The Cult of Global Warming

According to their website,

“The We Campaign is a project of The Alliance for Climate Protection — a nonprofit, nonpartisan effort founded by Nobel laureate and former Vice President Al Gore. The goal of the Alliance is to build a movement that creates the political will to solve the climate crisis — in part through repowering America with 100 percent of its electricity from clean energy sources within 10 years. Our economy, national security, and climate can’t afford to wait.”

The following is the test of an e-mail sent to The We Campaign by yours truly:

If one defines a “religious cult” as an organization that:

1) Follows its leader blindly and without question

2) Holds a system of beliefs that is not supported by scientific fact

3) Expects the world to change to conform with its beliefs

4) Believes that the end of the world is coming

Then you, my friends, are a religious cult.

Have a nice day.

Final take on the bailout bill

Congress is voting today on the revised financial bailout bill. The new bill reflects compromises made over the weekend as the result of bipartisan negotiations involving both the House and Senate.

After a lot of thought, I have decided that if I were a legislator, I would vote for this bill. This is not because I think it is a great piece of legislation, or that I am convinced that it will do what Treasury Secretary Paulson says it will do. Regardless of how you spin it, we are talking about the government taking over a bad investment.

However, the bill has been greatly improved by the bipartisan efforts. (Which, by the way, is how government is *supposed* to operate all the time.) Democrats and Republicans, despite their differing views, came together and tried to put the good of the country ahead of politics for a change – working throughout the weekend even as many members would prefer to be out on the campaign trail. That is to be encouraged. Both sides made concessions – Republicans on the $700 billion size and the principle of government purchasing the debts, Democrats on bankruptcy revisions and using any and all profts for debt relief (stripping out the noxious giveway to ACORN, La Raza and other left-wing groups.)  Additional oversight provisions and protections for taxpayers have been added. The result is something that nobody loves but most can live with.

The only alternative at this point seems to be to do nothing. Whether the economy could technically survive this crisis on its own without government intervention, I don’t know. However, it seems clear that to fail to act after all this discussion would have a very negative effect on investor confidence. Like it or not, our financial markets depend more on investors’ impressions of economic conditions that the reality of those conditions. If everyone starts pulling their money out, the system will collapse even if there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with it.

Economic policy is not a certain science, and economists differ widely as to the value of this action. Much like the stock market, this is a calculated gamble. Congress is genuinely trying to do the right thing, so in the absence of hard evidence that their course is disastrous, I think we should back their play.

Meanwhile, non-interventionists should really be up in arms about the auto bailout that just passed the Senate – $25 billion in loans for automakers to make capital improvements. This dwarfs the size of the Chrysler bailout of the 80s, and it was rushed through with very little public debate. Just because there is a $700 billon elephant on the other side of the room, doesn’t mean we can afford to let $25 billion rats run loose on the other.

This is *not* the Great Depression

As Congress votes on the financial bailout legislation, the media continues its coordinated hysteria campaign to convince us that we are on the verge of a second Great Depression. Irwin Kellner at MarketWatch.com chimes in with the economic facts that suggest the sky is not falling, at least not yet:

• In the crash of 1929 the Dow Jones industrials  plunged 40% in two months; this time around it has taken a year to fall 22%.
• The jobless rate jumped to 25% by 1933; it is little more than 6% today.
• The gross domestic product shrank by 25% during the early 1930s; it is up over 3% during the past year.
• Consumer prices fell by about 30% from 1929 to 1933; and the last time I looked they were still rising.
• Home prices dropped more than 30% during the Depression vs. about 16% today.
• Some 40% of all mortgages were delinquent by 1934 compared with 4% today.
• In the 1930s, more than 9,000 banks failed compared with fewer than 20 over the past couple of years.

     Remember also it was policy errors, not the stock market crash, that caused the Great Depression:

• Instead of increasing the money supply, the Federal Reserve of that era reduced it by one-third.
• Instead of lowering taxes, Herbert Hoover raised them.
• And to channel whatever demand was left into U.S.-made goods, the government enacted the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act to keep out foreign products; this only provoked our trading partners to do the same.

Add to this today’s automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance and Social Security, the FDIC to insure bank deposits and circuit breakers to keep stocks from falling too quickly, and you can see why this is not a depression in any way shape or form.

 

Full article is here: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/dont-call-bailout/story.aspx?guid=%7B0A2E0398%2D2E89%2D4F7F%2DB8C7%2D4150783B1B2E%7D