JayB

Maybe. Thinking that locally sourced bio-diesel usage could be the tie-breaker.

We (my wife) grow stuff in the yard too - but when you factor in the cost of hauling topsoil to the yard, irrigating with water piped in through a municipal treatment and distribution network, the trips to buy seeds, etc, etc, the process is a gajilliion times more expensive and resource-intensive than the production processes used by even the word's worst production-farmer. Organic or otherwise. Were it otherwise, there'd be no commercial farms. Hell - when we were living in the middle of nowhere in NZ at virtually every meal we were eating produce grown in our backyard, out of a garden that was fertilized by the innards and other non-filet worthy bits of the large wild-trout I was catching...out of gin clear spring-fed water that had been percolating through volcanic layers that had purified it to optical perfection, on single-barbles hooks via flies that I'd tied with my own hands. Locavore perfection. Of course - our plane tickets alone cost a fortune, we burned enough fuel to fuel an African village for years just getting there, I was driving at least 50 miles round-trip to get to the said trout, and I probably spent at least $300 dollars on tying supplies alone - so the entire enterprise behind every "locavore" meal was really a shameless orgy of unnecessary consumption motivated by nothing other than our desire to enjoy life as much as possible before we go to our entropic rewards. All of the dispassionate analysis out there confirms the same for the entire "locavore" phenomenon. Eat local and/or grow your own stuff if that makes you happy. That should be enough.

That's an important psychological benefit for quite a few people. Where do you draw the geographic line between local purchases that will hurt the economy? Do you also factor in the geographic origin of all of the inputs? Would a guy food in Eastern Washington using a John Deere tractor fabricated in the US, burning petroleum sourced from California, and shipped to market on a US-made vehicle get a higher local score than someone in Mount Vernon who used japanese tractors, powered everything with imported diesel, and shipped his produce to market in a Japanese trailer behind a Prius?

The argument in favor of digging for ore beneath your home and fabricating a car from metal that you smelt yourself is equally compelling. Ditto for drilling your own fillings vs sending the money out of your household by paying a dentist to do it for you, etc, etc. hmmm...buy locally produced food or growing a bit of lettuce in your own yard = drilling your own fillings for you. well sounds like you're convinced! interesting opinion you have there. There are all kinds of perfectly satisfactory reasons for growing your own food or buying from the left-handed vegan pacifist rooptop collective. Economic and environmental benefits aren't amongst them. That'd be like me justifying my fly-fishing habbit by claiming that doing so saves money. I'd estimate that the price of the fish I've kept over the years somewhere between $500 and $1,000 dollars a pound. Doesn't mean that there aren't good reasons for me to fly-fish, but it'd be silly and delusional to pretend that doing so had anything but non-economic benefits.

The argument in favor of digging for ore beneath your home and fabricating a car from metal that you smelt yourself is equally compelling. Ditto for drilling your own fillings vs sending the money out of your household by paying a dentist to do it for you, etc, etc. Why climb a mountain when others have taken pictures from the summit? Yes - people are motivated to get fillings, buy pre-mixed concrete, fiberglass insulation, and camcorders for all of the intangible non-economic reasons that people....climb mountains. Argument by Dada-analogy. Love it.

My hunch is that a progressive consumption tax would have the same or better public perception-of-fairness going for it, and would do a much better job of promoting savings, investment, production, and long-term productivity/economic growth.

The argument in favor of digging for ore beneath your home and fabricating a car from metal that you smelt yourself is equally compelling. Ditto for drilling your own fillings vs sending the money out of your household by paying a dentist to do it for you, etc, etc.

You're on a roll today, Drew! This takes me back to your rousing defenses of the "Fat Virus," homeopathy, and other greatest hits. Yes - being remote probably accounts for each bit being expensive. It doesn't explain why they price bandwidth consumption per-bit as opposed to a flat rate for unlimited data.

http://alanmccrindle.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/it-is-the-cooking-method-stupid-insights-into-energy-usage-and-carbon-dioxide-production-in-the-food-production-consumption-chain/ http://www.infra.kth.se/fms/pdf/Report160.pdf Et.....cetera. There's a bunch of other literature out there that establish this point. What makes a food "boutique" isn't the type of food, but the price that one is willing to pay for the particular production methods used to generate it. If you want to only eat fruit harvested by left-handed vegan pacifists who toil in rootop-veggie collective - great. I'm sure they appreciate your money.

Paying more could be a function of geography for sure. A price structure where you pay by the bit rather than a flat rate for unlimited use - don't see any possible connection to geography there - but if you can demonstrate that's the case, great.

Great thread - thanks for sharing the photos, links, and stories!

It's often the bulk of pay for Firefighters and Policemen. JayB's solution is going to be to hire more.... oh, no, he wants to cut the employment roles! Shouldn't your schadenfreude be directed at Ireland who mortgaged their future to bail out those deserved bankers and now, rightfully, are getting rolled over the coals for their predatory corporate tax rates? Oh, wait, they followed your little economic perscriptions off a cliff. Whoopsie! Austerity was coming to Ireland - the only question was whether it'd be in anticipation of or in response to prohibitive rates in the bond market. Where they really screwed the pooch was putting the public on the hook for all of the banking losses - which thanks to the magnitude of the property bubble there - significantly exceed Ireland's capacity to repay them. Ever. Not sure who made that call, but since debts that can't be repaid won't, the folks running Ireland should have told the retards in Germany, England, etc who lend hundreds of billions of dollars to retards in Ireland to pound sand and take whatever losses they had coming to them. The losses are simply too large for the Irish to repay, and at the end of the day, and the sooner that all concerned accept that the better. There aren't enough real savings in the world to make all of the retards who speculated on property that with rental yields that could never cover the debt required to buy them. The losses are coming, and it'll be interesting to see who the biggest loser is in this game of musical chairs. When and if the music starts in Spain and Italy things will get very interesting since the potential losses there exceed Europe's capacity to absorb them. So education, a service economy, low corporate tax rates and business friendly policies don't cure all ills? Oh dear. "State budget crisis is now a budget emergency THE NEWS TRIBUNE Last updated: November 23rd, 2010 12:23 AM (PST) Lawmakers have often promised to bring a hard-nosed, results-oriented, “everything on the table” approach to writing the state budget. Occasionally they’ve partially delivered. Mostly they’ve claimed they were delivering while leaving sacred cows untouched. This time is different. As of last week’s revenue forecast, state government was short $900 million of what it needs to continue the state’s existing programs and services at existing levels. It is short a staggering $5.7 billion over the biennium that begins in July. And that’s after the 2010 Legislature made tough cuts in some programs. The immediate challenge is to carve the $900 million out of the current biennial budget – close to a billion dollars worth of pain crammed into seven short months. Gov. Chris Gregoire has already covered $520 million of that, crudely, by imposing 6.3 percent across-the-board cuts. That’s the worst possible way to cut a budget, but she was forced to do it because lawmakers refused to meet in special session to make adjustments last summer. Their foot-dragging made the problem considerably worse. Gregoire’s now talking about a special session in early December to deal with the new, additional $385 million shortfall. That translates into another 4.6 percent the governor would otherwise have to impose – without reason, sense or priorities – in the absence of legislative guidance. There shouldn’t even be an argument about the special session. Waiting until the regular session begins in January will likely result in the usual two months or more of dithering and dawdling before lawmakers cobble together a supplemental budget. Do it fast. Do it now. It’s amazing what can be accomplished with the help of a short, hard deadline. After some equivocation a year ago, Gregoire now appears thoroughly committed to a ruthlessly rigorous approach to spending priorities. She walks, talks and acts like the budget hawk Washington needs in the governor’s mansion right now. On Thursday, she ordered the state unions to open their existing contracts for renegotiation. Her office has served notice that new contracts, negotiated but not yet finalized, cannot be included in the 2011-2013 budget – because the money’s just not there. When the state’s leading Democrat is facing down organized labor – the state’s leading Democratic constituency – you know things are grim. The Legislature’s highest priorities ought to be preserving the safety net, as much as humanly possible, for the state’s most vulnerable citizens: the mentally ill, abused children, the disabled and others who cannot fend for themselves. And preserving higher education opportunities for Washingtonians whose talents are essential to the state’s economic future. Everything’s got to be on the table this time. Really on the table" Very much agree with the text in bold above but I'm not optimistic that their interests will prevail in the sausage machine.

The funny thing about locavores is that preparing food at home consumes vastly more energy than anything else in the journey from food to table. The energy inputs from commercial production and transport are completely trivial by comparison. Having said that - if you're willing to invest the time and money in a particular boutique food fetish - knock yourself out. There are plenty of people who will be happy to take your money in exchange for producing food that's consistent with whatever set of values and practices that you believe in.

They had this system in NZ - and the end result that internet connections were slow, costly, and a pain to tap into while traveling. However, pretty much everything in NZ was expensive as hell - so internet services didn't really stand out. I suspect that's because they have more of a consumption based tax regime there. However - I'm not convinced that it's the end of the world easier. Under the current system folks that use the internet for e-mail and routine browsing wind up subsidizing the bejesus out of people that download terrabytes of content. Seems like the prime beneficiaries now are people and businesses that are able to transfer their transmission expenses onto everyone else, and they'd be the one's bearing the brunt of any change to volume-based pricing.

This is a common concern regarding consumption taxes of all kinds, and it appears legit on the face of it. But think about it: when "poor folks" buy shoes, they're getting them at WalMart for $20, VAT @ 22% = $4.40; when "the rich" buy shoes, they're buying ManoloBlablablas for $400, $500, $600 and more per pair. VAT @ 22% on $500 shoes = $110. When "poor folks" buy cars, they're buying 2nd- or 3rd-hand used cars for $500, VAT = $110; when "the rich" buy cars, they're buying Porsches or Jags or Caddies, or vintage collector cars, or monster "Death Star" SUV things, VAT @ 22% on a $100,000 vehicle comes to $22,000. Tell me again who's paying more? Also, there are ways of softening the blow for those at the lower end of the income scale. Our HST structure includes rebates for those at the lowest income levels, meaning they effectively pay no sales tax at all. It's a sliding scale, so as your income increases your rebate is reduced, until one day you find that the rebates aren't coming anymore. By that time you're making enough that the sales tax is affordable. Hell, I feel like I'm doing OK personally, but somehow I still qualify for small rebates that are deposited directly into my bank account quarterly. In general, I prefer consumption taxes over income taxes any day. Taxes are a disincentive - want people to smoke less, raise tobacco taxes. Want people to drink less, raise alcohol taxes. Want people to work harder, save more money, invest more - reduce their income taxes, and recoup that revenue with consumption taxes. In other words, go ahead and penalize me for spending my money, but don't penalize me for earning it. You want all those jobs to stop migrating to China? Right now you're taxing the earnings of all US-based companies, and all their employees. Those companies have to pay their employees more, simply because a chunk of their pay disappears before they even see it. In order to stretch what's left, they then spend their take-home pay on products made in China by companies that don't have to pay those income taxes. What if those products could be built in the US again, by companies and individuals that don't see their earnings being taxed at the source? By replacing income taxes with a VAT, you ensure that those Chinese imports are being taxed at the same rate as domestic products. The Chinese will still enjoy some degree of advantage due to their colossal labour supply, but at least you won't be deliberately building that advantage into your economy via your taxation policies. As long as it's designed with adequate protection for the lowest income-earners by way of rebates or something of that sort, I'm all for it. Cue JayB in 3... 2... 1... I'm with you on consumption taxes. They're far superior to income taxes is your goal is to promote savings, investment, and production (e.g. the things that promote long-term economic growth). You can even make them more politically palatable by making them small-P progressive. Under that regime you report your income, you report your total savings for the year, and you're taxed on the differential between the two. Very easy to engineer the tax structure so that the tax rate on the poorest is actually negative. Somewhere along the line Canada actually saw the light with regards to taxes - somewhere in the mega-reforms in the mid-90s, I'd guess - and now actually outranks the US in the index of economic freedom for the first time ever. Hopefully the current malaise will cause more than a few people to look at how the folks in Canada, NZ, and Australia structure their taxes and learn a thing or two. Not optimistic about that but it's nice to know there are examples to learn from if anyone is willing to do so. My only concern for Canada at the moment lies in the transfer of mortgage risk from the private banks to the public via the CHMC, and I continue to be extremely alarmed by the valuations, instruments like 40-year, 100% mortgages, and the total volume of mortgage debt that's bound to reset at a higher rate. I hope for Canada's sake I'm wrong about that but all of the metrics are quite worrisome. I don't feel any better when I peruse sites like these: http://www.crackshackormansion.com/ http://www.greaterfool.ca/

It's often the bulk of pay for Firefighters and Policemen. JayB's solution is going to be to hire more.... oh, no, he wants to cut the employment roles! Shouldn't your schadenfreude be directed at Ireland who mortgaged their future to bail out those deserved bankers and now, rightfully, are getting rolled over the coals for their predatory corporate tax rates? Oh, wait, they followed your little economic perscriptions off a cliff. Whoopsie! Austerity was coming to Ireland - the only question was whether it'd be in anticipation of or in response to prohibitive rates in the bond market. Where they really screwed the pooch was putting the public on the hook for all of the banking losses - which thanks to the magnitude of the property bubble there - significantly exceed Ireland's capacity to repay them. Ever. Not sure who made that call, but since debts that can't be repaid won't, the folks running Ireland should have told the retards in Germany, England, etc who lend hundreds of billions of dollars to retards in Ireland to pound sand and take whatever losses they had coming to them. The losses are simply too large for the Irish to repay, and at the end of the day, and the sooner that all concerned accept that the better. There aren't enough real savings in the world to make all of the retards who speculated on property that with rental yields that could never cover the debt required to buy them. The losses are coming, and it'll be interesting to see who the biggest loser is in this game of musical chairs. When and if the music starts in Spain and Italy things will get very interesting since the potential losses there exceed Europe's capacity to absorb them.

Bring skis. If you've got the weather window - hit it up from Paradise. If you don't, and IMO you most likely won't - the skiing at Crystal can be quite good, and if the avy conditions aren't too atrocious there are a bunch of fine mini-outings in the Tatoosh range that you could fire up.

hard to lead if you're not in charge, and hard to stay in charge if you propose unpopular action i'm cynical as hell on the environment - we're just way too dumb and unmanageable as a species to deal w/ the mega-complex co2 issue i think - deny it/don't deny it, whatever, it'll do its damage and either we'll adapt and survive or we won't - the sooner we're all dead the sooner we can all shut the fuck up at least! as for mama earth, i'm sure she'll do just fine w/o us (and all the other species we take down w/ us) "deny it/don't deny it, whatever, it'll do its damage and either we'll adapt and survive or we won't" Yup.

Police and Fire account for at least ~1K of that or more. Scrolling through the gross pay data on firefighters showed roughly 550 out of 1100 at 100K or higher. How about the value of the pension liabilities? It takes roughly a million dollars to fund an inflation indexed payout of $50K per year for someone who retires at ~55 years of age, you're looking at at least two million dollars to fund the pension, without even factoring in the cost of health insurance, etc. If the contributions are roughly 10% of gross salary per year, and you take 10K as an approximation of the average contribution, and plug in a ludicrous average annual return of exactly 10% per year, you get a value just shy of two million dollars. Plug in a more realistic value of 5%, and you get about 750K. At a minimum - I'd wager that each Seattle firefighter is on the receiving end of an extra million dollars worth of compensation in the form of pension payouts, and the actual difference between contributions + returns and total payouts and the number is likely to be dramatically higher. Great for the firefighters - and if compensating firefighters at levels that attract thousands of applicants for every job opening is the highest public priority - great. If providing social services, public defenders, etc also constitute public priority then at a minimum maybe it's time to consider "draconian" steps like shifting the folks in police and fire to defined contribution plans, or at least move to a 50-50 plan.

Of course, but it's from the same tune that they're playing in Greece: "America's strapped states and cities took another hit Wednesday, with California seeing tepid demand for its latest bond sale and other governments pulling about $700 million worth of borrowing deals this week as investors continued stepping away from the municipal bond market. The normally staid market has grown volatile the past week, posting its sharpest selloff in nearly two years, as investors demand higher interest rates to buy paper issued by states, cities and counties to finance their operations...." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703688704575620912858864200.html The only real question is - barring massive restructuring of public sector pay and benefits - whether or not Uncle Sugar will keep a lid on rates buy buying or guaranteeing state and local debt issues, which will simply transfer the pressure on yields to the Federal level. If Europe weren't actively imploding, that day would probably already be here.

Grab your popcorn. While you're waiting, take a look at the local budget: http://www.thenewstribune.com/soundinfo/seattlesalaries/ Amuse yourself by guessing how many pages of police and fire rosters you have to scroll through before you hit gross pay that's less than $100K. That's not including the cost of current benefits, much less the cost of funding pensions and other retiree benefits. "There's nothing left to cut." LOL. LOL. LOL....

The only question to ponder is whether the the resources diverted away from the private economy to fund the government will either lay idle or be will result in lower economic output than if they were first diverted through the public sector. Am I worried that the guy running a printing business will stare at his bank account in a state of bafflement wondering what to do with the money that he isn't paying in taxes? No. Even if he did - would the additional money in a bank account, money-market account, or other instrument be economically equivalent to the said money being buried in the back yard? No. Is there any evidence to suggest that transferring the money, less administrative expenses, into a retired ferry worker's bank account so that he can spend it instead of the print-shop owner will increase output relative to the guy spending, saving, or investing it himself? No. One of the key fallacies at work in your question is this presumption that because we collectively consume goods and services with a value equal to 70% of our total economic ouput - then the key to restoring prosperity is increasing "consumption" by any means necessary, including massive borrowing. People seem to understand intuitively that they can't increase their prosperity through spending, but have evidently come to believe that something magic happens at the macro level that makes it possible for a country to become better off by increasing spending alone. There isn't.

By this I take it that you believe that no matter what else may be at stake you intend to stick it to the state workers. All that matters is that these government workers have an unfairly sweet deal and you don't care what the issues may be until they lose it. That is called "war." Woah! War seems a touch strong for converting to a 401(K) style retirement plan and paying a bigger share of health-care expenses - particularly when the alternative is sticking it to the people that rely on government services the most, just about all of whom are way worse off than the average person employed by the city, county, or state. Self interest can certainly drive efficiency in conditions of open competition where alternative to becoming more efficient is going under, but since going under is an impossibility when you're talking about a taxpayer funded monopoly, there's no reason to believe or evidence to suggest that the self-interest of public sector unions has done much to inspire the kind of efficiency that might persuade the public to forgo any talk of reform. I actually think that it'd be in public employee unions interest to take the lead on reforming the cost structure and improving efficiency, since that would likely make the electorate more receptive to approving the taxes necessary to stave off much more severe cuts driven by straight-up budget shortfalls. I'd personally rather have a job with a 401(K) and higher-cost sharing on my health insurance premiums than be unemployed, and the next budget cycle will give public sector employees the opportunity to contemplate that choice. I think that the unions are hoping that this economic downturn is temporary, and that either higher tax revenues or a dramatic change in voter sentiment will make it possible to avoid things like pension reform. That's possible, but after looking at the numbers my conclusion is that here - as in Greece - math will take over at some point. We'll see.

My hunch is that the capacity to recall and type the words in your first entry actually represent all that you understand about the topic. What sorts of economic activity do consumers engage in to generate the resources that they then exchange for goods and services (trillions of dollars worth are imported) with a value equal to 70% of the national output each year? If consumer spending on imported goods increased by 5% would domestic economic activity then necessarily be reduced by 5%?

Not a union, but definitely a rent-seeking cartel of the highest order. Put a bill completely liberalizing medicine and abolishing price controls, grant me the power to change everything with a single stroke of the pen, and I'd gladly sign it. I think that most physicians would actually make more money under a liberalized regime with dramatically less third party payment, and patients would get better care, so it's not clear to me that the net effect of the cartel getting in bed with Uncle Sugar is necessarily positive for my household.