May 2012

The Globe and Mail today (Toronto, Canada) looks at the U.S. presidential candidates and their views on trade as they talked about those issues on the campaign trail. The article rates them using three former presidents’ trade actions as the benchmarks:

You simply can’t know, from the current presidential campaign, whether Americans are getting set to elect a Franklin Delano Roosevelt (low tariffs, high taxes), a Ronald Reagan (low tariffs, low taxes) or a Herbert Hoover (high tariffs, high taxes).

How do they rate? Here’s what the article says:

Bottom line? Among these 17 candidates, judged on expressed support for an open and global economy, we have no FDRs, three Reagans and 14 Hoovers – some of whom must know that globalization can’t be stopped, and probably can’t be slowed, without risking another Great Depression.

Britblogger Guido Fawkes delights in blowing up the sacred symbols of establishment. Here he presents data that strongly suggest that mass public transport, symbolized by the train, is less “clean” in terms of emissions than the average car trip, particularly when the trains aren’t fully loaded. As Guido puts it:

Trains are heavy, get their energy inefficently down wires where much of the energy is lost and are fundamentally a nineteenth century point-to-point technology belonging to a slower era. Cars are light, fuel efficient, and a liberating, flexible form of transport suited to modern life. Greens hate them so much because they are ideologically opposed to capitalist modes of consumption.

I’m not sure if Professor Kemp also included the emissions involved in getting to and from the rail station in his calculation. Given that those additional trips will almost certainly utilize an internal combustion engine, taking the train rather than driving direct may be even more emissions-inefficient than Prof. Kemp suggests.

I strongly agree with Michelle that NASA is a fine example of public choice theory at work. Political pressures impel NASA to sacrifice safety to propitiate environmentalists. The public choice problem has been a chronic issue. As the late, very much lamented Richard Feynman discovered in his investigation of the organization in the wake of the Challenger disaster, public choice and cognitive dissonance figured strongly in the misrepresentation of safety there, which led to the death of an ordinary schoolteacher:

Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less [than NASA's engineers knew]. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers…

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Recent events at NASA have demonstrated that the failings Feynman identified may not be confined to management of astronautical engineering.

NASA announced last Friday that while searching for the reason foam separated from the space shuttle Endeavor during takeoff (tearing a 3-inch gash in the belly of the craft and causing much nail biting during reentry), they found nine small cracks in the insulation on an external fuel tank that may be the cause of the foam chipping off—the same foam that was responsible for the Columbia disaster 4 years prior.

While NASA is coyly suggests that the blame ought to rest with the cork insulation and not the foam itself, this latest scare demonstrates that NASA has not, as I had hoped, fixed the problem that was responsible for the Columbia disaster. They have not reverted to the foam that had been used with great success before bowing to environmentalist pressure groups to switch to a green-friendly material. This prompts me to ask the question: Why does NASA continue to play Russian roulette by deferring their good judgment to the uninformed, unscientific whim of environmentalists? Do the priceless lives of brilliant astronauts on the Endeavor, Columbia, and Challenger mean anything to them? Evidence has been cited by other bloggers that environmentalism has been a direct cause in the last 3 shuttle disasters.

If not lives, what about the billions of dollars of public money disintegrating in the skies above us (not to mention the money given to the families of the crew and the investigations that resulted in no significant changes), surely that would motivate NASA to find and stem the cause of such waste and use every recourse to prevent reoccurrence?

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If you have two botanists discussing a certain plant species, and the first one believes that the plant will grow to 1 foot, but the other states that it reach 80 feet — would you say they have reached a “consensus?” But they both agree it will grow! However, is their science on it “settled?”Zoe Cormier has this to say in an article in theglobeandmail.com:

When Al Gore predicted that climate change could lead to a 20-foot rise in sea levels, critics called him alarmist. After all, the International Panel on Climate Change, which receives input from top scientists, estimates surges of only 18 to 59 centimetres in the next century.

But a study led by James Hansen, the head of the climate science program at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and a professor at Columbia University, suggests that current estimates for how high the seas could rise are way off the mark – and that in the next 100 years melting ice could sink cities in the United States to Bangladesh.

In stark contrast to estimates put forward by the IPCC, Prof. Hansen and his colleagues argue that rapidly melting ice caps in Antarctica and Greenland could cause oceans to swell several metres by 2100 – or maybe even as much as 25 metres, which is how much higher the oceans sat about three million years ago.

By the way, the sea levels rose about a foot in the last century, and the world didn’t end.

Washington, D.C. is a wonderful place. Perhaps its hallmark is the lack of shame. A qualification for high office is being able to engage in the rankest hypocrisy with a straight face. It happens all the time.

The other day House Minority Leader John Boehner criticized the ruling Democrats for failing to eliminate earmarks, the principle vehicle for delivering pork to voters. And there certainly is cause for complaint. Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) observes that the Democrats so far have approved 2,653 earmarks costing $13.2 billion. Reports the Washington Times:

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, said Mr. Emanuel’s assertion that new Democratic rules have resulted in a more open and transparent earmark process is “simply false.”

Mr. Boehner said new rules adopted by House Democrats prohibit lawmakers from forcing a debate and vote on individual earmarks contained in authorizing and tax bills brought to the chamber floor.

“Tax and authorizing bills have been vehicles for some of the most indefensible earmarks produced by Congress, under both Democrats and Republicans,” wrote Mr. Boehner in a piece that appeared Saturday on the National Review’s online edition.

House Republicans in June blocked a Democratic proposal to allow earmarks in spending bills only during the conference process — when a limited number of lawmakers from each chamber meet to hammer out differences between the bills passed — while barring them during committee hearings and on the floor.

Many Republicans say the only way to reform the earmark process is to eliminate the practice.

All true, but don’t expect that to happen even if Republicans retake control of Congress. According to CAGW, in 1994 the last Democratic Congress approved 1,318 earmarks costing $7.8 billion. Under the new Republican majority those numbers rose the following year to 1,439 and $10 billion, respectively. Last year the GOP Congress approved 9,963 earmarks costing $29 billion.

Similarly charming is President George W. Bush’s threat to veto nine of the dozen appropriations bills so far passed by the House. His fiscal fidelity would be worth celebrating … had he bothered to veto even one appropriation when the Republican majority was pushing domestic spending up at rates not seen since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Then there was the Medicare drug benefit, adding some $9 trillion in unfunded liabilities to America’s (un)balance sheet. And U.S. officials lecture other governments on how to make democracy work.

There’s been quite a buzz recently on the second anniversary of Hurricane Kartrina’s destruction of New Orleans. Presidential contender Barack Obama even offered a plan to restore the city.

Of course one should sympathize with the residents of New Orleans, especially those who were driven from their homes and lack the resources to rebuild. But from what springs the belief that one is entitled not only to live in a flood plain, below sea level, but to have the rest of the country pay one’s way?

America is a large country and there are plenty of places to build a house that do now sit in a bowl between a lake and an ocean. It’s one thing to make the mistake once. But to repeat the mistake again–and to put the taxpayers at risk again–is outrageous.

Of course, New Orleans is not the only place where Uncle Sam subsidizes construction in flood-prone areas. Indeed, that’s the only reason that federal flood insurance exists: to subsidize people who live in areas where private insurance is unavailable.

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In England, new centennarian Winnie Langley celebrates her 100th birthday by smoking her 170,000th cigarrette.

Winnie Langley started smoking only days after the First World War broke out in June 1914 when she was just seven-years-old – and has got through five a day ever since….

Speaking at her 100th birthday party Winnie said: “I have smoked ever since infant school and I have never thought about quitting.

“There were not all the the health warnings like there are today when I started. It was the done thing.”

Of course, people who smoke at a more prodigious rate may not enjoy Winnie’s good health, but it goes to show that the poison is in the dose, even with something as bad for you as tobacco. (Thanks to Megan McLaughlin for the link.)

New census bureau data shows a modest uptick in the number of Americans who do not have health insurance. (The number has not “soared,” contrary to some headlines.)

Dealing with the uninsured is a complicated question. As the National Center for Policy Analysis has shown time after time, the Left has every reason to overstate the severity of the problem. NCPA, however, can rightly be criticized for being too enthusiastic about whatever the Republican idea of the moment is. For example, in part because it was their idea in the first place, they like Health Savings Accounts a lot even though most consumers really don’t. In any case, the Kaiser Family Foundation–which has never struck me as ideological–offers a more nuanced look at the uninsured. The bottom line is this: after one gets through all the fuss about half of the uninsured are “soft core” adequate incomes to purchase health insurance or qualify for an existing government program. The other half can’t really find anything in the private market and don’t qualify for government programs. These people represent the real public policy problem, in part because any effort to help them buy health insurance without system-wide reform will attract a certain number of people who would otherwise get provide health insurance but prefer a subsidy. This, in turn, makes it harder for others to find health insurance. Thus, efforts like SCHIP, Medicaid buy-in, and state subsidized Medicare-like health plans in Maine and New York have tended to cover fewer uninsured than predicted but displace lots of people from employer-based private insurance.

The idea of employer-based health insurance, quite simply, is broken: there’s no really good reason why employers should provide health insurance in the first place. (They only do it because World War II price controls made it impossible to raise wages.)
So, on one hand, I’m happy that employer-based health insurance is dying what I think is a natural and long-overdue death.
On the other, making sure that everyone has medical care and takes responsibility for it requires doing far more to make it easier to buy in the private market. As I’ve written about elsewhere, I’d favor a “soft mandate” for people to buy insurance, total freedom to purchase insurance across state lines, and, to help enable it all, a tax credit proposal along the lines of the Burr-Coburn Every American Insured Health Act. Is it total free market? Nope. But it’s a lot better than we have now. Whatever happens, we need some alternative to the badly broken employer-based system and the newest census data just helps drive home the point.