In op-ed headlined “Welcome to the Recovery,” Geithner cites report claiming gov’t actions have saved 8M jobs, 6.5% GDP http://nyti.ms/99eo4S
In op-ed headlined “Welcome to the Recovery,” Geithner cites report claiming gov’t actions have saved 8M jobs, 6.5% GDP http://nyti.ms/99eo4S
I can make equally astounding and unprovable counterfactual claims, such as, if Obama had spent the entire stimulus and healthcare bill amounts on permanent corporate tax cuts, we would have saved 16M jobs, 10% GDP.
Or you could make equally unprovable counterfactual claims about what GDP would have been, if not for this or that tax cuts. Oh wait — conservatives already do just that, happily using unprovable economic hypotheses when trying to support tax cuts, but when Democrats do the same thing to support their policies, you decry not just the policies, but the while concept of using counterfactuals, as wrong and ridiculous. Hmm.
To an extent, all economic analysis / predictions involve hypotheticals and counterfactuals and outcomes typically reflect data applied to a given set of presuppositions and assumptions. I’m just tweaking Geithner for making an unintentionally amusing defense of the administration’s policies. Frankly, I think Reich has the political zeitgeist nailed — the Obama administration has set itself up for massive failure and political discontent, and nothing Geithner tries to say in defense of the administration’s policies is going to change anything.
I don’t disagree with that at all, and indeed my primary reaction to this Geithner article is how tonedeaf it seems — although that’s due in significant part to the awful headline, “Welcome to the Recovery,” which sounds sarcastic and flippant if not downright mocking, and which Geithner surely had no role in selecting, and which would surely have been vetoed as harmful to The Team if it had been vetted in advance by Journolist. 🙂
However… Reich’s thesis, and yours, basically boils down to: Obama has pushed through a bunch of major reforms that don’t have sufficient short-term positive impact to make voters happy immediately, and thus the Democrats will suffer at the polls. Some would call this politically foolish. Others might call it… what’s the word I’m looking for here… leadership. I mean really, don’t they understand that winning news cycles, and doing well in midterm elections, is WAY more important than enacting long-term policies that they believe are good for the country? How DARE they pass policies that don’t give instant gratification to the impatient, fickle voters, and instead focus on making structural changes whose full positive impacts will not become apparent until after they’re out of office? How DARE they think beyond two- and four-year electoral windows? That’s not how politics is done! Certainly, it’s not how either party has been doing things for the last 3 or so decades, and look what great shape the country is in! Oh wait…
Granted, I’m not expecting you to endorse Obama’s policy prescriptions as being the right ones, but would you at least agree that — assuming Obama and his team truly believe, rightly or wrongly, that ObamaCare, FinReg, etc. are good for the country in the long term — they are acting in more good faith, as stewards of the nation’s long-term trajectory, than, say, an administration that would pass a Medicare prescription drug bill that’s basically the opposite in terms of impact (designed to reap an immediate short-term “sugar high” political effect by making a key bloc of voters happy, yet self-evidently destined to hurt the country in the long term), or a series of tax cuts that have an “expiration” date in order to 1) deliberately skew the fiscal impact charts, and 2) kick the can down the road vis a vis any actual hard decisions about what to do?
Okay, upon a more thorough read, that’s not really Reich’s thesis… but I think it’s a valid and related one.
You don’t get credit for good faith, you get credit for results. Jimmy Carter operated in good faith and was a failure as a president. Obama has set himself up for the same outcome. The only question left to answer is, does the GOP have a Reagan up their sleeve? The GOP has a lot of good candidates, a lot of interesting candidates, but nobody seems to stand out above the rest. The GOP presidential field is like the USC stable of running backs the past few years: Nobody stands out as a star.
We’re talking past each other. You’re in your typical Machiavellian / Rovian political operator mode, talking about political strategy. I’m talking about whether the country can be saved from itself. You say, “You don’t get credit for good faith, you get credit for results,” but my whole point is, that not really correct: what you get credit for is immediate, obvious, short-term results. Hence, the sort of long-term, strucutral reforms that would be necessary to actually solve problems beyond a two- or four-year window are totally off the table, because any administration that dares put them forward will be pilloried and defeated.
I agree with you and Reich about the “political zeitgeist,” but all that does is make me depressed, because politics isn’t an end in itself, it’s supposed to be the process by which we govern ourselves, but if the “political zeitgeist” makes it impossible to do anything medium- or long-term, then we’re well and truly fucked. And I guess what I’m asking you to do is step back from the Machiavellianism and the political zeitgeist for a moment, and make a value judgment.
My value judgment is Obama has done potentially irreparable harm to the government fiscal balance sheet and that the Dems are turning us into a society that has all the problems of European state welfare and socialism but without the (supposed) benefits. They aimed for the stars, missed the moon, and now we’re completely lost and directionless in outer space.
Ouch on the USC backfield.
If Obama truly were a long-term guy willing to become a martyr for doing the right thing, he would push for a second round of stimulus. Just doing the first round is sort of the half-brave solution. IE, do what’s right, not what’s popular, unless what’s right is very unpopular.
It’s beyond stupid to argue that the stimulus didn’t create jobs. It’s tautologically wrong. It’s saying hiring people does not = hiring people.
The anti-stimulus argument that a smart conservative needs to make is that firms and individuals increased savings as a response to the stimulus. It is true that individuals are saving more, but it is tricky to empirically distinguish whether they’re anticipating higher future taxes or worrying about future growth. It’s possible — I just haven’t read any work doing that.
As for firms, they actually seem to be investing more lately. But again, whether that’s due to the stimulus or other factors (continuing growth in China, for example) is a challenging empirical question.
I really do think that a vitally important question in economics is, “Are (targeted) tax cuts better than spending for economic stimulus?” You could make a whole textbook on that. People have worked on it, and most of what I’ve seen favors the Keynesian perspective. But the profile of the subject is too low, chiefly because economists are preoccupied with the masturbatory mathematical bullshit that interests other economists, not what has public value.
It’s beyond stupid to argue that the stimulus didn’t create jobs. It’s tautologically wrong. It’s saying hiring people does not = hiring people.
1) In large part, the stimulus did not create jobs.
2) Most of the jobs saved or created were government jobs at the Federal, State and local level.
3) What private industry jobs were created cost much more money to create than what the employee was paid.
I really do think that a vitally important question in economics is, “Are (targeted) tax cuts better than spending for economic stimulus?”
How about “Are spending cuts better than spending or tax cuts for economic stimulus?”
Casey, the problem is people really do legitimately need to be saving more and shoring up their finical situation. The problem is, everyone has realized they need to do this at roughly the same time leading to a rather catastrophic finical meltdown.
The trouble is this time instead of 10 or 15 years of whoo hoo party buy it on margin that we had on our way to the great depression we’ve had at least 20 years, arguably more like 50 years of that kind of behavior. Both personal and business finances have spent, literally, decades being leveraged and over leveraged. The degree of correction to fix this kind of mess will make the Great Depression look like a “mild correction”.
The smart thing to do is to get your house in order. The problem is everyone is so over leveraged that when we all try and get our individual houses in order at the same time we get an epic catastrophe.
This is, of course, the argument that the economic engine has stalled, to get things going again someone needs to be willing to spend money. Tax cuts won’t fix the problem, the money saved will simply be diverted into savings at this point. Good for the individual bad for the group.
If we are to get America moving again (instead of changing the paradigm under which we define moving, which let’s face it just is not going to happen) someone has got to be willing to spend, well, rather stupid amounts of money. And from the looks of things so far it is not going to be individuals, and it is not going to be business (who don’t want to spend any money unless they think individuals will and individuals don’t want to spend unless they think business will).
So irresponsible Government spending or Mega Depression. Those are basically our two options. We have to pay for this mess either way. Probably the most logical thing to do would be to invest heavily into the infrastructure of our country. You can’t send that work over seas, and it desperately needs to be done anyway. Given how much of it is presently crumbling this would be money well spent. Instead of contractors we should seriously go WPA on this stuff and fix it. But perhaps even more importantly we need to fix it with an eye towards the future and sustainable growth. We have the opportunity to re build our communities away from total dependence on the personal car. And if we want to have any chance at a livable future, we are going to have to do that. Even in place like LA. A place so sprawling that the worlds best street car line served the population until GM bought it and demolished it and then lobbied the federal government to build freeways because people needed to be able to get around. Freeways that, for those scoring at home, cannot physically be built fast enough to deal with the burst demand of LA rush hours. Which, while I’m digressing, is another stupid thing we do building roads. We build them for the burst demand, which results in roads 2 – 4 times bigger than they need to be for their average load.
Transport, no matter the method, is now and has always been subsidized heavily by federal, state, and local governments. So if we are going to subsidize something, lets at least subsidize something that’s remotely efficient.
One final digression, now that I’ve been babbling about transportation way more than is healthy; Gahrie, you are aware that your job costs whatever entity that presently employees you at least twice your salary? Unless you work for yourself, in which case you would be aware that approximately half of your billings go to overhead. In other words, your third point is basically meaningless.
Dcl — I’m with you on the “paradox of thrift” argument. All the evidence from countries in similar situations suggests that we’re in for a long, slow, gradual recovery until we’re out of debt.
Unless we go fight a really big war. That would fix everything.
Personally I also favor government spending on things like infrastructure and mathematics education to fix the situation. But I also wouldn’t mind cutting spending on non-productive programs like end of life care for seniors.
However, in spite of everything Obama has done, I should add that the only change I’ve seen is that my health insurance premium has spiked.
Gahrie — To the extent that economists know anything, we do know that spending increases contemporaneous GDP growth, while savings reduces it. I don’t know anyone (including conservative economists) who would argue that cutting government spending would increase contemporaneous GDP.
The reason we care about contemporaneous GDP growth is that when GDP turns down sharply, we’re at risk of a negative feedback loop where layoffs–>lower incomes–>less spending–>more layoffs and so on. This is the sort of death spiral we got stuck in during the Great Depression.
It may seem myopic to focus on contemporaneous GDP, but it does make sense in situations like the present, where many future years of growth can be lost in the worst case scenario.
Long term GDP growth is a different matter. Government overspending would certainly dampen that. And I do think that we should cut about $1 trillion or so from military spending and healthcare for the elderly. But that’s a secondary concern right now compared to avoiding an economic death spiral.
On a totally unrelated note, check out the solar eruption coming our way. Duck!
Oh, and Geithner is about the worst PR person I’ve ever seen.
Food for thought on elder care.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all
The long and short of it is, we need to get on our big girl and big boy pants and realize people we love are going to die. That trying absolutely everything to save them is both massively expensive and destroys quality of life in a patients final days / months / possibly years. And that managing terminal illness for quality of life tends to be: massively improves quality of life in a persons final days, easies survivor guilt and depression, in many cases actually prolongs life sometimes significantly, is massively less expensive.
There is, of course one massive problem with the approach. The “long tail” of cancer survivorship. Those few people who beat the nearly impossible odds. Some of whom go on to fully recover and win the worlds most difficult sporting event 7 times in a row and start a massive organization to fight cancer and fund cancer research. This is, of course a major digression.
OMG, the paradox of thrift!!! I’m having memories of Planet Money podcasts from, like, a year-and-a-half ago. In which they interviewed economists with British accents. Who were PANICKING!!!! about deflation and insolvent banks and the paradox of thrift. Good times.
do what’s right, not what’s popular, unless what’s right is very unpopular.
LOL! This sounds like a perfect slogan for the Obama Administration to date. Hahaha.
The degree of correction to fix this kind of mess will make the Great Depression look like a “mild correction”. … So irresponsible Government spending or Mega Depression. Those are basically our two options.
BREAKING NEWS: Scientists discover blog commenter who is even more pessimistic about the economy than Brendan Loy. Loy reluctantly relinquishes Secretary of #PANIC!!!!! title to dcl. 🙂
Probably the most logical thing to do would be to invest heavily into the infrastructure of our country. … Instead of contractors we should seriously go WPA on this stuff and fix it.
You know, I was thinking about this on Sunday, as Becky and I took the wee ones for a walk around Evergreen Lake, and were reading a historical marker about the dam and dam-related structures built in the late 1920s / early 1930s. Clearly New Deal projects, and I found myself thinking, gee, will people decades from now see stimulus projects and think fondly of how the government made all these investments in the country back in the 2010s? And the answer seems to be pretty obviously no — for better or worse, nothing we’re doing really compares at all to what was done during the New Deal in that regard.
Unless we go fight a really big war. That would fix everything.
PANIC!!!
Perhaps, for our readers in the elite North-east and overcast North-west, we need an analogy-paradigm based upon Life and Starbucks …
When the (household) economy goes south, eventually we realise that we do not need to get our morning coffee at Starbucks … sure, we have the charismatic relative temporarily in the best room, who insists not only on Starbucks in the morning, but insists upon more and more froth each time getting more and more expensive variants – but that doesn’t matter, cuz it started getting mroe expesive during the tiem the best room was occupied by a less elitist relative … and, while a minority of the decision-making relatives have realised that for the next few months, morning coffee has to be at home, the majority of decision-making relatives not only insist on Starbucks for mornings, but also that it mustn’t be bought anywhere within easy domestic reach – it must be obtained from farther and farther away …
We’re not going to cut off the Starbucks habituation cold-turkey (not with the current not-so-hot turkeys running things in DC at the moment), but we can at least work to rein in the worst of the occupant of the best room’s excesses, by cutting off his credit at Starbucks … and especially when he wants to have a permanently-assigned Starbucks employee designated to bring him his morning latté (Look ! he just created a job !) …
In Real Life, the jobs we need are those building nuclear power plants, building oil pipelines from Alaska to the lower 48, building shale-oil extraction plants, drilling for oil in Alaska, building cars people *want* to buy rather than cars Our Ear Leader wants us to buy … we need people motivated to become doctors so that they can practise good medicine, not so that The Government can tell them how and where and when to practise … we need jobs farming and ranching in the Central Valley of California rather than some environmentalists protecting a dubious Darter at the expense of far too many family farms … we need jobs growing maize to feed people and food animals, rather than to convert into economically-unfeasible gasohol …
Casey, that’s not the argument. Of course federal spending creates jobs. Since the dollars used to pay for the stimulus must come out of the private economy before being injected back in as government spending, the real issue is comparative. The measurement is, for each $ taxed or borrowed out of the economy, does the stimulus create at least $1? If $1 spent creates $1.15 in production, you’ve got a ratio of 1.15. I don’t have my economics books in front of me, but my understanding is that stimulus efforts need to be in the range of 1.5 to 2.0 to be worthwhile given the drag on the economy of interest from borrowing and higher taxes. Most honest accounts have pegged the ratio of return for the current stimulus at < 1.0, meaning the stimulus was not effective and has in fact been a failure.
As for firms, they actually seem to be investing more lately.
They are investing in productivity and exports sans a corresponding increase in domestic human capital, a perfectly rational thing to do when your shareholders expect profits and growth but the fiscal and regulatory environment point to higher taxes and a higher cost of doing business.
I really do think that a vitally important question in economics is, “Are (targeted) tax cuts better than spending for economic stimulus?” You could make a whole textbook on that. People have worked on it, and most of what I’ve seen favors the Keynesian perspective.
I see little difference between targeted tax cuts and increased spending and don’t frankly think it matters which is eventually proven to be the most effective relative to the other. Just because the stimulus is a tax cut instead of an outlay doesn’t make it non-Keynesian; in fact classic Keynesian economics calls for cutting taxes and raising spending during a recession, and raising taxes and cutting spending during expansion. But Keynesian economics was based on the premise that fiscal policy was the best tool for regulating the economic cycle — not for calibrating and sparking long-term economic growth. Keynesian economics broke down in the 1970s for precisely that reason, and Volcker put the nail in the coffin in the 1980s by showing that monetary policy was the more appropriate mechanism for regulating the economic cycle.
The confusion we have today arises from the fact that monetary policy has, in a way, now also failed. The reality is, monetarists have been neutered because Greenspan did not raise rates to control inflation and asset bubbles during the expansion, leaving Bernanke little room to maneuver in the current crisis — in effect, his tequila hangover cure has been to prescribe more Bloody Marys. But just because monetary policy is currently broken doesn’t suddenly mean that fiscal policy is now the way to fix the economy, and we’re seeing that with the persistent economic malaise and high rates of unemployment despite all the stimulus and printing of money.
The simple, unpleasant truth is that the economy simply has to heal itself over time, and cranking up the debt load on future generations to try to speed up the recovery will prove (is already proving) to be very counterproductive. There is a lot of de-leveraging left to do in both the public and finance sectors, and private debt reduction that needs to take place as well. We can’t wave a wand and make this happen overnight.
The one thing we can and should be doing, other than the obvious of throttling back on the government spending and trying to balance the budget, is structural and regulatory reform: Streamline the economy and the transactional cost of government on the economy. That means entitlement reform, tax reform, financial and regulatory reform, trade reform, immigration reform, healthcare reform, and so on. Sadly, Obama is taking us in the opposite direction and increasing the transactional cost of government: new regulations and burdens on financial institutions (down to small and medium-sized businesses); the promise of higher taxes; a more complicated, government-centric healthcare system; no movement on entitlement reform; no attempt to restructure the tax code in a revenue-neutral manner; no movement to expand free trade and bringing immigration policy and control into the 21st century. Zero, zilch, nada progress on these — and instead, a return to failed 1930s / 1970s economic policies.
And that is why we are well and truly fucked.
Alasdair the fourth paragraph of your comment #17 was freaking hilarious. It’s good to know you are still living in some nostalgic past that if it ever existed is long dead.
To deal with just a few of your notions. Small producer farms are for the first time on the rise since the take over of agro biz starting in the 60s because people finally figured out the food it produces is crap. It’s cheep, but it’s also crap.
Hopefully we will soon figure out that more of the stuff we buy (mostly on credit) is cheep crap also. We in America have a cheep crap addiction and it’s killing us.
As for shale oil not only is is massively expensive to actually get usable fuel out of that stuff, it also uses a massive amount of energy to get it. The net gain in usable fuel is not worth the cost or the environmental catastrophe that doing so causes. Really that is just stupid, and is only a band aid solution best anyway.
Real solutions to our energy problems don’t involve pipelines and foreign wars, a real solution doesn’t involve coal or oil full stop. You are a fool if you think it does, that party is fast ending, we had a good run with it but we are both running out of it and destroying our environment by using it. A real solution involves sustainable fuel and sustainable transport strategies. And if you don’t like it, well you are just going to have to put on your big boy pants and deal, because the other options are constant war, global warming, or triggering a major ice age, or a few other options. It doesn’t really matter, we are all dead in each of those cases. We are fooling ourselves if we think we can keep going the way we’ve been going.
Nuclear power isn’t such a bad idea. I think there are some issues with dealing with the waist, mostly this seems to be #PANIC in regards to what to do with it, and what could happen if something goes wrong. But as a medium term solution it’s not so bad.
What we really desperately need is a long term solution. Alternative fuel sources, things like wind and solar are starting to show promise but we spend so much time subsidizing the cost of oil that they don’t appear cost effective. Of course achieving cold nuclear fusion would probably be a major step forward. Perhaps it’s worth the government throwing a few billion dollars at to try and solve the problem perhaps it is a problem we can’t solve.
AML, I actually agree with more of what you said in #18 than I expected. Honestly I hope we are both wrong, if one of us is even a little right about things, we are in trouble, If we are both right we are all truly and deeply fucked. Because nobody seems to want to deal with the truly difficult decisions and questions we are faced with. Everyone wants to treat symptoms, nobody wants to even think about treating the causes. Probably because fixing structural problems is hard, expensive, involves sacrifice, requires creative thinking, etc. etc. etc. Oh, and probably requires different priorities. Very hard getting people to change their priorities.
I think, honestly, we are truly at the end of an era the began at the end of WWII. That transformation took decades. And it sewed the seeds of it’s own destruction.
So, yes Brendan, you are right I’m more pessimistic about this then you I suppose. But it looks like the correction from the middle class credit bubble will take decades. And I have a feeling that the country will either look a bit different on the other end or we’ll all be dead, or we’ll all be speeding toward an even more catastrophic collapse.
Let’s hope that we as a nation can manage to think different.
dcl – “Real solutions to our energy problems don’t involve pipelines and foreign wars, a real solution doesn’t involve coal or oil full stop.” – I’m glad you agree with the Presidents Bush that real solutions to our energy problems don’t involve foreign wars …
On the other hand, realistically, in the short and medium term, until robust industrial grade energy sources can be brought online (like nuclear), real solutions have no choice except to include both coal and oil … ideally, given that constraint, we would use domestic coal and oil, just for long enough to achieve what France, for example, at 80%+ of French electricity needs being supplied by nuclear power plants (and they *still* manage to export electricity while doing that), has succeeded in doing for how many years ? Decades ?
(If we actually are subsidising Oil, then that should be stopped asap – just as we should have stopped subsidising folk to *not* grow certain crops)
Solar and Wind sources, for the foreseeable future are *not* sufficiently reliable … (and, lest David K froth even more, I will remind folk that I am a major supporter of solar tech – we have been using solar water heating since 1980 for most of our family’s hot water requirements) … as soon as solar photo-voltaic becomes just a little bit more cost-effective, I’ll be putting solar PV on my roof, too, to supply some of our family’s elecricity needs …
Ahh, everyone always forgets the very very quiet subsidies of the mining act of 18… whatever the heck it was. That’s how anonymous, but important to mining, drilling for oil, really any resource extraction process this is. Basically, the long and short of it is the Federal Government does not charge companies for the minerals they extract, oil, coal, gold, whatever from claims on Federal land. Nor charged for these rights at all when selling land.
This kind of stuff amounts to basically Trillions in lost revenue. But it also helps keep prices down. And there are lobbyists to keep it, but nobody ever bothers to say we should do something about it. It’s goes along with the the construction of the rail network where they were given the land and got everything 10 miles to either side of the track, which they deftly made go past all sorts of valuable commodities. Remember what I said about transport always being subsidized… Yep.
And the Aggi policy in this country is still stupid. Though actually paying people not to grow is not the stupidest of it much of which is still on the books. Also, paying not to grow actually did help in the depression because it stabilized prices, but it should of ended much sooner than it did.
@AML — You’re on the ball with the stimulus multiplier being the right metric to judge the stimulus. The only problem is finding a non-partisan analysis of what the multiplier is. You can find conservatives arguing that it is 0, and liberals arguing for 3+. That clouds the view of any party trying to make a rational inference, and when the empirics are cloudy, ideology drives opinions.
Even if there were good estimates of the stimulus multiplier, not all spending is created equal. Building a useful new freeway would have a huge multiplier; giving people rebates to buy foreign cars, not so much.
I do think the difference between tax cuts and spending for stimulus is meaningful. It’s the difference between government being larger or smaller. The ultimate effects of both depend on the marginal propensity to consume of those who wind up with the funds. And since the wealthy have the lowest MPC’s, the one thing I am comfortable with right now is letting their tax burdens come up a bit.
@ dcl — I have 2 thoughts on new energy sources. First, I really do think we may be within 10 years of our first viable energy-out fusion power plant. Second, I think it’s quite possible that we’ll move towards a carbon-neutral oil cycle (using algae to make hydrocarbon fuels) instead of switching over to wind/solar/nuke energy.
Casey, you might be right. I think large scale solar is problematic at best. Whether that is a R&D problem or a systemic problem I’m not sure. But it is certainly not all that efficient.
Wind is a different story. Wind power seems like it really could work, though it’s not so great for birds.
I’m not sure if carbon-neutral oil is really workable in the needed volume.
One thing is for sure, we are going to run out of oil and we are going to run out of Coal. I think a long term solution requires a combination of efforts. One of the biggest, though, is to change the way we use fuel on a basic level. We need to get more efficient.
I think meaningful cold fusion is part of the solution. But another part of the solution is recognizing that our resources are limited and they only re-generate so fast.
One thing is for sure, we are going to run out of oil and we are going to run out of Coal.
No. We have thousands of years worth of coal in the United States. As to oil, again we have lots of oil available. We have either placed it off limits, or it is expensive to get to. Besides, there is a distinct possibility that oil is constantly seeping up from deeper in the Earth’s core.
I love that gahrie’s response to a problem is to shove his head further up his ass.
No, my response is to allow the market to work. When/if carbon based energy becomes too expensive, alternatives will be found.
dcl, you doomsayers have always been wrong. “The end of the world is coming…we’re running out of whale oil!….”
On the fusion point, check this out. Somewhere there’s a quote from Dr. Bussard about how, “I’m the only person alive who really understand how to make this technology work.” Then he died, without his project completed, because we didn’t fund him.
“No, my response is to allow the market to work. When/if carbon based energy becomes too expensive, alternatives will be found.”
So you favor not planning for and preparing for the future? I assume your retirment plan is to hope you win the lottery then. The market is REACTIONARY. Get it? It REACTS to things. Guess what happens in a reactionary system? You have to wait awhile for the effects of the reaction to occur. In the meantime? Things can get really REALLY bad. Wouldn’t it make far more sense to say “gee, oils gonna run out someday, and as it does it will get more and more expensive. Lets plan ahead and spend the money developing alternatives now, so that we aren’t left in a crisis situation later”. If we all lived in gahrie land we’d farm a plot of land until it was unsustainable, move on to the next plot until there was nothing left to farm. Then we’d let the market fix things. Where by fix things I mean we’d starve to death.
You favor continuing our dependence on foreign sources of oil rather than trying to pursue cleaner, renewable power we could generate right at home?
“Besides, there is a distinct possibility that oil is constantly seeping up from deeper in the Earth’s core.”
What the hell?! Do you even KNOW where oil comes from? What, do you think the ancient mole people all died down there and then turned into this magical oil that is seeping up from the molten core of the earth?
Holy crap, I knew you were pretty far right, but I didn’t know you were so far right that you lacked even a basic understanding of the sciences. I mean it makes a lot more sense now but damn.
“What, do you think the ancient mole people all died down there and then turned into this magical oil that is seeping up from the molten core of the earth?”
I wish someone would pose this question to Sarah Palin on TV. I’m just curious.
There’s a distinct possibility that major looming crises will go away if we just ignore them harder.
You favor continuing our dependence on foreign sources of oil rather than trying to pursue cleaner, renewable power we could generate right at home?
Nope. I favor developing domestic sources of energy. It’s your side that has made us dependent on foreign oil by banning both domestic exploration and the construction of nuclear power plants.
What the hell?! Do you even KNOW where oil comes from?
http://gahrie.blogspot.com/2005/09/refilling-oil-fields.html
Hllarious. We should start a sitcom starring gahrie and sandy, the two most out there people on this blog.
David K # 29 and kcatnd #30 – dunno about ancient mole people, but we have known about, and have been using Breeder Reactors since sometime in the early 1950s or earlier …
Of course, that is science-based, as opposed to the faith-based prejudices against the likes of Sarah Palin …
The primary problem with nuclear reactors is that most people don’t object to them in principal, just in their backyard. The problem is electric transmission lines loose a energy for every mile of line. So we can’t just build a massive reactor in Nevada to power the whole country.
I actually think small scale plants, basically designed to replace a single coal plant might make sense. Just go through take out the coal plant, put in the reactor and move on down the line.
Hopefully before too long we’ll be replacing coal plants with fusion plants. And then we won’t need to worry about oil or coal. (Well, assuming that the scientists are right that there are not highly volatile extremely dangerous waste products from fusion.)
@Alasdair
What does a breeder reactor have to do with gahries insane theory about oil seeping up from the molten core of the earth?
As for Sarah Palin, what are you even talking about? Faith based prejudices? I’m not opposed to her because of my religion you moron, I’m opposed to her because I think she’s an idiot who would make a terrible leader regardless of her political views.
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38645
http://blogs.motortrend.com/6245781/editorial/is-the-earth-producing-more-oil/index.html
While abiogenic oil has not been proven, it is far from insane.
Just for starters, how do you explain extraterrestrial hydrocarbons?
Okay, gahrie, how old is the earth?
Okay, gahrie, how old is the earth?
Most scientists currently believe the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Why?