The Arrogance of Joe Biden's Staff

Scott Powers, an Orlando Sentinel reporter, was the pool reporter to cover a fund-raiser for Democrat Senator Bill Nelson at Alan Ginsburg's palatial home in Florida.  Joe Biden and Bill Nelson were to speak at the $500 a head dinner.  When Scott Powers arrived, he was escorted to a small, overcrowded storage room and told he had to wait there until Biden arrived.  Powers was kept in the overflowing room with a chair squeezed in near its door for 1 hour and 15 minutes, before Biden staffers would allow him to come out as the speeches began.  When the un-newsworthy speeches were finished, Powers was immediately escorted to his car and told to leave.  He was never allowed to talk to any guests.

Given Joe Biden's claim that no individual has any sovereign rights, but only such provisional "rights" as the government chooses to give individuals at the convenience of the government, this imprisonment of a respected reporter is not really surprising.  It is certainly consistent with the theft of our ownership rights in our own bodies and minds provided for by ObamaCare.  Joe Biden is a man of principle and that principle is that every American individual is to serve the needs of the government or more exactly, its VIP political leaders, such as Joe Biden.  Such is the arrogance of power among the Democrats.

You can read more about this here.

The Cost of Living in the United States

The Composite Cost of Living results for the states across the United States for the 4th Quarter of 2010 are now available:

The cost of living is influenced by the cost of doing business, the cost of land, the cost of housing, and the cost of government, among many other factors.  Crowded areas or those in which the federal and state governments own too much of the land will tend to have high land costs.  Housing costs are a function of land costs, building codes which may be designed to force the hiring of local labor or to use expensive materials, zoning restrictions limiting home development, and building permit restrictions designed to slow growth.  The cost of doing business varies greatly due to differing government policies on taxes and regulations, as well as Workmen's Compensation costs.  Then government spending varies greatly and the more the government's spend, the higher the taxes.

Examining the map above, we find the Northeast and the Pacific Coast to be the highest cost of living areas.  The lowest cost of living states tend to be between the Appalachian Mountains and the Rocky Mountains minus the northern tier of states.  Illinois and Louisiana are also excluded.  The heroically inexpensive states with their composite cost of living indices are:

Kentucky, 89.2
Tennessee, 89.5
Oklahoma, 90.1
Arkansas, 90.6
Texas, 91.0
Nebraska, 91.1
Kansas, 91.3
Missouri, 91.7
Georgia, 92.2
Mississippi, 92.3

The worst states are:

Hawaii, 165.6
DC, 139.9
California, 132.6
Alaska, 132.6
Connecticut, 130.2
New Jersey, 128.5
New York, 128.3
Maryland, 124.8
Rhode Island, 123.2
Vermont, 120.4

My state of Maryland is expensive, but then what do you expect of a Democrat state.  On the other hand, I have family members living in Oklahoma and Kansas and they really do live much better on much less there than one can in Maryland.  If you want Nanny State, all intrusive government, you must pay through the nose for it.

Your Payment on the National Debt Interest

If you are employed, what is your share of the cost of the interest on the national debt?  The national debt is presently $14,255,760,000,000.  The interest paid in 2010 on the national debt was $413,954,825,362.17, according to the Treasury Department.  [The White House claims the interest paid in 2010 was only $196 billion on a public debt of only $9.019 trillion, but we know how creative the Obama administration is in misinforming us.]  In February 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says 138,093,000 Americans were employed.  The average debt interest payment per employed American is then $2997.65.

I sure am not making enough to be able to pay about $3,000 a year of interest payments on the national debt.  Actually, I am not paying that much.  There are a few rich people covering most of my share, I am sure.  This will also be true for most readers.  But, we should be asking ourselves if we have any business spending about $3,000 per employed person just to make interest payments.  Don't you think we have a strong incentive here to greatly reduce government spending to the point we can pay down the national debt and reduce these incredibly high interest payments?

The Hypocrisy of Democrat Caring - Inflation, Another of Many Examples

The Democrats always claim to care for the well-being of the poor and the middle class.  When we examine this claim critically, all we see is hypocrisy and the maneuverings of flim-flam artists in most cases.  Let us consider another such case.

When faced with a recession brought on by a spike in oil prices which then burst the housing and credit bubbles, the Democrats produced a huge porkulus bill to funnel more than $800 billion preferentially to their political followers, mostly overblown state and local governments, crony big business merchantilists, labor unions, trial lawyers, environmentalists, and community organizers.  This was a huge transfer of money from the productive private sector to the non-productive government sector and away from the jobs-producing small businesses of the free market.  The Democrats further restricted the free market with ObamaCare, so-called financial reform favoring big Wall Street firms over banks and financial companies of a smaller scale, threatened and real tax increases, cutbacks in coal mining and oil and gas extraction, and increased regulation burdens, especially by the EPA.  Job loss was quick to follow.  In December 2008, we lacked 15,287,000 jobs and by February 2011 we lack 23,108,000 jobs.  The Democrat control of the House, Senate, and White House quickly added a loss of 7,821,000 jobs, which was added to the 4,254,000 jobs lost in the second year they controlled the House and Senate in 2008.  The under-educated and low-skilled people the Democrats always claim as their own and to be so close to their hearts, were preferentially found among those now without a job.  The Democrats could not have done a better job of targeting them for grief and deprivation.

Also in keeping with Keynesian economic theory, long known to be balderdash, but much beloved by governments always looking for reasons to spend more money, the Democrats increased the money supply hugely.  Once that is done, avoiding a future bout of price increases is very nearly impossible.  Cutting back on the growth rate of the money supply, once the economy begins to respond to having increased cash, but decreased saving and investment values due to dilution, becomes painful to many.  Among the many who cannot cut back are the governments themselves.  To spend so much, they create huge new debt and that debt has to be financed.  Presently, the Federal Reserve Bank is buying 70% of U.S. Treasury notes!  Without a fundamental change in spending policies by the government, which it is clearly loathe to do given the unwillingness to reduce spending by even $60 billion in the face of a deficit for 2011 of about $1,600 billion, the Federal Reserve Bank will be the only buyer of U.S. Treasury notes for a long time.  They will lighten that obligation by causing inflation, so the debt becomes less burdensome over time.  This is a favorite way for governments to effectively tax the people, without having to pass a tax increase.

This has further consequences for those who are poor, out of a job, on fixed income, or are in the middle class.  Let us examine the consumer price index trends we are now seeing clearly:

Since July 2010, there have been only increases in consumer costs.  These increases are given in terms of annual rates so that adding the last 12 months given adds to 2.0%, but round-off loses 0.1% of the total 2.1% increase over the last 12 months.  The alarming message is that zeroes and negative numbers have been replaced since July with large numbers.  The average monthly increase since July has been 0.2875.  Projecting that alone forward would give us a consumer price index (CPI) increase from July 2010 through June 2011 of 3.45%.  Still more alarming is the fact that the trend is actually upward over that time.  It is more realistic to project at least a 4% increase in the CPI for this period.  Such an increase generates further uncertainty which will make businesses more reluctant to add employees.

 

These increases have been led by increased food costs and fuel costs.  Food and fuel costs are particularly difficult for the poor, those on fixed incomes, and even middle class families to bear.  As we know, medical costs continue their high rate increases, accelerated by ObamaCare. The hardship is increased when many more people are unemployed.  In 2009, the median U.S. inflation-adjusted household income fell 0.7% from 2008.  It is estimated that the median inflation-adjusted household income in 2010 was down by 1.0% compared to 2008.  Income has been going down and now prices, especially unavoidable ones such as food and fuel prices, are going up at a great clip.

Democrats, this is really the way to show how much you care for the poor and the middle class!  Your slip is definitely showing.  No, that would be much too nice.  That can happen to anyone, or at least any woman.  No, you are clearly revealed for the con artists you are.  You cannot put this flim-flam game over on the American people for long.  Surely they will catch on.  A 5% decrease in the ability to purchase goods and services (4% CPI increase, 1% income decrease) is hardly likely to go unnoticed.  Your snake oil is not working and sick Americans are going to notice they are becoming sicker.  You had better hightail it out of town, you flim-flam Democrat con men and women!  This is pure shades of Jimmy Carter replayed and the hopey-changey misdirection magic is not working anymore.

Third-World Property Rights in California

California is well-known for its high taxes, high deficits, never-ending regulations, its coddled government employees, its poor schools despite spending twice the national average per student, its building restrictions and high property costs, its high level of domestic out-migration to other states, and its third-world property rights.  California is one of the states that still allows governments to seize private property for private use virtually without restriction.  National outrage following the Supreme Court decision to allow New London, Connecticut to seize the Kelo home and neighborhood for proposed private use brought reforms in many states and local governments to reign in such abuse of property rights recognized in our Constitution.  The land seized from its rightful owners in the Kelo case is now a vacant wasteland.  Similar vacant wastelands have resulted in troubled California owing to similar eminent domain abuse of private property for private, connected company gain.

Third-world property rights are one of the worst impediments to economic growth and the standard of living in third-world countries.  California, with all its woes, has opted for property rights uncertainty to replicate those destructive effects upon ownership and investment right here in our most populated state.  Tim Cavanaugh gave some examples at reason.com:

But the acres of south Los Angeles wasteland generated by the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles (CRA/LA), the state’s largest and wealthiest RDA, are a grim testament to failure. The agency’s Normandie 5 Redevelopment Project has generated zero development. Its 107-acre Watts Project area, which has been in effect since 1968, boasts nothing but a Food 4 Less that hardly required government help to come into being. The massive $163 million Marlton Square project has stagnated, unbuilt, for nearly 20 years as a shady developer with friends in City Hall looted taxpayer funds. The two-block project area at the corner of Vermont and Manchester Avenues is a vacant lot. So is the long-fallow Central/Slauson project, where the CRA used eminent domain to shut down a metal works that was the only functioning business in the area.

 He also notes that the people attracted to such government property seizure schemes are not the best people:

Maybe the most important factor is the tendency of public-private partnerships to attract the worst elements of society: union goons, neighborhood activists, reverends, public-trough developers, political appointees, city planners, and so on. The Marlton Square project came close to breaking ground in 1999 under the legendary Lakers point guard and successful developer Magic Johnson—until itinerant local politician Mark Ridley-Thomas forced Magic out and turned the project over to a developer with a history of bouncing checks and cheating on his taxes, who went on to make millions of city dollars vanish before going bankrupt.

One of the more notable characteristics of these ignoble schemes is that they usually victimize the poor or the lower middle class for the comfort and profit of unscrupulous well-off people with good connections to government.  Fortunately, these would-be victims have a resolute champion in the Institute for Justice, which is making a point of becoming a nemesis for such low-life dispossession in the rascal-ridden state of California.  An example of the work the Institute for Justice does is its defense of a community youth athletic center against the out-of-control use of eminent domain by National City near San Diego.  A cavalier declaration of blight has been issued to 700 properties so that the city can exercise eminent domain over any of the properties over the next ten-year period.  The property owners must successfully fight off the blight rulings within a limited time to save their property from some potential exercise of the eminent domain claim in later years.  This means considerable expense and effort to prevent the loss of their property which may or may not happen.  This arrangement is a most cunning way to cause many property owners to fail to get the blight ruling overturned, especially when they are people of limited financial resources.  This is a plague upon the unwealthy for the future benefit of unscrupulous wealthy developers.

The Institute for Justice and some brave would-be victims have something to say about that however:



You can read more about this worthy case here.  Please consider becoming a supporter of the Institute for Justice while you are there.

The Ships That Won't Go Down

A friend sent this poem to me.  I like it.

The Ships That Won't Go Down
    by Henry Lawson (1898)

We hear a great commotion
'Bout the ship that comes to grief,
That founders in mid-ocean,
Or is driven on a reef;
Because it's cheap and brittle
A score of sinners drown.
But we hear but mighty little
Of the ships that won't go down.

Here's honour to the builders –
The builders of the past;
Here's honour to the builders
That builded ships to last;
Here's honour to the captain,
And honour to the crew;
Here's double-column headlines
To the ships that battle through.

They make a great sensation
About famous men that fail,
That sink a world of chances
In the city morgue or gaol,
Who drink, or blow their brains out,
Because of "Fortune's frown".
But we hear far too little
Of the men who won't go down.

The world is full of trouble,
And the world is full of wrong,
But the heart of man is noble,
And the heart of man is strong!
They say the sea sings dirges,
But I would say to you
That the wild wave's song's a paean
For the men that battle through.

 

Thanks Paul. 

No Improvement in Employment, Recession Continues Unabated

Do not be encouraged by the announced falling unemployment rates.  These are only informing us that the prospects for finding a job have been so bad so long that the unemployed have either given up on hunting for a job or the government has decided to assume that they no longer want a job.

As I have done many times before, we can calculate the number of jobs that people would want if the economy were robust and offering plenty of good jobs.  It is not doing this due to the huge increases of wealth transfer from the private sector to the government sector throughout the first decade of this century and the many, many tens of thousands of federal, state, and local regulations which are strangulating businesses and preventing the formation of new businesses.  When the situation was better in the late 1990s after the supply-side economics efforts from 1981 on had time to work their magic, many people wanted to work in desired jobs and the unemployment rate was very low.  In January 2000, 67.49% of the total non-institutional working age population was either working, looking for work, or transitioning from one job to another.  Our working age population has grown since then by more than 30 million people.  We can estimate the number of jobs that would be desired now based on the 67.49% who wished to have a job in January 2000.  I know of no fundamental reason why people would not be as eager to work now, if only good jobs were available.

Once we determine how many jobs would be wanted by this criterion, we can subtract the number of jobs actually held by Americans now.  The resulting number is the number of missing jobs.  This number of missing jobs is a great measure for the health of the economy, just as the GDP is also.  The GDP has been improving somewhat for some time in this Great Socialist Recession thanks to productivity improvements per worker, but as we will see, job creation is more dismally deficient than we are led to believe.

Let me provide the job numbers for January and February employment and unemployment before we go on.  The numbers in the table below are from the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report or earlier reports.  The table does not use seasonal adjustments.  These are the actual numbers of people employed and unemployed.

The unemployment rate, using numbers not adjusted seasonally, was 9.8% in January and 9.5% in February.  This is not as good as 8.9%, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate.  The real story is much worse than this.  In December, we had 22.067 million missing jobs, which we can compare to only 5.689 million missing jobs in January 2000.  Some sizable fraction of the January 2000 unemployed were probably briefly between jobs as they switched from one job to another, so this actually slightly overstates the number of missing jobs then.  The job market was so good, people were then changing jobs frequently.  In January 2011, the missing jobs rose to 23.5 million and we saw a small improvement in February to a mere 23.1 million missing jobs.  The percentage of missing jobs is actually 14.3% now.  That is much worse than the 8.9% unemployment rate we are told by the government and the media.  Of course, we also know that many people are also underemployed in addition to this appalling number.

To get a better sense of what the progress has been on job creation as the economy measured by the GDP has begun to improve, let us examine a graph of the number of missing jobs (given in thousands, making 1,000 jobs in thousands equal to 1 million jobs).  This graph has a baseline of 20  million jobs, so no month in the time from November 2009 through February 2011 has as few as 20 million missing jobs:

We see that January and February of 2010 were awful months, but there was some job growth through July of 2010.  Then the jobs situation became worse through the end of the year into January 2011.  February 2011 shows a bit of improvement, but the economy is still missing more than 23 million jobs!  If the Democrats had increased taxes as they wanted to before the voters convinced them in November 2010 that that would be suicide for their political careers, this missing jobs situation would certainly be worse.  But, with the upcoming scheduled reduction of corporate tax rates in Japan, the U.S. will have the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world.

It is easy to make a huge difference in the number of jobs available to Americans.  Right now, it makes more sense for companies to expand their operations overseas, close to their non-American customers and where the taxes and the environmental regulations are often less onerous.  The Cato Institute just released a study entitled New Estimates of Effective Corporate Tax Rates on Business Investment.  The effective tax rate on U.S. corporations is 34.6%, but it is only 18.6% for the average OECD nation.  The average for 83 nations is even lower relative to the U.S. rate at 17.7%!  Only an idiot can fail to see that this is a strong negative factor for the creation of U.S. jobs.  Indeed, this is why major corporate tax rate reductions have been made in Canada, our largest trading partner.  Canadian business is booming compared to the U.S. and generating more tax receipts for government as a result, thereby reducing the Canadian deficits.  Over the last decade or a bit more, Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Turkey, Egypt, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Lesotho, Mauritius, and Singapore have made large corporate tax rate reductions.  Australia, Belgium, China, Denmark, Finland, South Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom made substantial corporate tax rate cuts also.  Many of these countries are going to make further tax rate cuts.

Only the U.S. has been too dumb to stop penalizing companies for providing the goods, services, and jobs we want!  The Democrats have actually raised the future effective corporate tax rate with provisions in ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill.  They raised the rate with the imposition of mandates to use expensive and unreliable "green energy" and will raise it more with anti-carbon regulations out of the errant EPA.  On top of all that, before the November election, they wanted to raise the basic corporate tax rate.  The Obama budget proposal for 2012 and beyond calls for tax increases of $650 billion.  He wants to add $46 billion of taxes from oil companies, thereby preventing them from taking advantage of many new oil and gas finds in the U.S. to create new jobs and wealth.  Actually, they probably will not be able to extract much more oil and gas anyway while Obama occupies the office of the president since he is allowing no leases to be sold.  In addition, he plans to hit multinational corporations with an additional $129 billion of taxes.  Such an anti-business climate makes the avowedly socialist countries of Europe look like better bets for expansion in too many cases.  The Democrats talk about wanting to create jobs, but virtually every concrete proposal they make will kill jobs.

Investment in U.S. corporations is also blocked with high taxes on dividends.  The owners of a corporation pay an effective tax of 34.6% prior to any dividends being issued and then pay an amount on ordinary dividends equal to their individual income tax bracket.  Through 2012, that bracket may be 35%, making the total tax they pay on an ordinary dividend equal to an overall tax of 0.346 + (1 - 0.346)(0.35) = 0.5749 or 57.49%.  This leaves little incentive for such investors.  In 2013, the situation gets worse, since the Democrats want the highest income tax bracket rate to automatically go up to 39.6%, which will take the dividend rate along with it.  Dumb and dumber.

Job creation is mostly the business of small business.  The personal income tax rates strongly affect small businesses, since their profits are normally added to the income of individuals on their personal income tax returns.  The same is true for many angel investors and the family members who invest in a relative's business when he starts one up.  The risks in starting a small business are huge.  Most go out of business within ten years.  Those that succeed in generating profits, return less to their investors by virtue of the long-term capital gains tax.  Through 2012, this has just been set at 15%, but it is scheduled to go up to 20% in 2013, unless the more economically savvy Republicans can pass legislation opposed by Obama and the Democrat Senate before then.  Meanwhile, no one can undertake a long-term investment without assuming that any success will be taxed at the 20%, not the present 15%, capital gains tax.

One of the most important requirements of good tax laws is that businessmen should be able to count on their tax rates not going up.  When tax rates go up, they turn calculations that justify an investment of money and years of work into failures.  Wealth and jobs are lost as a result.  Even the threat of a tax increase causes proposed investments to be tossed out as excessively risky and it can cause somewhat marginal businesses to be closed down early.  Most businesses have a learning curve in which the owner messes up and has a number of close calls with failure and bankruptcy.  Many wildly successful businesses had such close calls in their infancy.  Every time a tax burden or a regulatory burden is added for a young business, that business may be pushed over the cliff.  We cannot calculate how many future successes are killed in this way.  But, we do see that countries with lower tax and regulatory burdens on businesses do tend to have higher growth rates, generate more wealth, improve the living standards of both the poor and the wealthy, people live longer, there is less pollution, and they have lower unemployment rates.

This picture is so clear that it is evidence of a strong idiocracy in academia, the political class, and most of the media.  Idiocracy is my word for persistent wrongheadedness in the face of a multitude of evidence to the contrary often subscribed to by otherwise intelligent people.  The word is applied most frequently to college indoctrinated Progressive Elitists.  They have worked very diligently to produce the Great Socialist Recession and to maintain our economy in a jobless state.

The Real American Energy Opportunities

Gasoline prices are rising at the gas pumps and look as though they will continue to do so for some time.  There are many predictions that the price of regular gas will rise above $4.00 a gallon.  The present recession occurred when it did because a sudden oil price surge was the pin that popped the housing credit balloon.  Ten of the eleven U.S. recessions since the end of WWII were precipitated by a sudden rise in oil prices.  In addition to the instability of the Middle East and the fact that Obama by design has no foreign policy to deal with it, Obama is determined to force fossil fuel prices upward drastically.  Such an action must have an effect similar to an international upsurge in the price of oil.  Our fragile economy may not be able to survive his efforts to rapidly reduce the use of coal, to virtually end exploration and drilling for oil and gas in America and its waters, to penalize CO2 emissions, and to misdirect the economy into expensive and unreliable wind and solar generated electric power.  It will certainly not prosper and generate the millions of jobs we desperately need it to, especially in view of our huge national debt and the unfunded looming liabilities for Social Security and Medicare for the retiring and politically blind Baby Boomer generation.

American energy policy is absolutely critical and should be founded upon the following facts:

• Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is a scientifically failed hypothesis.
• Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but is plant food which will only promote plant growth should its concentration in the atmosphere continue to increase due to the warming of the oceans since the end of the Little Ice Age.
• It is not practical and economic for the U.S. to pursue energy independence.  We presently import over 60% of the crude oil we refine.  This imported crude and other petroleum products cost $453 billion in 2008.  Decades of Presidential declarations of our pursuing energy independence have failed to make progress toward the goal.
• The best way to assure the availability of adequate oil and gas supplies is to have as many sources of them in as many areas of the world as possible.  The resulting competition for income will do more to relieve price and availability concerns than any other approach to the problem.
• Presently, 77% of wold oil reserves are owned or controlled by national governments, some of which are unfriendly and many of which are subject to instabilities.  Nationalized oil companies are also inclined to be inefficient, often under-capitalized, and to lack innovation.
• The U.S. has 22.6% of the known world reserves of coal, which leads the world.  Russia has 14.4% and China has 12.6%.  In 2010, despite increases in natural gas use for electric power generation in the U.S., coal still produced 45% of American electric power.  Coal power stations require scrubbers and generate fly ash, but their problems are exaggerated by many environmentalists and Progressive Elitists.
• Ethanol additions to gasoline only provide corn-growing farmers and ethanol refiners with welfare payments and drives food prices upwards.  Ethanol provides neither net energy nor pollution benefits, despite claims years ago that it did both.
• Wind generation and solar power plants are very expensive and exist on the power grid only due to government mandates and subsidies.  These power sources have little utility except in remote locations far from the electric grid or for temporary setups to avoid power hookups.  They are also unreliable and use the land inefficiently.  When on the grid, they require expensive gas-fired power plant back-up.
• The U.S. has huge oil and natural gas reserves compared to those acknowledged by the U.S. government.  The government estimated that Alaska's Prudhoe Bay held 9 billion barrels of oil, but it has already produced 15 billion barrels and is still producing.  The Bakken Formation of North Dakota and Montana is now thought to have up to 4.3 billion barrels of oil, but the government had previously thought it had 25 times less than this amount.  Much of America is effectively unexplored for oil and gas and there are many, many areas worthy of exploration and development.  This situation exists because the government has not allowed exploration in many areas.

Let us discuss a few of the exciting oil and gas opportunities that the U.S. has, if only the Obama gang were not so determined to stifle them.

Northern Economics and the University of Alaska - Anchorage's Institute of Social and Economic Research has just recently released a study concluding that Alaska's Outer Continental Shelf could make Alaska the 8th largest oil-producing region in the world.  This would place it ahead of Nigeria, Libya, Russia, and Norway.  Alaska could produce 10 billion barrels of oil and 15 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.  About 55,000 new jobs would be created and add payroll of about $145 billion nationally.  Because oil royalties are very high, government revenues through the year 2057 would be increased by $193 billion.  The operating life of the 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline System would be extended by such production.

The development of the many oil shale deposits in the United States holds huge promise and were recently discussed in the Investor's Business Daily article A Shale of Difference.  The known shale oil deposits are shown in the map below:

Late in his presidency, George Bush opened up 2 million acres of federal lands in the Green River Formation to possible development for shale oil and tar sands.  Interior Secretary Ken Salazar of Obama's cadre has refused to allow this to happen, claiming that the leases must be reviewed.  Of course environmental groups have also filed federal lawsuits to prevent its development.  The area is thought, by the U.S. Geological Survey, which commonly makes underestimates, to hold 1.5 trillion barrels of oil.  This is six times the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia and would supply the U.S. with enough oil for 2 centuries of use!  But, despite the recession and the soaring costs of oil, the Obama cadre sees only reasons to prevent the development of this oil source.  After all, it would only make it too easy for Americans to pollute the atmosphere with CO2!  The consequences of such wrongheadedness mean that we will not be producing 2 million barrels of oil a day from oil shale fields as we could have been doing by 2015.  That production would have exceeded the production of the Gulf of Mexico prior to the Deepwater Horizon event.  The now booming Bakken formation of North Dakota could have had some good company and America could have been much richer and had many more jobs.

An ICF International study claims that opening up the federal waters off the Pacific Coast, the Eastern Gulf of Mexico Coast, and the Atlantic Coast for development of oil fields would increase domestic oil production by nearly 1 million barrels a day and 3 billion cubic feet of gas a day.  Allowing efficient and innovative American oil and gas companies to tap these resources as the economics allows would provide a strong steadying hand to the problem of oil and gas availability and price stability for Americans.  The benefits for the American economy over the next several critical decades would be huge.

Yet faced with an exemplary environmental track record in recent years, a fragile economy due to many government interferences, a 13% real unemployment rate with many more Americans underemployed, a lack of good jobs for those without a college degree, an entire Middle East unstable and in revolt, and all of these opportunities for wealth creation, our Progressive Elitist overlords have decided we are best put on a severe energy diet.  Energy Deprivation is Good, say our all-knowing federal and many state masters.

We the People clearly need to mount an Energy Plenitude is Good campaign!  Drill, Baby, Drill!!!!

ObamaCare Now Seen as so Bad, Democrats Consider it Disparaging

Recently, Representative Tom Graves, Republican of Georgia was speaking on the House floor in favor of an amendment to defund ObamaCare.  He describes how it is so expensive that 915 companies and union health plans have received waivers, letting 2.5 million Americans off the hook for ObamaCare.  A Democrat Representative from Florida rudely interrupted him several times claiming she wanted a ruling on a parliamentary inquiry.  She was allowed to make that inquiry only after Representative Graves finished and yielded the floor.  Her point was that members of the House were not supposed to make disparaging remarks about the President.  She claimed that by calling the Affordable Care Act by the popular shorthand name ObamaCare, that Rep. Graves was being disparaging.  It is very interesting that this great triumph of the Obama presidency is now seen as so bad that Obama's being associated with it is seen as disparaging.  What an amazing admission by a Democrat in the House of Representatives!  The brief Graves talk and the "lady" from Florida can be watched in this video clip:

Blackbody Radiation and the Consensus Greenhouse Gas Theory

Let us consider the nature of black body radiation and evaluate the manner in which black body radiation is invoked in the consensus theory of the greenhouse gas warming of the Earth. The essence of the greenhouse gas hypothesis of global warming is given in this schematic diagram used in the U.N. IPCC report:

In Note 4 on the diagram, it is said that the longwave infrared radiation is emitted from the surface of the Earth due to the 168 W/m^2 of radiation from the sun that the surface has absorbed.  In Note 5, it states that some of this radiation is absorbed by greenhouse gas molecules with half being emitted in the direction of space and half emitted back toward the Earth's surface.  The infrared radiation from the greenhouse gas emission toward the surface is absorbed and the surface gains more heat.  This additional heat causes more infrared radiation to be emitted, which again is absorbed by greenhouse gas molecules and half again is re-emitted toward the surface heating it still more.

This is very important in the greenhouse theory because the Earth's surface is desperately cold due to direct solar heating, since the black body temperature corresponding to a thermal power of 168 W/m^2 is only 233.3 K or -39.8 C.  Fortunately, the theory claims half of the surface radiated infrared energy that is returned to the surface provides more heating of the surface, which radiates still more energy as it warms, but half of that is returned.  In fact, the claim is made that a great deal of heat energy is added to the Earth's surface in this way.  Let us examine the frequently cited Kiehl-Trenberth Energy Balance diagram to see how much.

This diagram comes in several versions and the incoming radiation from the sun absorbed by the surface differs somewhat in the various versions.  In this diagram, it is 161 W/m^2, or a bit less than the 168 W/m^2 of the IPCC diagram above.  The total energy added to the surface by greenhouse gas re-emission is said to be 333 W/m^2 here.  This means that greenhouse gases are adding slightly more than two times the energy of the sun to warm the surface.  They believe that a factor of two times the solar warming is due to the multiplier effect of greenhouse gas re-emission.  Each time a greenhouse gas molecule absorbs ground radiation energy, it sends half of it back to the surface.  The surface radiates all of that added energy and half of that half is returned to the surface by the gracious greenhouse gas molecule.  The result is a geometric series of one-half raised to a power times the initial heat energy the surface had from the sun.  It works like this:

Back Radiation = (161 W/m^2) (Sum from n=1 to infinity of terms 1/(2^n))

The greenhouse gas theory says that the sum of the geometric series is 2.  Actually, the sum is 1.  I suspect the error arose from the use of a general formula for geometric series which starts with the term for n=0 and one-half raised to power zero is one.  The greenhouse gas theorists forgot to subtract this first term of one, which was not in the series they needed to sum.  In any case, note that 2 times 161 W/m^2 is 322 W/m^2, or almost the 333 W/m^2 this diagram claims warms the surface with slightly more than twice the power of the sun itself.

There are many problems with the physics of these diagrams.  This will not be a general discussion of all of these problems.  I will note that it is interesting that the Kiehl-Trenberth diagram allows for some cooling of the surface by evaporation and by thermals or air convection currents, but these apparently become operative only after all of the direct solar warming radiation has already been doubled by the re-emission of infrared radiation back to the surface!  One should note that no radiation is emitted by the nitrogen, oxygen, and argon that make up most of our atmosphere in this model.  They are warm, as implied by the thermals, but they emit no radiation in their theory. [17 March 2013: Actually, oxygen molecules absorb and emit energy on the border of visible and infrared radiation (found in solar insolation, but not the Earth's emission spectrum) and nitrogen, oxygen, and argon all emit electromagnetic radiation in the very low energy microwave radiation spectrum.  These represent very minor amounts of energy, however.]

Another interesting implication is that the absorbing greenhouse gas molecule always re-emits 100% of the infrared radiation it absorbs.  It never transfers any energy to nitrogen, oxygen, or argon due to collisions, despite molecular collisions occurring at the rate of 6.9 billion per second at sea level.  In reality, such collisions do occur before re-emission does and the absorbed energy often is transferred to nitrogen, oxygen, and argon molecules or atoms, which remain cooler than the Earth's surface under most conditions and times of day.

As we know, heat is not transferred from cooler bodies to warmer bodies.  The flow of heat is always from the warmer to the cooler body.  This creates a problem since as one ascends in height in the lower atmosphere, called the troposphere, which extends to an altitude of about 15,000 meters, the temperature drops.  Where the average surface temperature is 288 K, the temperature at 1000 meters altitude is 281.7 K, and at 5,000 meters it is 255.7 K, or about the same temperature the Earth appears to be as seen from space and assuming it is a black body radiator.  Of course it is not a black body radiator, despite the fact that greenhouse gas theorists almost always assume it is.  The everyday objects of our lives do emit infrared radiation, but with a reduced efficiency compared to a black body radiator.  The Earth's surface is full of everyday objects and materials, none of which are black body radiators.  Greenhouse gas theory says that the greatest increase in temperature due to added CO2 occurs at an altitude of 8,000 to 12,000 meters above the equator and the lower latitudes.  At 10,000 meters, the gas temperature is 223.3 K.  A greenhouse gas molecule at any of these altitudes is colder when at equilibrium with the surrounding gas molecules than the surface of the Earth at 288K.  Even if we compare to the black body temperature corresponding to the 161 W/m^2 said to come straight from the sun, the molecules at 10,000 meters are colder than that surface would be and they could not heat it according to thermodynamics principles.  Apparently, the greenhouse theorists believe the greenhouse gas molecule absorbs the infrared radiation it is able to absorb and that raises the temperature of the molecule to a higher temperature than the surrounding molecules in the atmosphere at that elevation and before the greenhouse gas molecule has a collision and transfers energy to those surrounding molecules, it re-emits infrared energy to the ground and warms it.

Let us now discuss the properties of a black body radiator.  It is a very special cavity with a very thin skin.  The volume within the cavity has a very special property.  The energy density, or the energy per unit volume of space, is constant everywhere within it.  That energy is determined by the photons of various frequencies that are emitted from the walls of the cavity as uniquely determined by the temperature of the walls of the cavity.  One of the interesting properties of a black body cavity is that if the interior volume is doubled, then the emission of photons from the walls must also double, assuming the temperature remains the same.  Let us examine the distribution of electromagnetic frequencies found in a black body at several temperatures of interest for the greenhouse gas theory of global warming.  The diagram below shows the spectrum of frequencies or wavelengths for the sun and for some temperatures similar to that of the Earth.

The spectrum of wavelengths for the sun at 5525 K is shown at the left top of the diagram to have a peak in the visible light part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but also has a long tail in the infrared part of the spectrum.  On the right top of the diagram, three spectra of emission energies are shown for black body radiators at 310, 260, and 210 K.  These are the smooth lines of violet, blue, and black, respectively.  The Earth's surface at about 288 K is closer to the spectrum for a body at 310 K.  The blue area filled in within those black body spectra is the portion of longwave infrared radiation from the surface of the Earth which is not absorbed by the greenhouse gases.  The wavelengths at which the greenhouse gases absorb radiation is shown for each gas below, as is the sum of their absorptions.

If the Earth's surface is at a certain temperature, then it too will have a black body-like emission spectrum.  Now suppose that CO2 absorbs a particular wavelength of infrared radiation out of that spectrum and then re-emits that energy at that wavelength back to the Earth's surface.  Can that photon absorbed by the surface raise the temperature of the surface?  No.  The reason it cannot raise the temperature of the surface is because to do so, the radiative spectrum has to move to the left in the diagram above.  The shorter wavelengths on the left correspond to higher frequencies and to higher energies.  For the surface to become warmer due to the absorption of the photon from a greenhouse gas, higher energy vibrational states must become occupied in the Earth's surface materials.  A photon from a lower temperature emitter cannot warm the surface to a higher temperature because that lower energy photon cannot excite the necessary higher energy vibrational modes.  That photon can slow down the cooling of surface at night, since its emission at night will cool the surface and the returned photon will be at a higher energy than the surface is by the time the photon returns.  This is the equivalent of the process when we put hot coffee in a thermos, thereby slowing down its cooling rate.  But, the returning photons from the reflective wall in the thermos never heat the coffee to a higher temperature than it was at when it was poured into the thermos.

Whether a photon is absorbed by a material or not is dependent upon the electronic and vibrational states in the material which can be excited and the energy of the photon.  The fact that a photon is incident upon a material does not mean it will be absorbed.  The greenhouse gas theorists recognize this when the material is nitrogen or oxygen molecules, but they assume the Earth's surface can absorb whatever strikes it, at least if it is a low energy or longwave infrared photon.  But, just as visible light passes through window glass without absorption, this is not necessarily the case.  The light photon is not absorbed in glass because glass has a wide energy band gap in which there are no occupied or unoccupied electronic states.  Still higher energy ultraviolet energy may excite available unoccupied electronic states, which in turn will de-excite in time.  Until they do, they can warm the glass.  But visible light just passes through.  The same is the case with some of the low energy, longwave infrared radiation returned from greenhouse gas molecule de-excitations.  The Earth's surface will not accept them since the excitable vibrational states are already excited and vibrating assuming that its temperature has not dropped since the returned photon was emitted by the ground.  There simply is no available energy state able to accept it.  The fact that the greenhouse gas alarmists ignore this fact is a very egregious error.

For another approach to the problem of heating surfaces with black body radiation, let us return to the black body cavity.  To make this simple to picture, let us assume it consists of two identical hemispheres which we have put together to make a sphere.  We supply heat to the sphere wall to bring it to a temperature T.  The power radiating from the black body walls is known to be equal to a constant times T to the fourth power.  The interior is full of photons, which are incident upon the walls, which are also radiating photons.  Let us image one of the hemispheres is on the left and one is on the right as we look at our black body radiator.  When a photon from the right wall is incident upon the left wall, the temperature of the left wall does not go up.  It remains constant.  An incident photon did not cause a temperature rise.  Of course, one may say that the incident fluxes of photons are equal to emitted fluxes, so it is expected the temperature will not increase.  But, then if we have supposed that the greenhouse gas molecule that has absorbed a photon from the Earth's surface has not lost energy to a gas collision and has re-emitted the photon at the same energy back to the Earth's surface, then why would the Earth's surface temperature increase any more than the left hemisphere wall temperature would in our black body cavity?  The answer is that it would not.

Perhaps you would object that there is something so special about the black body radiator that the Earth's surface cannot replicate it and will act differently.  Indeed, there are differences, but it is the analogy to the black body radiator explicitly that is being used in the greenhouse gas theory.  The differences of the Earth's surface from a black body radiator are important, but I cannot see how they help to allow one to claim that photons of an energy from the surface's black body radiation spectrum are able to drive the surface to higher temperature than it had when it first emitted a photon of the same energy.

Let us try still another thought experiment.  Let us separate our two black body hemispheres ever so slightly so that we have two hemispheres facing each other and they are still at the same temperature.  In the greenhouse gas theory, these two facing spheres would heat each other up to a higher temperature!  The right sphere would emit a photon and it would be absorbed by the left sphere.  The left sphere would then emit half of such photons back to the right sphere and half out into space from the outside surface of the hemisphere.  But then half of those emitted from the inside surface would be incident upon the right hemisphere inside surface and be re-emitted toward the left hemisphere.  Of course one might say the right hemisphere emits half inward and half outward, but note that in greenhouse gas theory no photons are emitted in the direction of the Earth's interior, despite the fact that they actually are.  So assuming the right hemisphere acts like the Earth's surface and the left hemisphere acts like the greenhouse gas, we have set up the same "energy doubling" geometric series between our two hemispheres.  The temperature of the right hemisphere must climb.  Well, no, it does no such thing.  The two hemispheres will remain at the same temperature just as if they were still together as a standard black body cavity.  Well not quite.  Actually, each will be a very slightly lower and equal temperature.

Let us now take our hemispheres and widely separate them.  We will put the right one at a higher temperature than the left and then bring them into close proximity to almost make a spherical cavity.  What will happen?  The cooler left hemisphere will warm, but neither hemisphere will become warmer than the right hemisphere before they were brought together.  The photons incident upon the warmer right hemisphere from the cooler left hemisphere cannot make the initially warmer hemisphere any warmer.  Why would they when if we made the left hemisphere the same temperature as the warmer hemisphere, it could not warm that hemisphere.  Indeed, the most ideal situation for warming one hemisphere would be to put the two hemispheres back together to make the true black body cavity, but with each hemisphere at a temperature T as we put them together, we would simply wind up with a black body cavity with a temperature of T.

In short, the greenhouse gas theory errs badly about the behavior of black body radiation and radiators.  Yes, bodies above absolute zero temperature do radiate photons.  But those photons are not always absorbed and they are able to raise the temperature of the absorbing body only if they are of a high enough energy to allow vibrational states to be excited which would be excited in the black body radiator at that higher temperature.  The black body radiator requires that the energy levels of its spectrum be occupied and that they be filled to the prescribed extent given by the black body energy distribution for a given temperature.  Having many photons incident at an energy level which is already filled, will not increase the temperature of the black body radiator material.

The consensus greenhouse gas theory hugely exaggerates the effect of greenhouse gases.  This is not to say that there is no effect.  As I have pointed out in a chapter of Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory (Stairway Press, Mount Vernon, Washington, 2011), greenhouse gases cool the Earth's surface during the daylight hours and retard its cooling in many cases at night.  This is an important, though in no way catastrophic effect, and it has been observed to be happening as the CO2 concentrations have increased.  But those effects of greenhouse gases do not violate the conservation of energy and do not require cooler or equal temperature bodies to warm a warmer or equal temperature body.

As I also pointed out in that chapter, the incident radiation from the sun is actually somewhat greater than that claimed in the diagrams above.  The temperature of the Earth's surface given that higher energy flux or power density is also much higher than the equivalent black body radiator, since the Earth's surface has a much lower emissivity than does a black body.  This means that it cools itself more slowly with radiation than a black body would.  As a result, the Earth's surface is likely only about 9 C warmer than one would expect from the incident radiation from the sun.  There are many other sources of energy that can account for this much smaller energy differential.  Among these are the effects of gravity upon our atmosphere, the heat from the very hot interior of the Earth, the energy due to the tides in the ocean and land due to the moon and other bodies in our solar system, the energy from cosmic rays and dust, the energy from the solar wind, the energy from the interaction of the sun's magnetic field with that of the Earth, and the energy stored in the subsurface oceans and land.  The urban heat island effect is also substantial in some areas, though relatively minor across the globe.

Rational Taxation Policy - The Fundamentals

The rational man obtains the great majority of the goods and services he needs and wants from the private sector where individuals enter into voluntary trades and contracts.  In the private sector each individual chooses his own values and is free to act in accordance with his individual values.  In contrast, in the government sector, the government uses force to supply services and sometimes goods, for which it requires compensation in the form of some combination of taxes, mandated services and expenses, and the acceptance of a devalued currency.  The individual may have some say in what services government will provide and how at the ballot box, but on many an issue he is subject to the will of a majority who will evaluate the given government action differently than he does.  Furthermore, most voters will have but a very limited understanding of the effects of government action, so their decisions are not fully informed and not rational.  Despite this, irrational government policies may be imposed on the individual who disagrees.  Even when most voters agree, we have found that our politicians and still less our bureaucrats will often not listen to the will of the majority.  In other words, government provided services are not responsive to the values and needs of individuals.

Individually, we have little ability to choose the services we will acquire from government, the cost of those services, and the manner in which they will be delivered.  We have also come to understand that government services are provided very inefficiently.  For all of these reasons, it is clear that the People are best served with having the private sector provide them with most of our goods and services.  But, it is also true that some government services are required.  Our Founding Fathers and the Framers of the Constitution acknowledged this in the Constitution which provides for a minimal, but necessary, government with very limited powers.  They were always conscious that government was force and it was to be very carefully controlled.

Let us call the total cost of government, whether actually taxes, or effective taxes such as the devaluation of the currency and regulatory mandates of service and provisions of goods, simply by the name of taxes in the further discussion.  Whether the taxes are levied on income, on the size of trade transactions, profits, or taken as forced labor, they can effectively be said to represent some fraction of the Gross Domestic Product or GDP.  Let us note that the higher taxes are, the more they discourage people from working and the more they discourage reinvestment to increase the productivity of the economy.  But, economic or trade activities do require that violent acts such as thievery, assault, fraud, rape, and property destruction be controlled.  They are also aided essentially by the enforcement of contracts.  A region and the people living there also need to be protected from invasion or assault by other countries, if they are to prosper.  For these minimal desirable services, the government will need to have a baseline level of taxation.  That baseline taxation level I would estimate to be between 0.05 and 0.10 times the GDP.  Government requirements for spending above that level are optional, though I would argue that they are also immoral.  Spending beyond this level is clearly dependent upon one's values and upon one's willingness to use force to obtain what one wants from others.

Whatever size government attains, some of its activities ought to scale with the size of the population and some scale with the size of the GDP.  The cost of protection from personal assault and rape scales with the size of the population.  Some types of robbery and fraud do also.  The enforcement of contracts scales more nearly with the size of the GDP, as do some types of fraud and most aspects of property protection.  I suspect that the components dependent on the size of the population and on the size of the GDP would be similar for a constitutional government.  But, in any case, the effective tax rate can be expressed as a fraction of the GDP and we will call that rate t.

Over time, the GDP of a country will change.  We have a long tradition in the United States of watching it grow in many more years than not.  The GDP grows because our population is growing, though in the last decade, our population growth has been just under 1% per year.  This growth assumes that the People do not feel a reason to change their inclination to work during the period in question.  But clearly one factor affecting GDP is the size of the population.  Another is increases in productivity due to machinery, equipment, management improvements, and worker training.

Let us make a simple model of the effect of taxation on the growth of the GDP.  To be more accurate, on that part of the GDP that will be taxable, since at high tax rates, much of the GDP goes underground.  In this model, p will be a constant annual growth rate for the population.  The baseline GDP will be GDPb.  After n years from the time of the baseline GDP, the growth in population would cause the GDP growth by year n to be (n)(p)(GDPb) assuming that tax rates had no effect upon how hard people worked or how much income they reported.  A simple way to incorporate the effect of how people will react to the tax rate is to add the factor 1-t to the growth of GDP due to the growth in the population.  When the tax rate is 1, no one will work, at least they will not report that produce which they must produce to eke out the barest sustenance.  This says that people will work in proportion to how much of what they produce they get to keep.  The strict proportionality may not be completely accurate, but I suspect it is not far afield from reality.  This component of GDP growth is then (n)(p)(1-t)(GDPb) for GDPn of the nth year.

Increases in productivity also play a role in growing GDP.  If productivity is improving at a fractional rate of e per year in the economy with a very minimal government providing adequate freedom from violence and enforcement of contract that e is at its maximum value, then the GDP in the nth year after the baseline GDP would be about (1+e(1-t))^n (GDPb), since the amount of money available for investment in increasing productivity is proportional to what people have left after taxes.  This formula is akin to the principal owed on a loan at an interest rate i where e(1-t) takes the place of i.  The nth power is due to the compounding nature of the interest, or in this case to the compounding nature of productivity improvements.  To this point we have neglected the fact that no one will make such investments if the tax rate is 1.  So we will add a factor of (1-t) here also.  The net equation for the GDPn in the nth year after the baseline GDPb with a minimal government is then about:

GDPn = [(p)(n) + (1 + e(1-t)^n](1-t) (GDPb)

Admittedly, this is a simple model and it is not going to be a highly accurate replica of a real economy.  But, it will be very hard to have any understanding of a real economy if one does not develop a feel for the growth rates of a GDP predicted with some reasonable disincentive effect attributed to taxes.  Let us learn such lessons as we can from this model.

Let us use the following values to evaluate a family of GDP curves over a period of 30 years.  The tax rate t will be the variable for each curve.  p will be taken as 0.01, which is very close to the U.S. population growth rate over the last 10 years.  e will be taken as 0.08 or an 8% productivity growth rate per year with ideally minimal government.  The graph below then shows us GDPn/GDPb, the ratio of the GDP in year n to the baseline GDP, or the GDP growth factor.

Now I am not sure that the 0.05 tax rate is adequate to meet the assumption that an e of 0.08 is possible, since the government might be too weak to prevent violence and enforce contracts.  I am sure that a tax rate of 0.10 is high enough to meet that assumption, though.  The tax rate of 0.05 is the only rate shown which allows the first year with the tax imposed to actually have growth in the GDP.  The 0.10 tax rate causes the economy to shrink in the first year by 2.62%, but it has grown by 5.2% in the second year.  At a tax rate of 0.05, the GDP in 30 years is 8.84 times as large as in the base year.  At a 0.10 rate, the GDP in year 30 is 7.52 times as large.  Unfortunately, we presently have an effective tax rate of more than 0.45 and maybe 0.5 in the United States, counting taxes, devaluing of the currency, and regulatory mandates.  That GDP in 30 years at t = 0.45 is only 2.17 times the baseline GDP and at t = 0.50 it is only 1.77 times the baseline GDP.  Many socialists want the tax rates to be much higher.  Note that if the tax rate is increased to 0.60, the GDP in year 30 is only 1.15 times its original size.  This is only half the growth rate of the population alone in 30 years, which means the per capita GDP is shrinking.  Only in year 26 does the GDP at this rate become greater than that in the baseline GDP.  At t = 0.45, the economy immediately shrinks to 0.58 times the baseline GDP and it does not exceed that until year 13.

This model says there is every reason to believe that high tax rates stunt an economy.  We do not see the sudden onset of GDP reduction on the scale shown here since our taxes have long been high and they have been increased gradually.  But when we increase taxes from a fractional rate of t = 0.4 to t=0.45, there is some immediate reduction in size of the GDP or its growth rate.  Commonly, that reduction is partially hidden by a devaluation of our currency.  Note also that each reduction in tax rate by 0.05 causes an increase in the 30 year GDP which is larger than the last such reduction in tax rate caused.  The actual amount of the effect on the GDP is surely not what is produced by this model, but the fact that high tax rates greatly suppress the GDP over time is the important lesson.

When the Congressional Budget Office is asked what the effect of doubling the tax rate is, they always respond that the tax revenues will double.  When asked what the 10 year effect on taxes is, they say that the taxes collected over ten years will double.  A realistic model will agree with this one in one very important respect.  It will say that a tax increase from current levels will result in much less revenue than that proportional to the tax increase.  The GDP ten years down the road will be much smaller with a doubling of the tax rate.  This has been observed time after time.  When Coolidge decreased the tax rate in the 1920s, government revenues actually increased and the GDP grew greatly.  When Kennedy did the same in the 1960s, the same result re-occurred.  The same was true for the Reagan tax cuts and for the Bush II tax cuts. 

Let us look at the results here to compare the effects of a 0.20 and a 0.40 rate on taxes in 30 years.  At 30 years with t = 0.20, the tax revenue is (0.20)(5.38) = 1.076 GDPb, while at t = 0.40, the tax revenue is (0.40)(2.63) = 1.052 GDPb, so the tax take is actually less at the higher tax rate.  What is more important, in the lower tax case, the people are keeping 4.308 GDPb, while with the higher tax rate they keep only 1.577 times GDPb!  It has to be perfectly clear that the People are much, much better off with a tax rate of 0.20 compared to one at 0.40.  The tax revenue increase in this model is understated because it does not address the frequency of taxable transactions.  Lower taxes take less per transaction, but if the number of transactions increases because the tax take is modest or minimal, the total tax revenue sum over a longer time may bring in much more money to the government.  The record shows that this is exactly what happens.  People also have less incentive to put their money into tax-free municipal bonds where returns are modest, but there are no tax requirements.

Despite this clearly deleterious effect of high taxes, the Democrats and the Socialists are constantly trying to tell us that high tax rates are an investment in our economy.  Nothing could be more ridiculous and foolish.

Decline of Labor Unions Continues

In 2010, the number of union members in the government sector outnumbered those in the private sector by 7.6 million to 7.1 million.  The union rate for the private sector employees was 6.9%, compared to the huge government sector rate of 36.2%.  Among all jobs, union members decreased from 12.3% in 2009 to 11.9% in 2010 due to a loss of 612,000 union members.  These losses should continue since union membership is highest among those workers who are 55 to 64 years old and lowest among workers who are 16 to 24 years old.  Because unions have been such a strong force for socialist programs and special interest programs in government, this decline is a very good thing.  Unfortunately, this decline has made them more desperate and as we saw in the general elections of 2008 and 2010, the unions are willing to spend huge sums to push the government in the direction of socialism and a greater play of factions.

The highest union membership was among local government employees with a rate of 42.3%.  The heavily regulated private sector industries of transportation and utilities had the highest degrees of unionization at 21.8%. and they were followed by the regulated telecommunications industry at 15.8% unionized.  Agriculture at 1.6% had the lowest rate of unionization, though financial services was also low at a 2.0% unionization rate.  Teaching had the highest degree of unionization at 37.1%.  Protective services had the second highest rate of unionization at 34.1%.

Broken down by race and ethnicity, black workers had the highest rate of unionization at 13.4%, while whites were 11.7% unionized, Asians were 10.9%, and Hispanics were 10.0% unionized.

Union membership rates rose in 17 states, but fell in 33 states and the District of Columbia.  The map below shows the distribution of unionization rates in the states:

New York has the highest unionization rate at 24.2%.  Alaska and Hawaii are next at 22.9% and 21.8%, respectively.  This is apparently because these two states have a very high ratio of government workers to private sector workers.  Washington state has a 19.4% rate, while California's rate is 17.5%, and New Jersey's rate is 17.1%.  Unionization is concentrated in the Pacific region, the Northeast, and the East North Central.  To these, Minnesota and Nevada should be added.  The high unionization rate in Nevada played a big role in the re-election of Senator Harry Reid.

It is no accident that population growth rates and state domestic product growth have generally been better in those states with low unionization rates.  The states with the fastest population growth rates from the 2000 Census to the 2010 Census are:

Nevada, 35.1%
Arizona, 24.6%
Utah, 23.8%
Idaho, 21.1%
Texas, 20.6%
North Carolina, 18.5%
Georgia, 18.3%
Florida, 17.6%
Colorado, 16.9%
South Carolina, 15.3%

Of these states only Nevada has a high unionization rate.  People generally migrate to those states which have the best job growth.  The unions are much better at destroying jobs than creating them.

Happy Birthday, Ben Franklin!

17 January was Ben Franklin's birthday.  Ben was America's most important diplomat and before that worked hard to unite the colonies.  He was also a world-famous scientist and inventor.  He signed the Declaration of Independence, the Alliance with France, The Peace Treaty with Great Britain, and the Constitution.  Marsha Enright and Gen LaGreca have written a great piece commemorating him here.  I especially enjoyed this part:

Franklin’s pamphlet “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America” (1784) illustrates how his own values of self-reliance and industry also shaped the new nation. In giving advice to potential immigrants, Franklin explained that there were no lucrative public offices in America, “the usual effects of which are dependence and servility, unbecoming freemen.” Such offices lead to “faction, contention, corruption, and disorder among the people.” In Franklin’s America, government played a minimal role in life. A man seeking to live off public salary, Franklin said, “will be despised and disregarded.”

In America, “every one will enjoy securely the profits of his industry.” And “if he does not bring a fortune with him, he must work and be industrious to live.” Franklin contrasted hard-working Americans with the indolent European nobility. He proudly repeated an American saying of the time, “God Almighty is himself a mechanic!” In short, “America is the land of labor, and by no means” a place “where the fowls fly about ready roasted, crying, Come eat me!”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/01/16/on-franklins-birthday-a-crucial-lesson-from-the-first-american/#ixzz1B

Evaluating the Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming Hypothesis

The continued barrage of claims that man's use of fossil fuels should be curtailed because it generates CO2 emissions has caused me to revise and add to an earlier posting on the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.  The EPA has declared CO2 a pollutant even though it is essential for plant growth and the present levels are less than optimal for plants.  It also has no known toxicological effects upon man unless it were to be at least 20 times more concentrated than it presently is.  Obama and many in Congress want to find ways to further reduce fossil fuel use in order to decrease CO2 emissions, or so they say.  The United Nations remains determined to bring about a reduction in the use of fossil fuels.  Meanwhile, the United States has tremendous reserves of coal and has recently found ways to extract huge amounts of natural gas from shale, yet we are to be stopped from making effective use of these resources and saddled with huge energy costs in the name of catastrophic man-made global warming based on the hypothesis we are about to discuss.

Man clearly makes a contribution to global warming because there is a strong local warming effect in urban areas.  However, the contributions of man to warming on the global scale are small and difficult to even measure.  The anthropogenic global warming catastrophe hypothesis makes the following claims:

• Man's use of fossil fuels results in CO2 emissions in amounts significant compared to the natural sources.
• The CO2 added by man to the atmosphere lingers there a long time, often said to be 100 years.
• The greenhouse gas warming caused by these additions of CO2 is itself significant.
• The warming caused by man's CO2 additions to the atmosphere causes a much stronger warming due to increased water vapor at altitude and its greenhouse effect.
• The great increase in water vapor at 8 to 12 km altitude over the equator and the lower latitudes results in a warming hot zone in the atmosphere, which warms the entire globe by back infra-red radiation.
• The resulting warming causes catastrophic effects, such as droughts, heavy rains, low snowfall, heavy snowfall, increased numbers and severity of hurricanes and typhoons, increased malaria, increased parasites, a greater mortality of older people, the extinction of species, and a great rise in sea level.

One of the most popularly cited versions of the greenhouse gas global warming hypothesis is based on the following thermal power diagram by Kiehl and Trenberth (several similar versions exist):

This is all so much hogwash and bunkum.  Let us consider some of the reasons why CO2 emitted by man is not causing such large and significant global warming effects:

1) The rise of atmospheric CO2 concentrations since 1850 to the level of 2008 made almost no difference in the infra-red radiation absorbed since almost all of the infra-red radiation was already being absorbed that CO2 can absorb in 1850.  The temperature increase due to the CO2 increase since 1850 is about 0.12C.  This is based upon the usual atmospheric CO2 concentration plot, but like the temperature hockey stick plot, this plot is now known to have been manipulated to make the rise of CO2 since the end of the Little Ice Age and the start of the Industrial Revolution look more dramatic than it really has been.  It has not been proven that the general rise in CO2 is not simply due to the oceans warming as their temperature increases slowly due to the end of the Little Ice Age just as often happened before the Industrial Age.

2)  The greenhouse gas models treat the Earth's surface as a black body thermal radiator.  Black body radiators are a very special idealization which the surface of the Earth does not much resemble.  Real objects are characterized by an emissivity constant of less than 1.  The black body radiator has an emissivity of 1.  The Earth's surface has an emissivity of about 0.7.  The diagram above says surface radiation is 396 W/m^2, which is the power emission for a black body with a temperature of 289.1K, close to the Earth's average surface temperature.  The real Earth's surface with an emissivity of 0.7 only emits about 277.2 W/m^2 at a temperature of 289.1K.  The Kiehl - Trenberth diagram over-estimates the outgoing surface radiation by a factor of 1.43.

3)  The models underestimate the solar radiation incident on the Earth's surface.  They claim it to be about 47% ( Kiehl and Trenberth), when measurements have commonly shown it to be between 65 and 75% of the total solar radiation incident upon the outer atmosphere (see the diagram below).  This underestimate of incident radiation, together with the much higher surface radiation claimed by treating the Earth's surface as a black body radiator, allows them to greatly increase a claimed large amount of back radiation due to infra-red absorbing gases in the atmosphere re-emitting long wavelength infra-red radiation absorbed from the ground.  This radiation is said to be half emitted into space and half emitted toward the ground.  This happens over and over, they say, creating a geometric power series of 0.5 + 0.25 + 0.125 + 0.0625 + ..... or terms of one-half raised to the nth power.  This infinite series equals one, though the greenhouse warming advocates say it equals two!  The half of the radiation emitted into space is 169 W/m^2 in the Kiehl - Trenberth diagram, but the half returned to the Earth's surface is twice (1.97 times to be precise) that amount.  This huge exaggeration of the back radiation is a complete violation of physics.  This exaggeration then causes the effects of greenhouse gases to be greatly exaggerated.  In reality, a cooler atmosphere cannot emit sufficient IR toward a warmer surface to raise the temperature of the warmer surface.  The power incident upon the surface minus the cooling claimed for thermals (air convection) and by evaporation of water is only 64 W/m^2, which creates a surface with a black body temperature of 183.3K or -89.8C if the surface were a black body radiator as claimed.  In reality, the surface temperature with an emissivity of 0.7 is 200.4K or -72.7C.  The claim is that a surface that should be at this cold temperature somehow raises its temperature to 289.1K or 16.0C by radiating much more energy than it should and most of that energy is returned to the surface thanks to a multiplier effect in the atmosphere.  This violates cause and effect, not to mention basic thermodynamics in which heat energy always flows from a higher temperature body to a lower temperature body. 

Note also that the Kiehl - Trenberth diagram claims that only 40/396 = 0.101 of the surface radiation passes through the atmosphere without absorption.  The data on the right side of the upper part of this figure makes it clear that much more than 10% of the radiation is emitted into space from the surface despite the infra-red gases called greenhouse gases.  The estimate is that it is 15 to 30% transmission.

4)  The CO2 warming models believe that increased CO2 and water vapor do little to decrease the incoming solar radiation of ultraviolet, visible, and short wavelength infra-red radiations.  This offsetting effect, important during the day, is underestimated, however.  The greenhouse gas models do not predict the observed small decrease in the range of high day to low night temperatures as a result.  The radiation absorption of CO2 and water are shown in the figure above.  The three strongest absorptions of CO2 all occur where there is complete saturation of the effect due to the combination of the effects of water and already existing CO2 already.  The fourth strongest absorption line lies in the longer wavelength tail of the incoming solar radiation however and the absorption frequency at which it lies is not already saturated.  So although this line is weak, it actually has a significant effect as CO2 is further increased, at least as compared to the outgoing radiation effect.  The effect on incoming radiation is to cool the surface by removing more incident solar energy from the spectrum reaching the surface.

5) The residence time of man's CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is about 5 years when introduced high in the atmosphere (as in nuclear blasts or some volcanic eruptions [not caused by man despite the claims of certain Iranian clerics, but useful for studies of CO2 atmospheric dwell times]), not the 50 to 200 years claimed in one part of the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007, but in agreement with another part of the same report.  Other studies of the low altitude introduction of CO2, where man's use of fossil fuels introduces the vast majority of it, show the half life in the atmosphere to be about 1 year.

6) The portion of the CO2 in the atmosphere due to man is estimated to be about 1.2% to maybe a couple of % based on other reasonable assumptions.  The seas and plants are the dominant factors determining the atmospheric concentration of CO2.  Warming seas increase the atmospheric concentration of CO2.  Increased CO2 causes more plant growth which uses more CO2.  Ocean animals with shells also use large amounts of CO2.  Higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2 also cause land minerals to react with more CO2 and bind it up.  Thus, plants and land minerals provide some negative feedback to increased atmospheric CO2.  When man adds CO2 to the atmosphere, the increased partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere pushes the equilibrium concentration in the oceans at a given temperature upward, acting as a further negative feedback mechanism.

7)  The hot spot in the warming pattern from about 8 to 12 km altitude near the equator that should be found if CO2 is acting as strongly as a greenhouse gas and enhancing the greenhouse gas effect of water vapor as is claimed by the UN IPCC AR4 report has been searched for. The hot spot in the atmosphere is not present.  This is definitive proof that the UN IPCC computer models are wrong about the role of CO2.  This reason alone is not only an adequate reason to reject the man-made CO2 contribution to global warming being as large as that claimed by the UN IPCC report, but it requires a scientist to reject this hypothesis.  A theory cannot make so necessary a prediction and fail, and nonetheless still be claimed to be true.  This would violate the fundamental scientific method.

8)  The temperatures on other planets and moons in our solar system are also rising, which is consistent with measurements of the solar cycle.  These other atmospheres are all warmer than predicted by the intercepted solar radiation energy.  Many have hotter surfaces and atmospheres than Earth though they have little or no greenhouse gases.

9)  Much of the claimed rise in land surface temperatures is due to the urban heat island effect, which has increased the reported temperatures in recent decades due to the closing down of more accurate rural weather stations around the world.  Few station sites follow the rules for good siting.  Urban stations should be entirely excluded when recording temperatures for global warming or cooling effects or assessing the effects of greenhouse gases such as CO2.  Instead, low altitude and urban stations have been given fallaciously high weight in the ground temperature records by extrapolating data taken from such warmer stations onto areas far from them but at higher altitude or more remote locations.  Stations at higher latitudes in Canada, Russia, and China have been preferentially shut down and temperatures for those critical areas have been assigned based on readings far to the south.  The temperatures officially used for high altitudes in the Andes of Boliva are based on data from cities on the Pacific Ocean and hot jungles of the Amazon basin.  The cool Andes Mountains lie between these areas and are much cooler.  This trick has been used over and over around the world.  Cooler temperatures actually measured decades ago have been replaced by interpolated values biased to higher temperatures in recent times.  This exaggerates the apparent temperature increase.

10)  Much raw temperature data has recently been pried loose from national temperature archives, often thanks to dogged requests under Freedom of Information Acts.  The rural stations in the U.S., Russia, Northern Europe, northern Australia, New Zealand, China, and some areas of Canada, Latin America, and Africa whose data has been examined carefully show little to no late 20th Century temperature increase.  The data used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 was heavily manipulated, in ways that make no scientific sense, to enhance a rapid rise of temperatures in the late 20th Century.

11)  There is much evidence that the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warming, the Minoan Warming, and the Halocene Warmings b and a and other warmings longer ago were warmer than the present time, yet humans, animals, and plants thrived.

12) The rate of the temperature increase at the start of the Medieval Warm Period was similar to that we had in the late 20th Century using even the inflated and manipulated ground temperature data.  There was also a warming period around 1700 in which the temperature rose 2.2C in just 36 years, compared to the 0.7C temperature increase claimed for the 20th Century.  The claims of an unprecedented rise in temperatures in the late 20th Century are without justification.

13) The sea surface temperature data, the balloon data, and the satellite temperature data for the late 20th Century show much smaller temperature increases than does the manipulated land surface data used by the alarmists.  The oceans and water cover 71% of the Earth and the satellites read temperatures over the entire Earth.  The oceans store about 22 times the heat stored in the atmosphere.  The ocean temperatures of the last 6 years are unchanged or decreasing.  A better way to search for warming is to examine the heat content of the oceans using the results of the reliable Argo buoy arrays which can measure the heat content to a depth of 700 meters in the oceans. These measurements show no increase from 2003 through 2008.  The entire heat capacity of the atmosphere is the equivalent of only the top 3.2 m depth of the oceans.

14)  The atmospheric concentrations of CO2 follow temperature increases rather than preceding them, consistent with dissolved CO2 being emitted upon the warming of the oceans or dissolved when the oceans cool.  The solubility of CO2 increases greatly with lower temperature and higher pressure.  Due to high pressure and cold temperatures, the deep ocean waters hold huge amounts of CO2, but it takes a long time to warm those waters in response to solar irradiance changes due to the huge amount of heat energy needed to raise the temperature of water, the low amount of heat energy in the gaseous atmosphere, the huge volume of water, and the depth of most of the oceans.  Consequently, the rise in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere will lag general warming events by long times, though there is observable response to warming El Nino events and cooling La Nina events.

15)  Despite a continued CO2 concentration increase in the atmosphere since 1998, the temperatures have not risen, which was noted as an embarrassment in the dumped CRU e-mails by Trenberth.  The much-touted computer models are baffled by this.

16)  Solar wind and solar electromagnetic fields are believed to have major effects upon the cosmic ray flux on the Earth and other planets in the solar system.  When solar sunspot activity increases, solar irradiance increases, but so also does the solar wind and the range and strength of the solar electromagnetic field.  This shields the Earth from cosmic rays and the reduced flux of cosmic rays causes less lower atmosphere (below 3.2 km) nucleation and growth of clouds.  The Earth's temperature decreases sensitively to the amount of cloud cover in the lower atmosphere, so when the sun is less active, there are more cosmic rays and they generate more lower atmosphere clouds, which has a strong cooling effect.  Contrary to the frequent claims of the global warming alarmists, solar activity has stronger effects upon the Earth's temperature than just that caused by the changes in solar irradiance.  Both the solar and Earth electromagnetic fields are presently weaker than they have been in many decades, so cosmic radiation is not being as well shielded as has long been usual.  With both fields weakened, the flow of molten material in the center of the Earth is decreased, which also should decrease the heat flow from the center of the Earth to its surface.

17)  The predicted catastrophic changes due to warming do not seem to have materialized.  The failure here is widespread and should not be a surprise given that these calamities did not happen during the earlier warm periods such as the Medieval Warm Period given in 11) above.  The historical record indicates that man generally benefited from these warmer periods.  We also know that mortality rates generally are higher due to cold weather than due to warm weather, so moderately rising temperatures are less harmful than an equivalent drop in temperatures.

So, what is the essential physics of our climate?

1)  About 70% of the incoming solar radiation is incident and absorbed by the Earth's surface.  Thus, (0.7)(341 W/m^2) = 238.7 W/m^2 warms the surface.  With an emissivity of 0.7, the temperature of the Earth's surface is 278.5K, or only about 9.5K cooler than the average temperature we observe.

2)  Most of the remaining energy is due to the action of gravity on our atmosphere and the movement of convection currents to keep the atmosphere in equilibrium.  The gravity effect operates due to the energy of the ideal gas molecule being the sum of its kinetic energy and its potential energy.  The higher altitude gas molecules have more potential energy and less kinetic energy and the decrease in kinetic energy is almost linear with increasing altitude.  The temperature of the ideal gas in equilibrium is proportional to its kinetic energy.  At sea level, the nitrogen, oxygen, and argon molecules that make up about 99.967% of the atmosphere and the remaining gas molecules are colliding about 6.9 billion times per second, so they rapidly absorb their share of energy even from the infra-red absorbing gases commonly called greenhouse gases.

3)  At lower altitudes, the transfer of energy by water molecules and their phase transitions from liquid or solid state to gas and then at somewhat higher altitudes where it is cooler, back to the liquid or solid state.  These transitions involve a large absorption of energy or cooling upon the transition to gas and a large emission of energy upon returning to the liquid state.  Water provides a great balancing effect to the climate and very effectively counteracts either great temperature increases or decreases.

4)  The average daily surface temperature is raised by the storage of large amounts of energy in water and the subsurface ground during the bright sunlight hours of the day and the return of that heat to the surface by conduction during the night.  Such an effect is observed for the moon as shown below, despite the fact that the moon stores much less energy than our Earth with water covering 71% of its surface and our vegetation holding heat better into the night.  The image below shows that effect NASA long ago calculated for the moon.  The outer surface of the blue areas is the temperature due to the solar radiation incident with no subsurface to store heat or to be warmed by conduction.  The outer surface of the orange is the observed temperature due to the subsurface heat holding effects.  Note that the daily high temperature shifts to later in the day, just as on Earth, from the noontime.  Note also the cooling effect during the day and the bigger warming effect at night.  These effects would be more subtle on Earth due to the smaller temperature extremes, but they will still exist.  In fact for a much more realistic understanding of the Earth's climate, one needs to develop the complete day to night cycle in this fashion for the more complicated Earth with its atmosphere, oceans, and plant coverage.

5)  At about 4000 meters, as much energy is transferred in the atmosphere by radiation as by air molecule collisions and convection currents.  The temperature of the Earth as viewed from space is about 255K, which is the temperature of the U.S. Standard Atmosphere at an altitude of 5000 meters.  The atmosphere at about 5000 meters is in effective thermal equilibrium with space.


6)  As one moves to lower altitudes from 5000 meters, the increasing kinetic energy of the gases as the potential energy decreases causes the temperature of the atmosphere to increase approximately linearly.

7)  Energy input from the solar wind, the interaction of the solar magnetic field with that of the Earth, the conduction of heat from the Earth's hot interior including large numbers of thermal vents in the deep oceans, and debris and particles collected from space provide additional energy inputs to the Earth.  It is not difficult to account for the 9.5K higher temperature of the Earth's surface compared to that expected for the average incidence of solar radiation upon its surface.  What is far more interesting are the explanations as to why the Earth's surface does not rise to a temperature of 393.8K or 120.7C at noon on the average day and then fall to 3K at night with no incident sunlight.

The case for the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is so poor, that it is clear that the real reason so many support this false hypothesis does not lie in the science.  There are ulterior political and unethical business motives for the constant claims that man's use of fossil fuels is going to be responsible for a global climate catastrophe.  Those who want reasons to increase the control of our use of energy, flock to this false theory.  Those who want to add further high taxes love the idea of something like cap and trade taxes.  Those who wish to subject the United States to more international control, say the United Nations, love this false theory.  Those who stand to make money from the trade of carbon credits love it.  Those who are pushing federal investment and mandates to create the smart grid love it.  Those who are working on electric cars, wind generation of electricity, solar power generation of electricity, nuclear power, thermal insulation, higher efficiency light sources, light materials for transportation, products made from recycled materials, and many others who stand to make money from throttling fossil fuel use very often support this false alarmist idea.

Disclaimer:  My laboratory works on projects for oil companies, solar power companies, wind generator companies, nuclear power plants, suppliers to the coal industry, low-weight materials for transportation companies, efficient light sources, improved thermal insulation materials, materials made from recycled materials, and energy from recycled materials.  My laboratory will prosper better with a strong private sector, a strongly growing economy, a limited government, and with widespread respect for science and what it can do for us to make our lives better.  Bad science and the disrespect for science that it will generate is bad for the future of my laboratory.