Earlier this week, in a letter to Sierra Club climate council David Bookbinder, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said the Agency would reconsider, via a notice-and-comment rulemaking, a Bush-EPA memorandum interpreting regulations that determine whether carbon dioxide (CO2) is currently subject to emission controls under the Clean Air Act’s Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) pre-construction permitting program. [click to continue…]
January 2012
I have been a steak snob ever since I apprenticed under a master butcher in Ojai Valley, California a few years back. Indeed, I’m the kind of guy who orders his steak so rare that the people dining at the table next to me get uncomfortable.
So it is with rising dread that I witness the greenies’ assault on the beef industry. Enviro-types have long hated cattlemen for treating cows like animals, but recently, they’ve found a new motive to attack providers of delicious red meat: climate change.
According to the latest in the “It’s easy being green” series run by the Center for American Progress, “it’s worth taking a closer look” at beef production, for “the planet’s sake,” because industrial scale livestock farming has a big carbon footprint. The piece references a 2006 study that compares “a Toyota Prius, which uses about one fourth as much as fuel as a Chevrolet Suburban SUV, to a plant-based diet, which uses roughly one-fourth as much energy as a diet rich in red meat.”
How about a steak tax, America? After all, the greens put gas-guzzling SUV’s (God bless ‘em) in their cross-hairs, and came out on top-they forced through new fuel efficiency regulations that have saddled an ailing Detroit with a $100 billion burden. Can the cattleman be far behind?
Oregonian brewers looking for a new home may want to consider moving to Michigan where a state authority may just understand the principle that fewer regulatory burdens on businesses actually increases economic growth!
The Michigan Economic Growth Authority (MEGA) provides tax credits to businesses that move or expand operations in the state.
The Michigan Economic Growth Authority (MEGA), the state’s response to interstate competition for company expansions and relocations, may provide a refundable tax credit against the Single Business Tax (SBT) to companies expanding or relocating their operations in Michigan.
One business making headlines by taking advantage of the MEGA tax breaks is the Michigan Brewing Company– which announced plans to create a Kid Rock inspired vintage.
They were granted a $723k tax credit that they’ll get over 7 years. So, it isn’t much compared with the billions of tax payer cash the fed is doling out, but is something, if only a symbolic example of a regulatory body that gets it.
Someone in Michigan actually understands the concept of regulatory competition and the fact that business people can choose where they set up shop and that those choices bring money into the state. Not only does Michigan understand this, they are choosing the honey route rather than the much more common tactic of penalizing businesses (such as taxing companies that choose to brew in other states) .
It would be nice if, rather than selectively granting a retroactive reprieve from the theft of wealth, the state of Michigan would reduce the tax and regulatory burdens on ALL businesses in the state. Until then, I’m going to raise a glass to the MEGA for being an example of regulatory measures that will actually have some benefit. Maybe the fed will get a clue.
Today President Obama announced his homeowner bailout plan. While that plan will spend huge sums of money helping “renters” stay in homes they couldn’t afford and creating incentives for homeowners who don’t need handouts to get in the food lines, it stops at rewriting mortgage contracts. But that’s likely to come soon with the “Helping Families Save Their Homes in Bankruptcy Act of 2009.”
On a fast track now in both the House and the Senate, the legislation would allow homeowners in Chapter 13 bankruptcy reorganization plans to completely rewrite the terms of their mortgage contract –
–reduce the principal of their mortgages,
–lower the interest rate to the current fixed rate, and
–reset the term of the mortgages to 40 years less the time the mortgage was in effect.
The legislation would apply to all mortgages written before the measure is enacted.
Talk about incentives to declare bankruptcy – this legislation is an enticement. It’s likely that the already swamped bankruptcy courts will soon need their own bailout.
More importantly, consider what this legislation does to contracts. What a deal – two parties willingly sign a contract and one gets to rewrite it at will. Who says the number 13 is unlucky?
From FoxNews.com:
“As the president stated during the campaign, he does not believe the Fairness Doctrine should be reinstated,” White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said.
If this is indeed the Obama administration’s official stance, the news couldn’t have come at a better time. Just last week FCC officials met with Rep. Henry Waxman’s staff to discuss resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine under a new name. Waxman, the head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has also been looking into “fairness” issues on the Internet—creating an expanded, Fairness Doctrine 2.0.
The American Spectator reported on this reanimation of the long-dead doctrine and brought us this great quote from a Waxman staffer:
“It’s all about diversity in media,” says a House Energy staffer, familiar with the meetings. “Does one radio station or one station group control four of the five most powerful outlets in one community? Do four stations in one region carry Rush Limbaugh, and nothing else during the same time slot? Does one heavily trafficked Internet site present one side of an issue and not link to sites that present alternative views? These are some of the questions the chairman is thinking about right now, and we are going to have an FCC that will finally have the people in place to answer them.”
It doesn’t seem that Waxman’s real concern is having an FCC that can answer questions, but an FCC that will ignore its obligation to uphold the Constitution and sacrifice our freedom of speech on the alter of “fairness.”
Of course, none of this has anything to do with fairness, but has everything to do with politicians controlling what we can say, write, or otherwise express.
If Congress is somehow able to dupe the American people into accepting such speech restrictions—and President Obama doesn’t block a Fairness Doctrine 2.0—we can look forward to websites being patrolled by federal fairness cops, radio stations being staffed by stop-watch-toting FCC agents, and a presidential appointee sitting on the editorial board of every newspaper and magazine that still chooses to publish.
Let’s hope the President takes his oath seriously and defends the Constitution. Our basic freedom to speak our mind—the most fundamental of all freedoms—may rely on Mr. Obama’s resolve.
Yesterday’s edition of the Internet news juggernaut, The Huffington Post, ran an ethanol love song written by Bob Dinneen, who is identified in his HuffPo biography as “the ethanol industry’s lead lobbyist before the Congress and Administration.”
Given that Mr. Dinneen is a professional shill, there’s no need to repeat his self-serving argument. Whatever is his case for ethanol, the bottom line is his bottom line. But it is worth saying a few things about the reality of ethanol.
Ethanol is touted as a solution to America’s dependence on foreign oil. It is true that ethanol—an alcohol distilled from corn—can be used to run cars. “Can,” however, does not mean “should.” Indeed, ethanol is a bad idea both economically and environmentally.
For starters, ethanol is twice as expensive as gasoline, so filling your car with ethanol raises your fuel bill. Also, by turning corn, which is usually used food, into fuel, demand for food increases. So, increased ethanol use raises your food bill too. Finally, ethanol is awful for the environment—it results in increased corn cultivation, which leads to greater nitrogen runoff, which causes massive, oxygen-depleted “dead zones” in our streams, lakes, rivers and oceans.
Yet Americans are forced to buy ethanol thanks to laws written by the ultra-powerful corn and agribusiness lobbies. Ethanol makes corn growers and ethanol producers rich, so they have spent millions lobbying legislators to pass (1) generous taxpayer subsidies for ethanol production, and (2) a Soviet-style production quota that forces Americans to use a certain percentage of ethanol in the nation’s fuel supply (last year, Americans were forced to buy 9 billion gallons of corn fuel).
So why is the Huffington Post pimping the ethanol boondoggle when so many others have stopped supporting these corrupt programs?
King corn and its agribusiness allies could never convince Americans to buy ethanol; instead, they convinced Congress to force ethanol on consumers. The industry’s existence is a powerful testament to lobbyists’ ability to rig the rules of the game to enrich their clients at the expense of everyday Americans—a tacit endorsement from the Huffington Post can only help the ethanol lobby continue to do so.
Huff Po is generally a well-done publication, so why run a pitch by a guy who is trying to get rich by screwing the consumer? Since when are greedy lobbyists palatable to the left?
Can prediction markets – virtual markets – play a role in valuing toxic assets? A critical obstacle in evaluating the health of financial institutions and devising approaches so they can get rid of the questionable assets on their books is how to value those assets. Since many of the securitized assets are made up of bad mortgages bundled with more standard ones, there’s no easy way to determine value. Thus, plans to set up U.S. government public-private partnerships to buy up troubled assets still faces that underlying problem.
What’s needed is more information about what those distressed assets are worth in the market. But how to get that information presents a conundrum. Government setting the prices won’t work. As my colleague John Berlau has noted in advocating reform of mark-to-market rules,
. . . if the government sets the price of asset securities too low, it could spread the contagion mark-to-market losses even further. If it sets the price too high, taxpayers will lose out.
Perhaps prediction markets can help remove some of the opaqueness. Some readers more expert than I on virtual markets may want to weigh in on this.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--fouxXwKB0 285 234]
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