees. Many small business owners have no health insurance for this reason. And many have none because the small business cannot afford the expense. But, of course, the government hates business owners, so this may well not be changed.

The report talks about how various levels of reduced health insurance costs will help small businesses to become more profitable and to offer their employees more pay. They pick percentages of reduction out of the hat and calculate savings. But, there is no reason to think that health insurance costs will actually go down given that the government is going to dictate added benefits be added to the insurance coverage. I suppose, as long as the subsidies are offered, companies with many low-paid employees may save money if they are among those few companies with low-paid employees who already offer health insurance. The report notes that the lower the average pay of a small company's employees, the less likely that the company offers health insurance benefits. Most small companies may simply be tempted to stop offering health insurance and tell their employees to turn to the government health insurance exchange.

Under the House bill, a worker with a spouse and two children whose family income is $40,000 per year would pay approximately $1,700 for a policy that in a non-group market would cost $12,000 or more. This will be a huge government subsidy. Of course the government is figuring some reduction in cost because the insurance companies entering the plan are supposed to give up their profit! Ha!!! Perhaps they think the policies will be sold for less than what insurers would charge large companies. Let us use this 18% differential to calculate that part of the savings, though that figure may not have any validity. So 18% of $12,000 is $2,160. This means that the government subsidy for this family will be $12,000 - $1,700 - $2,160 = $8,140. Note that this is a huge transfer of wealth from some Americans to other Americans for no reason but that they are less productive individuals! This is the core of Obama's share the wealth philosophy.

This exchange plan is a lot better in some ways than most company offered plans. The family will have to make no more than $850 or less in out-of-pocket expenses. A family of four making less than 133% of the poverty level income of $22,050 will be put on Medicaid. Above this 133% level, they will go into this government exchange. At the starting income for the exchange of $29,300, this family of four will pay about $400 (approximately, estimated from the graph in Fig. 8 in the report) for the $12,000 insurance plan. Wow, what a transfer of wealth!!! The family of four making up to 400% of the poverty level will also receive a subsidy. This is an income of $88,200 and the subsidy will be about $2,200, again estimated from a graph.

As I see this, it would appear that most small businesses, except those with average employee compensation well above the average, will be better off ending their employee health benefit if they now offer one and letting their employees go into the government exchange. This frees them of the headache of doing a lot of paperwork, and many of their employees will be eligible for very large subsidies.

Of course, those subsidies come from taxes levied in some way upon the economy. It is clear that Obama and the Democrat Congress will levy those taxes on the most productive people in America and then transfer that money through these massive subsidies to those who are much less productive. The same is to be done in the carbon cap and trade scheme where the government will give subsidies to lower income families to offset their higher energy bills, while more productive people will pay the full cost of their skyrocketing energy bills.

Frankly, if the health insurance redistribution bill and the energy use tax redistribution bill are passed into law, there is no reason for productive people to bother being productive. They should go on strike. Going Galt is the only answer. It will be time to do some reading, go fishing, go hiking, and sleep in late, but there will be no point in working for money. Perhaps we should all retire to Galt's Gulch and prepare for the collapse of this socialist monstrosity that Obama and his fiendish Democrat Congress are fashioning. There we might create our own money with no convertibility into U.S. dollars and claim we have no income and hence should pay no taxes to the Socialist Republic of the United States.

The Villainy of Businessman T. Boone Pickens

One of the great problems with a mixed economy having a substantial private sector and an overblown government sector, is that businessmen lacking in morals can readily use the government to grant them profits through the government monopoly on the use of force that the businessman cannot gain in competition in a free market. In particular, there are many such immoral businessmen taking advantage of the many energy subsidies and mandates that Congress has been giving out for a very long time. For example, there is the egregious case of the ethanol subsidies and mandates that I have often harped about.

T. Boone Pickens has joined the Orren Boyle and James Taggart crowd of Atlas Shrugged. Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner's Lobbying Editor, has written an excellent column on Pickens and "the Pickens Plan," called Congress gives your money to T. Boone Pickens. The small Washington Examiner has become a very good paper for excellent columnists, while the once very good Washington Times has lost much of its value since undergoing a change of editors.

Senators Robert Menendez (D, New Jersey), Orrin Hatch (R, Utah), and Harry Reid (D, Nevada) introduced a bill this last week to provide a $100,000 tax credit for the construction of each natural gas filling station and to double the very big subsidy for buying a natural gas car.

The methane-powered Honda Civic costs nearly $10,000 more than the regular Civic. The savings from using natural gas rather than gasoline does not begin to pay for this initial purchase cost difference. Natural gas cars are already subsidized, since the 2005 energy bill already gives tax credits for natural gas cars. The House version of the bill provides $30 million per year for research on natural gas cars.

Pickens founded and partly owns Clean Energy Fuels Corp. It builds natural gas fueling stations and it is a leader in transporting natural gas. He also has invested in V-Vehicle Company, which makes natural gas cars. Pickens is a wind generator investor as well and that industry also exists on subsidies and mandates. Since 1992, he has been lobbying Congress for natural gas subsidies.

Timothy P. Carney is a columnist worth following. Let me offer some quotes that indicate clearly how he thinks:

Perversely, his recent shift—from selling stuff (such as oil) that people want to buy, to selling stuff (like gas cars and wind power) that people buy only when it’s subsidized or mandated—has elevated Pickens’ reputation from greedy capitalist to world-saver.

“Hostile takeovers” is an inaccurate term for what Pickens used to do. The management didn’t like them, sure, but the transactions in question consisted of shareholders voluntarily giving their stock to Pickens in exchange for Pickens’ money.

Pickens’ new bid actually is hostile. I don’t want to fund his windmills or methane cars. But if I refuse, the IRS will come after me. But instead of“greed” it’s dubbed as “green.”