Re: Sayonara

Letting the energy industry keep on pushing up atmospheric CO2 levels is another way of destroying the economy. It's a bit slower, but the "destruction" is going to be a whole lot more real.

Moving over to renewable energy sources would double the price of energy - in the short term.

Energy apparently represents 8.4% of the current US GDP

so doubling the price overnight would put a nasty crimp in your economy. Something like this happened in 1973 when the price of oil went up by a factor of four, and it didn't destroy anybody's economy.

In fact it isn't going to happen in the short term - you've got to a build a whole lot of renewable energy generating plant before you can switch, and the very act of building that much plant would at least halve the price of renewable energy (the rule of thumb for economies of scale is that increasing manufacturing volume by a factor ten halves the cost of manufacture).

Paying for the necessary capital investment might be seen as putting a crimp in your economy, but it can also be seen as Kenysian stimulus spending, which your economy still seems to need to keep out of recession.

And as you build more renewable energy generators, you'll need to import less oil - and what you pay for the oil you import is roughly your long term balance of payments deficit, which does happen to be unsustainable either.

A bizarre misinterpretation, propagated by particularly stupid right- wing nitwits.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The poor thang ;-)

What we need is a welfare rule where adding a kid _after_ you go on welfare _reduces_ the take. ...Jim Thompson

The problem with notions of what is, in essence, a 'child tax' is it punishes not only the 'excess' child but the others as well.

THAT is _exactly_ the point...

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=A0 =A0 =A0...Jim Thompson

Which is what makes it immoral and moronic. It isn't the child's fault that it was born to a mother without a sound grasp of social realities, and it doesn't make much sense to punish the child for its mother's errors.

It's in society's interest to see that the child is well enough fed and educated while it grows up to be able to become potentially useful adult.

Punishing the mother provides instant gratification, but risks damaging the child. Taking the children away and putting them into care is a theoretical possibility. but in practice it's too expensive to be used as a matter of routine, and even good care-givers aren't all that much better for the child than a tolerably bad biological mother.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Well...reward both with death.

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=A0 ...Jim Thompson

Giving someone money, just less, is punishment?

But, if they just published a schedule showing a decreasing incremental benefit, the extra kid-for-ransom production would drop.

Of course that'll never happen, since the formulas are always too complicated for anyone to understand. Measuring everyone's "need" is complicated.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Not so difficult. We all need roughly the same things - food, water, shelter, clothing, medical care, safe place to live. We just don't want to ensure everyone has those things, because we feel some people don't "deserve" it - they are unworthy.

As long as we keep trying to decide who "deserves" resources, we're going to have some mighty bizarre rules about who gets what. So we invent a sort of merit-based structure; yes, we'll feed you if you're "worthy." But if you're an addict, we won't - no benefits, including no treatment for your addiction. Get clean, and *then* we'll help you.

Not saying I want to subsidize a person's alcohol or drug use; just saying that we need to be treating such people as sick, not bad, and to ensure that they can get the treatment they need. Otherwise they stay sick, but don't necessarily die before producing offspring they can't nurture.

I don't think there's a quick fix for all this, and I'm not advocating just throwing money at the problem, since that isn't going to work. But I do think we could simplify things if we quit worrying about who "deserves" things, and focus more on who needs them - and make sure they get it in time to make a difference.

But as someone hinted, it would be cheaper to just execute anyone who doesn't work out in society. Don't think of it as the death penalty; think of it as putting them out of our misery.

On welfare? Lose any children. It's child abuse to allow children to grow up in a welfare home and become the next generation of dependents.

It's not fair to punish the kids for the misdeeds of their parents.

If you want to be draconian about this, take away any kids after #2 (or whatever) -- there are plenty of people out there who'd like to adopt newborns.

Of course not. My thoughts were toward _prevention_.

Maybe we make it a requirement to take the injection-style birth control to ensure no more kids while on welfare?

Or simply neuter them ?:-)

Perhaps. ...Jim Thompson

What ratio would you accept? Can we damage one to prevent 20, 50, or 200 from be put into that cesspool, which creates it's own damage. Mikek

..or require the parent(s) to show cause why they should not be removed. Maybe sterilization and/or turning their vote over to the political party in power at the time could be a defense.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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=A0 =A0 =A0 ...Jim Thompson

None. Human sacrifice is no longer acceptable, no matter how you dress it up.

And with adequate social security, a low income environment isn't a cesspool. It's not a great environment, but lots of people survive it and go to be useful and productive citizens.=A0Good environments still produce=A0their own quota of bad apples.

Look at Germany. You can have adequate social security and a blooming economy, and Will Hutton - amongst others - has argued that adequate social security actually gives you are more productive work force and a more productive society.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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=A0 =A0 ...Jim Thompson

Punishing the mother may make sense, but punishing her children doesn't.

If there was kids-for-ransom production in the first place. Evolution has instilled a pretty effective and largely irrational drive to have kids in all of us. Financial incentives are all that effective in changing that kind of programmed-in behaviour

Much too complicated for you. None so blind as those who do not wish to see.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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=A0 =A0 ...Jim Thompson

o grow up

But most of them don't. And with slightly more generous social security, even fewer of them end up dependent - not so many more as end up dependent after having grown up with a silver spoon in their mouths.

Right-wing nitwits find reality much too complicated to cope with so they idealise the world into 100% good bits, replete with mom and apple pie, and 100% bad bits where all fathers are absentees and every mother is a crackhead.

It's nonsense, but it is the kind of nonsense that even krw can understand.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

So Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson is going to start shooting people? He may find that some of them can shoot back, and he represents a bigger-than-average target, and can't take cover quite as quickly as people who haven't needed hip-replacement surgery.

If he was serious, we wouldn't have to put up with him posting nonsense here at all-too-regular intervals for very much longer. As usual, he's got it backwards. He is not going to shoot people, but rather get himself shot.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

welfare

many. You can have adequate social security and a blooming

The people of Germany have a work ethic, we have generations that think it's ethical to live on welfare. We have entitlement programs that we do pay into but, we receive more out than we pay in. We now have 150 million of our citizens receiving money from the government.

Entitlements

If all Americans are "entitled" to help, who will pay for it?

by James Fallows

This is funny, he thought we had a problem 30 yrs ago, it is so much worse now.

I may not be far from joining the takers.

My business is trying to compete with someone that has told me he pays taxes on 30% of his income. His wife and 5 kids are on food stamps and medicaid. I pay my own healthcare premium, now $6,000 and I pay the first $10,000 of expenses as my deductible. The government pays his. I buy all the food for my family. The government pays his. I pay for my house, I suspect his wife gets some housing subsidy. My problem is I'm to $%&# honest, I found an error in my bookkeeping and filed an amended return, I had to pay an additional $3,300 in taxes. My accountant said, I don't have many clients that would have brought this to my attention.

Mikek

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Isn't that kind of eugenics, but backward?

-- Cheers, James Arthur