Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog

Cory Doctorow, at BoingBoing, reproduces this great chart, showing the number of people who, after receiving the benefits of a government social program, still believe they are not using government social programs:

He editorializes:

It’s the “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” phenomena writ large: a society of people who subsist on mutual aid and redistributive policies who’ve been conned (and conned themselves) into thinking that they are rugged individualists and that everyone else is a parasite.

While I am second to none in slamming those in the  ”Keep your government hands off my Medicare” crowd, this graph doesn’t exactly say that.  Doctorow says “subsist on” but that’s not really what the chart says.  It just points out that one is receiving a government benefit of any value, not that one subsists on it, or even enjoyed net benefits from it.   To take a specific example, as far as I can tell (I don’t recognize all the items listed), the only one that I have received is the mortgage interest deduction.  Yet, as a crazy libertarian, I would indeed say “I am not on a government social program.”

You can say that’s me being hypocritical, but when you compare the amount of money I gain from that tax credit, compared to the money I pay in taxes to support all those other things that I do not benefit (you can argue that I may one day benefit, or that they provide a protective net) from, it’s hardly fair to say that I benefit from (much less subsist on!) government programs as a whole, as the net benefit to me of them is negative.  In fact, for at least some relatively large section of the population, the net benefit must be negative, in order to balance the other section (those for whom the social program is surely designed) for whom the benefit is positive.  I would gladly forgo that tax credit if I could get out of even one or two of those other programs — social security being top of the list.  The endpoint of this logic is that we would claim that a person who pays 1o dollars in taxes to support “government social programs” and only receives 2 dollars in benefit from them is a hypocritical jerk for not thinking they were beneficiaries of these programs. (more…)

The entire problem with the budget is this: both Republicans (hardcore anti-nominal-tax ones and the regular brand) and Democrats don’t understand that spending is equivalent to raising taxes.  What we usually call “raising taxes” is just balancing the checkbook later on.  Once the government declares that it has spent a dollar, it has raised taxes, because that dollar (and any attendant interest that is accumulated in the span of time between spending and acquisition) must be physically acquired by one of the following “national checkbook balancing” methods:

1. What we usually call “raising taxes” — i.e. signing a bill in congress that actually empowers the IRS to deduct one dollar from some taxpayer’ account.
2. Printing it — which causes inflation, and therefore, all else held equal, makes everyone else slightly less wealthy. (you can argue that it has other good effects, or is better than option 1, that’s fine — it is still inflation)
3. By refusing to physically acquire it, or defaulting, which increases the actual cost of every other dollar the government spends, which then must be acquired via option 1 or 2.

This has three implications for those congressmen who took Grover Norquist’s “no new taxes” pledge: (though it’s obvious neither he nor they interpret it this way, though that’s merely their ignorance)

1. If they ever voted for increasing spending, they violated their pledge.  (i.e., almost all of them)
2. If their actions lead to a default, they have violated their pledge, because it will increase the cost of “national checkbook balancing” options 1 and 2 by even more.
3. If they do not vote for combined bills that reduce spending by a higher amount than they allocate to ”national checkbook balancing” option 1 (i.e. what we traditionally view as “raising taxes”) then they are violating their pledge as well. (there are some complicating issues here — you might not want to maintaining long term surpluses, though I think we’re currently at little risk of that, or you might not be convinced that the bill will actually cut spending, but the general principle remains)

As the current budget qualifies (at least as far as it has been explained to me) for category 3, it should be passed — and it would indeed reduce the true level of taxation, consistent with their pledge.

The final implication is that the only people more guilty than those who are hesitating to physically acquire the dollars to balance our spending in the past are those who voted to increase our spending so much in the first place, thereby making these “tax increases” (by either definition) necessary.

Via Steven Landsburg, I see that Paul Krugman has essentially resorted to third-grade level statistics.  Take it away, Paul:

I’ve been getting some mail over yesterday’s column, with angry correspondents posting charts like this, showing government spending as a percentage of GDP, to claim that government spending has too surged:

He says this is dishonest, since:

What’s going on? Yes, that’s right: it’s what happens when you divide by GDP in a time of terrible economic performance. Spending hasn’t surged; in fact, it grew more slowly in the two years after Lehman collapsed than in the two previous years, despite a sharp rise [what's the difference between "a surge" and a "sharp rise" -- apparently Krugman knows] in spending on safety-net programs. Instead, GDP growth has plunged.

This is a totally fair critique — you could show a surge in spending even with a decline in real dollars spent, if GDP had dropped enough — and of course is has dropped over the last 2 years.  But here’s where the mindboggling, balls-out dishonesty comes in.  Here’s the graph that Krugman posts to refute it:

But if you look at the raw numbers on government spending, here’s what you see:

I’ll take a moment to pause, because everyone who has ever taken a stats course or submitted a research paper has just violently thrown up on their computer screen.  What Krugman’s done here is completely unacceptable — he just compared two graphs, after resizing the Y axis.  This is 100%, totally, fundamentally dishonest.

Yes, I know that what he said he did was get a graph that showed real spending increases vs. spending-as-a-percentage-of-GDP and he did indeed do that — but the problem is that if that was all he did, the graphs wouldn’t look the way he wanted them to — the 2nd would actually show a larger change (see below), with similarly scaled Y axes.  But when he resized the Y, he’s stepping into cheating land.  To get a good grasp of how dishonest this is, you have to look at the actual numbers.

The top graph which, according to Krugman, dishonestly shows “a surge,” has a total increase (going purely on my visual estimations, instead of referencing the actual numbers, since Krugman is asking his readers to rely solely on the graph) of ~30.8 to 36.1 — the latter number is about 117% of the former.  In the lower graph, the left most number is ~4,100 and the final number about ~5,300, which is about 129% of the former.  I’ll let that sink in.  Krugman has “refuted” his opponent’s claim of there being a “surge” in government spending by reproducing a different graph with a method of calculating spending that actually shows a higher percentage increase — which, no matter the subjective definition of “surge” or “sharp rise,” I think we can all agree that 129% of something represents a larger “surge” than 117% of something.

The entire reason the second graph looks like a less drastic increase is the resizing of the Y axis, which is completely dishonest.  I feel like a broken record, but this is simply unacceptable.  You can’t do that and expect to be taken seriously.  To get a good feel for how crazy Krugman’s claim  that “real spending vs % of GDP shows there was no spending surge” is, you have to understand that it’s usually the “cut spending” (i.e. Krugman’s enemies) crowd that revises the graphs like this — there’s a reason Nick Gillespie, in his “we are out of money” rants at Reason.com, always encourages using the real dollar amounts, because it makes the spending increase look larger!

This is flat out dishonesty.

(more…)

This. To the deficit, spending one dollar is exactly as irresponsible as a one dollar tax cut.

Please focus on economic issues.  This is your competitive advantage over Republicans — they are perfectly willing to compete with you on social conservatism — they’ve certainly had a lot of practice.  But you’ll have a much better advantage trumpeting fiscal policy — that is, after all, the genesis of the name “Tea Party.”  There’s a reason this name was chosen, rather than one loaded with social or religious meaning.  You can be socially conservative, but remember what makes you different and focus on it.

Plus, it’ll give you an advantage when you actually have to face Democrats in the real election.  There are moderate Democrats (and libertarians) who are willing to vote for fiscally conservative people, but if you focus too much on social or religious issues, they won’t, and it’ll only motivate the non-moderate Democrats to vote in droves.  Remember, you have to beat both other Republicans and Democrats — not just one.  Social issues can’t do that for you, but economic ones can.  Stick to your core competencies.

David Boaz says essentially the same thing to social conservatives in general, but of course, vastly more eloquently.

While I agree with the point, it’s funny to see this stated in reference to tax cuts: (via Andrew Sullivan)

A ‘permanent” tax cut is a fiction. No tax cuts are forever. Congress amends the Internal Revenue Code annually, and sometimes more than once a year. Since World War II, it has done a major overhaul about once a decade, and is overdue for its next renovation.

At the same time, our recent experience with four dozen allegedly time-limited tax cuts that Congress extends more or less routinely each year suggests the word “temporary” does not carry the same meaning in Washington as it does elsewhere.

What about all the “temporary” tax increases, spending increases and subsidies that we still have?  Sure, I suppose it’s true they’re not “permanent,” but they sure seem to be.  It seems strange to be bringing this point up now, as opposed to at some point in the last few decades.

Is Paul Krugman insane?  Isn’t this column a huge plea for extending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?  If spending trillions on the military “saved us” from the Great Depression, then why wouldn’t… spending trillions on the military today do the same thing, given how Krugman spends an entire column making the comparison?  Isn’t he also saying that Bush saved us from a deeper recession in the early 2000′s by getting us involved in two expensive wars?

Can you imagine how liberals (and rightly so!)  would jump on a Republican for saying something like this?  They would scream, as I would, that this is precisely the kind of “war is the health of the economy” crap that we should all condemn.  Yet we’re just supposed to take Krugman’s word (though I can’t actually find anything in the article that says “well I don’t really advocate spending trillions more on the military) that he’s really not advocating war capitalism.  This is like walking up to an alcoholic and mentioning that – hey, you know what’s been a really good plan for getting more booze in the past?  shooting people and taking theirs! — and then feigning shock when they hold up a liquor store.

Sure, he could counter that he actually prefers spending on things like roads and bailouts, but it is extremely reckless to be one of the most influential economic policy advisors in this country (it nauseates me to type that) and say things like “Hey, you know what really got us out of that Great Depression I keep comparing this recession to?  (And even named my column “1938 in 2010″!)  A gigantic war!  Man, if only we could have something like that today!” to a current government that has proven far less dovish than it should, and a future 2010 government that (and Krugman states he is aware of this) is likely to hold a much larger percentage of Republicans that have such a reputation for fondness towards the military industrial system and still think both of our current wars are super-swell ideas.  There is a non-trivial group of people who think fighting Iran or China would be a great idea, and we don’t want to be giving them any ideas that it would be an economic solution as well.

Update: Peter Schiff rather humorously rips the “we need a new WW2!” idea to shreds in a column written even before Krugman’s!  Now that’s prescient.

Via Arnold Kling, John Shure writes:

Those who are blaming states for their severe budget shortfalls and arguing that Congress shouldn’t provide much-needed assistance until states “clean up their act” (here’s a recent example) are wrong on both counts.

The huge gap between what states need and what they have overwhelmingly reflects how badly state income, sales, and corporate tax revenues have collapsed in the recession. In fact, state tax revenues have fallen more in this recession than at any time in at least the past 45 years

He then hilariously shows the following chart:

Note what month and year that chart starts.  I wonder what the  chart would look like if taken back to 2000, or graphed alongside budget increases over the same period.   (more…)

Krugman, DeLong, all the other people who think that fiscal austerity is a bad idea: does this mean you think we should continue our current spending levels in these areas?:

1. The war on drugs.
2. Corporate/agricultural subsidies
3. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
4. military hardware in general
5. abstinence education
6. Military bases overseas
7. Medicare (remember that if you supported the healthcare reform, the 30% ‘efficiency’ improvements are spending cuts)

I’m almost certain that almost every single anti-austerity liberal would endorse some spending cuts in these areas — for the obvious reason that they disagree with them as policies.  And I get why you’re against spending cuts to unemployment benefits.  But why are they railing against austerity in general, when they have always wanted cuts to these policies? (more…)

While I am normally on Landsburg’s side, I think he’s missing one thing here, where he slams Krugman for calling a tax cut a “cost”:

First, no economist—let me repeat that—NO economist, not even Paul Krugman on the days when he’s being an economist—would count a tax cut as a cost for purposes of policy analysis. A cost is something that consumes resources, not something that changes the ownership of resources. My Principles of Economics students all understand this; so, presumably, does the Nobel-prize winning author of a prominent Principles textbook.

The problem is, Krugman isn’t writing as an economist.  Claiming that he is would be like saying Machiavelli wrote as an Florentine citizen.  Krugman writes, like The Prince (ostensibly), for a specific audience: people in power.   (more…)

Tyler Cowen links what he describes as a self-educated economic experts but not professional economist, who has the following to say:

I think the austerity debate is unhelpful. There are complicated trade-offs associated with government spending. If the question is framed as “more” or “less”, reasonable people will disagree about costs and benefits that can’t be measured. Even in a depression, cutting expenditures to entrenched interests that make poor use of real resources can be beneficial. Even in a boom, high value public goods can be worth their cost in whatever private activity is crowded out to purchase them. Rather than focusing on “how much to spend”, we should be thinking about “what to do”.

See, though I understand the argument that austerity, if applied generally during a depression, is a bad idea.  But while there might be some people (like me) who advocate across-the-board cuts, that’s really just a simplification — almost everyone advocating cuts has specific ideas of what should be cut.  I personally want huge cuts to the military, subsidies, the drug war, Homeland Security and entitlements because I think that lots of the spending on those things is causing costs instead of benefits. (more…)

I really liked this Robin Hanson post a week ago: (regarding the BP oil spill, at least at the moment)

Look, in any area where we let humans do things, every once in a while there will be a big screwup; that is the sort of creatures humans are. And if you won’t decrease regulation without a screwup but will increase it with a screwup, then you have a regulation ratchet: it only moves one way. So if you don’t think a long period without a big disaster calls for weaker regulations, but you do think a particular big disaster calls for stronger regulation, well then you might as well just strengthen regulations lots more right now, even without a disaster. Because that is where your regulation ratchet is heading.

… but I didn’t think of another application until today, when I read this: (via Marginal Revolution)

People, we have seen a literal mountain of government spending around the globe. And what do we have to show for it? An avalanche of unsustainable deficits and sovereign debt levels.

Government spending seems to be a similar kind of one-way ratchet: we spend more when tax revenues are high because we can, and then when we have a recession, we have to spend more to help people through these troubled times and because otherwise collapsing spending will deepen the recession (or so I’m told).  So we can assemble a similar paragraph for this example as well:

So if you don’t think a long period without a big [recession] calls for [less spending], but you do think a particularly big [recession] calls for [more spending], well then you might as well just [spend] lots more right now, even without a [recession].

The one key difference is that unlike regulation, spending while you don’t have recession actually makes it harder to spend during the recession (when everyone thinks we need it most!) because you could’ve been saving that money for the rainy day.  Yes, I know it all works differently for sovereign nations, but the cause and effect are basically the same.

So, I am willing to accept that we may need spending right now in order to mitigate the recession — I don’t have the expertise to say.  But what I do know is that if this is true, it retroactively proves right those who cautioned against increased spending during the non-recession mid-1990′s and 2000′s.  It also means that if governments don’t have the money to spend (or, more accurately, can’t spend it without endangering their credit) on anti-recession measures today, the blame for that falls squarely on those who vastly increased spending during the good times.  It might also imply that after this recession, when things look rosy again, perhaps people should heed those calls for spending restraint.  If you think it likely that future politicians will, then I have some low-low-risk home loans to sell you.

Very Nice.  Follow the link for a zoom-able version.

From Mr. Harsanyi at Hit&Run:

The uplifting tale of the hard-boiled immigrant, dipping his or her sweaty hands into the well of the American dream, is one thing. Today we find ourselves in an unsustainable and rapidly growing welfare state. Can we afford to allow millions more to partake?

When Nobel Prize-winning libertarian economist Milton Friedman was asked about unlimited immigration in 1999, he stated that “it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both.”

I completely agree with the sentiment.  But do the facts of immigration back this up?  Immigrants across the only border that people ever talk about “guarding” are generally young and looking for a job.  It may be possibly true that they would be net recipients of welfare (i.e. get more welfare than they pay taxes on their work), but what about Medicare?  Medicare makes welfare look like pocket change — and it is a primarily generational tax transfer; that is from working young to the old.  In this case,  immigrants look less like freeloaders and more like suckers.

Given the way the demographic numbers are pointing, with the percentage of young, working Americans declining, and the percentage of old, not-working Americans increasing, we may need a ton of immigrants (who are overwhelmingly in the first category) to make this work in the long term.  I am convinced that even if immigrants are free-riding on welfare, the fact that they (and illegal immigrants moreso) are net contributors to the Medicare redistribution more than makes up for it.  If there is a program that is going to bankrupt America, it is Medicare — not welfare.  Therefore I can’t get angry about young, relatively healthy workers coming here and helping put off our financial apocalypse.

Update:

I honestly don’t care how much people want to police the border, or crack down on illegal immigrants.  I want the completely legal routes to working here to be made much wider.  I want the world to actually resemble the one the crazy build-a-wall people imagine: where the only ones trying to sneak across the border are criminals — because anyone who is just trying to get a job has an easy and low-cost method of getting in.

Conor F. has more on the “let more people in and we don’t care how you police the border” idea.

Because the ones that keep yelling “we’re the sane ones!” keep saying things like “oh the auto bailout was such a good idea!”  Megan McArdle then completely demolishes whatever argument he may have had and this is his response:

McArdle says I’m wrong about the auto bailout. I think the context of a spiraling depression scenario justified it – and am relieved that the results seem far better than I’d expected.

That’s it?  No discussion of the numbers she brought up?  No analysis of the opportunity cost of that bailout money?  No curiosity about how, with the expected revenue numbers, that GM is going to get back into the black, and whether or not it will just persist eternally on tax-payer life support?  Not even a blip (shockingly, from someone normally so concerned about the rule of law) about how “financial bailout money” got used as a handout to a powerfully connected car company?  Nothing?

If this is the level of economic discourse from the “sane” conservatives, then what’s the point in having this irrelevant category of conservative at all?  Just vote Democrat and be done with it.  I’m delighted to see people like Mr. Sullivan slag the stupid “insane” conservatives who don’t like immigrants, gays, or minorities, and I will continue to applaud him for doing so — but if there’s no value in the “sane” conservative economic policy, why even bother with the term?

Update 1: The absolutely balls to the wall hilariousness is that the post directly after his claim that the massive spending of the auto bailout worked is a link to Bruce Bartlett saying we need a VAT now.

Personally, I think it’s stupid to put up with a decade of unnecessary pain and suffering before we finally bite the bullet and do what has to be done to stabilize our nation’s public finances. But I don’t see any other path that will get us there.

Why is there no other alternative to a VAT?  Because we spent so much!  Why did we spend so much?  Because people like Bartlett and Sullivan supported that spending!  This like a confronting a burglar in your kitchen and he tells you: “See, I told you needed an alarm system!”

I also like this line from Bartlett’s piece:

The right-wing, tea party fantasy that we can solve our fiscal problems only by cutting spending has to be proven by experience to be a failure before rational people can finally put real solutions like a VAT on the table[.]

Yes, you crazy right-wingers, thinking that you can reduce your debt by spending less.  What insanity!  The thing is, it’s not like spending has remained constant.  It has risen dramatically.  So Bartlett’s case that an equilibrium of lower spending can’t exist is belied by the fact that it did exist before spending increases took place.  Here’s your new slogan, Mr. Bartlett: “Bruce Bartlett not only doesn’t have a 9/10 mentality, he doesn’t even believe that 2001 could have existed!”

This is the argument that I keep making to local (including mine) and state governments who are saying that spending cuts are untenable — if going to a lower level of spending is disastrous, then how were you operating back in 2000 or 2005, before spending increases that took place at all levels of government over the past decade?

To repeat, what is the point of a “conservative” economic policy that is “tax and spend more”?  We already have a party for that.  Well, to be fair, we have two.

… is from Tyler Cowen:

There is also a substantial probability of a techno-utopia as Moore’s Law races against the higher costs due to health care spending on the elderly.

Of course, he previously points out that there is a substantial probability of Moore’s Law losing the race, (temporarily or permanently) resulting in this:

[...] we will [be] in the stationary state where the extra wealth thrown off by growth will go almost entirely to the elderly and health care costs of those same elderly.

So, code-monkeys, get to work — you’ve got to defeat the demographic curve, before you are yourself absorbed, zombie-like, into the hungry monster.  That goes for everyone else too!  We’re on a timetable here, people.  Well, except for you, geriatricians, you can slack off a bit.  Take a few extra rounds of golf this year.

Update: Mr. Kling thinks it’s important too.

It’s really strange how when a crisis occurs, all the policies that people have been proposing for years suddenly become solutions to that crisis.  And so it is with this line from President Obama:

In a nationally televised address marking his first six months in office, Obama said overhauling the U.S. health-care system is “central” to his prescription for rebuilding the economy and making it stronger.

As far as I know, Democrats have been wanting health-care reform for decades, even those that didn’t contain economic recessions.  What’s the chance that this was the solution for our economic ills all along?  Or is it more likely that the President read the opinion polls and saw that everyone was worried about the economy, so decided to sell the healthcare reform plan as a solution in order to get their attention?

The problem is that giving more people health insurance is going to cost money.  And right now we’ve been spending a lot of money, and we’re going to have less money — that is what a recession is, right?  So then Obama (who is actually, at the time of this post, at the Cleveland Clinic in a private meeting with its CEO) has this weird disconnect:

Members of both parties are balking at the proposed $1-trillion price tag — and how to pay for it.

But Obama insisted the country’s budget deficit will continue to grow unless skyrocketing health-care costs are brought under control. He said the consequence of inaction will be higher premiums and out-of-pocket costs and thousands more people losing coverage every day.

“The budget deficit will grow unless we spend billions more dollars!”  If in response to my complaints (yes, hubris alert), the President is actually stopping by my town’s high school (not exactly enemy territory, if you know our voting tendencies) later in the day to address concerns and answer questions.  A good question would be “How the heck are we going to pay for this?”

But even some moderate-to-conservative members of Obama’s party — the so-called Blue Dog Democrats — say they are concerned about the potential side-effects of health-care reform, such as tax hikes, government control and an even larger deficit.

But Obama reiterated his pledge that any bill he signs will not add to the country’s soaring deficit. “And I mean it,” he said.

He also vowed to reject any measure “primarily funded through taxing middle class families.”

Look, you can’t just blatantly say these things.  People will ask questions.  You can’t have a trillion dollars of healthcare reform without A) increasing the deficit or B) increasing taxes on some middle class people.  Or you could C) cut lots of spending elsewhere — but if someone on Obama’s team has a list of a trillion in spending they could cut, I havent’ seen it.  And both A and B seem like bad ideas during a poor economic climate.  It’s almost as if the recession makes massive spending bills like healthcare reform less likely, instead of necessary.   (more…)

Look, I’m as much (or more) of a sci-fi, futurist geek as anyone.  The Apollo moon landing actually chokes me up with how amazing it is.  But at the end of the day, my childhood dreams are just that.  It’s kind of callous of me to demand that the government take other nice people’s tax dollars just to make those dreams reality.

The whole getting into orbit thing was understandable — there are lots of very productive things that we can do in orbit, like satellites.  But the whole moon/Marsbase thing drives me up a wall.  Here’s the thing that most people don’t understand: planets and moons are like the galactic equivalent of potholes — they are the annoying inconveniences you try to navigate around.  With the exception of the one we currently live on, and which therefore has quite a bit of infrastructure already in place, the rest of them are pretty crappy places.  There’s really nothing to recommend living at the bottom of stupid gravity wells.

They don’t have atmospheres (or they do, and they are super-hazardous) — if you have to build a contained environment to live in, it might as well be in space away from planets.  They require tons of energy to land on without smashing yourself apart, and then they require even more energy to take off from again — the vast majority of energy expended by moon missions is burnt in the first few miles getting away from the annoying pull of Earth’s gravity.  The rest of the way is relatively smooth sailing.  What’s worse, when they don’t have atmopsheres and have pesky gravity, this means they basically attract all kinds of interplanetary buckshot at you — there’s a reason the surface of the moon is pockmarked with craters.  And even the gravity that exists is problematic — unless you get a planet that has similar-to-Earth values, people find it hard to work.  But it’s trivial to make a space habitat have precisely the same effective gravity as Earth — just make it a cylinder and spin it at the right speed, then walk around the inner surface.  Then, there’s the dust.  Planets are not hospitable islands in the hazardous sea of space — they are obstacles to be avoided.

The one and only advantage that planets have over nice, empty space is mineral resources — and here, despite having tons of them, it’s still hideously expensive to have to lift them off the surface and back into space for transport home.  It will be a very, very long time before we’ve mined Earth to an extent that it’s cheaper to get it from the moon.  In fact, one of the only things silly space exploration shows on Discovery can come up with to mine on the moon is helium-3, which will be very useful… once we invent fusion power.  And even in the case of moon-mining, it might be cheaper to just run out to the asteroid belt, which has all kinds of pre-chopped up chunks of ex-(pre?)-planets for mining.  Once we get to the point where we’re desperately combing the solar system for mass,  we should just blow up the planets to get at them, instead of going down to their icky gravity covered surfaces.

And finally, if we just have to go all Star Trek and explore these useless chunks of rock, let’s just do it with remote controlled robotic probes, like we’re doing with Mars right now.  I don’t say this in order to protect our noble astronaut explorers, but rather because taking them (and all the equipment to keep them alive and useful for Science) along is energy-expensive and acceleration-restrictive — two things you don’t want when exploring space.

(more…)

Whichever presidents/senators/congresspersons/bureaucrats were responsible for this site, uh… good job.  I really mean it!  Via Freakonomics.

Some fun things I found in a few minutes of wandering around:

- Lots of money spent on prisons

- KBR is making a lot of money during the years of 2003-2008.  Gee, I wonder why.

- I wish I could make this one per-capita

- Wow, that is a steep line: (Total Contracts Spending in Billions)

Well, at least we aren’t planning any new massive expenditures in the coming years.  Oh, right.

There is no way on earth that expanding healthcare coverage via the government is going to cut total costs:

A Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 67 percent of Americans believe that they do not receive enough treatment and that only 16 percent believe that they have received unnecessary care. If the Obama administration covers more people with government-supplied or government-subsidized insurance, the political support will broaden for generous benefits, their continuation and, indeed, expansion of current expenditures.

For years, proponents of nationalized healthcare have regaled us with stories of the poor souls who must survive without it, and even of the people being denied care by greedy health insurance companies — and how we shouldn’t be so miserly so as to not support them.  Fair enough — this is a moral question and I’m willing to entertain the idea that we should.  Now, as we’ve entered this recession, we’re told that it turns out these plans will actually save us money!  Yes, giving people more of what they want, and introducing a political tool to enable them to vote people into power who will give them even more — this will save money.  Really.

This entire recession has been filled with this conversation:

“Hey, look at this amazing new program/policy that I’ve been plugging for years!  We should totally do it.”

“But we didn’t want to do it before, because it cost so much money — and now our revenues are plunging in this recession.”

“Oh look, I just realized — it also saves us money!  Did I forget to mention that before? “

That’s why it’s always weird when everyone’s favored stimulus/economic recovery plan just happens to be all the policies they favored when there wasn’t a recession.

Expansion of government provided healthcare is not, and will not be a cost saving measure.  The only way it will be is if you radically reduce the amount of healthcare you are providing — to a group of people who feel that they are not receiving enough healthcare right now.  Or, reduce the amount that you’re paying providers, who have an even more powerful lobby.  Good luck with that.  For better or worse, people never ever vote themselves less of something.

The scary part is that our budget looks pretty disastrous going forward — then you realize that we currently have “healthcare reform” listed as a savings.  That makes all the lunatic assumptions already built into that budget look pretty tame.