JayB

Hmm. Seemed like you were arguing that KK should, for the sake of logical consistency, fear the power wielded by corporations as much as feared the power of government. In it's simplest form, my question about your stance on "single-payor" healthcare comes down to this: Do you want the government to just pay for healthcare, or both pay for and control the its distribution down to the individual level? The two are not synonymous. There are many mechanisms by which the state could provide funding for healthcare without the state acting as the sole administrator of the funds. My hunch is that if, say, the government used a system of vouchers/subsidies/tax-credits that enabled everyone to afford health-care, but left control of these funds in the hands of individuals, this would not satisfy you, even though this would involve a single entity essentially paying for all health-care expenditures in the country. Keep the control of the money in the hands of the state, rather than individuals, and I suspect that the system would be rather more to your liking, but feel free to correct me if I've misunderstood you.

Yeah - I should have left out the churlish comment. Sorry.

The comments were directed at Carl. I'm not persuaded that under the current system, any and all acts of malfeasance that anyone might conduct while working in/for a corporation will go unpunished. I'm hardly an expert, but from my vantage point it seems like there's a fair amount of individual exposure to criminal/civil prosecution for actions undertaken in such circumstances, and while corporations can't be sent to jail, they too are subject to a variety of sanctions, punishments, etc. The notion that corporations can act with impunity, and are unconstrained by the legal system is simply false.

Agreed on that point - but I'm still interested in hearing the argument for why a rational person should worry as much about the encroachments that corporations might make on their rights and freedoms as they do about their government's ability to do the same. Also still interested in whether your ideal healthcare system would involve a single payer/administrator, or whether a system where the government gives individuals the money that they need to buy their own coverage would satisfy your desire for a "single payer." If not, then it would seem that you are arguing in favor of something rather more comprehensive and far reaching than a "single-payer" system.

No one who has conducted business under the auspices of a corporation has ever been prosecuted for conduct that they undertook while doing so? Someone page Dennis Koslowski, Ken Lay, etc. In the case of the company in question - did they violate standing laws when they emitted the pollutants, or did the regulations come after they did so? IMO if the company breaks a standing law, they should pay. If they regulations are changed retrospectively, then the state should cover the tab.

All of these things are true, but I would like to see what the evidence is that "actors" are statistically more likely to exhibit behaviors consistent with greed, malice, etc than their counterparts in sole-proprietorships, partnerships, or any legal classification under which for-profit entities are administered and organized. Having said all of that - and conceding that corporations are run by humans who are no less infallible than their counterparts who make their living in for profit enterprises with slightly different characteristics - I'd still like to see you demonstrate that corporations (IBM, Microsoft, The Gap, Dunkin Donuts, Mattel Corp - manufacturer of "Extreme Tickle Me Elmo," etc) are invested with an array of powers to forcibly constrain individual freedoms that are equal to or greater than those of the government. If you can do so, then you'll have a rational case for arguing that everyone should be at least as concerned about corporate greed/power as they are about government power.

"As I pointed out, to the sneers of Fairweather and Canyondweller, my wife and I pay over $7,000.00 a year for medical insurance plus deducibles and other uninsured costs (our deductible is $1,500.00) and we have no kids and no history of expensive medical ills. If you work for the government (god forbid) or medium to larger businesses you probably have pretty good insurance and don't have any idea how much it actually costs. If you work for small business, are self employed, or are disabled -- maybe not." My wife and I just finished shopping for individual health coverage in Washington, and opted for a plan from Regence "Regence HSA HealtPlan" with the following characteristics. -$5,000 deductible (per family) -80% coverage over the deductible -$10,000 annual out-of-pocket maximum (this includes the $5,000) deductible -lifetime maximum coverage of 1-2 million (can't recall this one off the top of my head). Total cost per month is $84 for my wife (30-34 bracket), $99 for me (35-39 bracket), for an annual total of $2196. Here's the breakdown for other brackets: (40-44): $127 (45-49): $147 (50-54): $172 (54-59): $203 (60+): $236 Assuming that your average age is somewhere between 40 and 50, your monthly bill would be between $3048 and $3528 annually, or around half of what you say that you are currently paying. Since the people that you go to for your non-critical medical care don't take insurance anyway, and you would presumably rather have the money that you don't spend on health-care in your own savings account, rather than an account owned by an insurance company, it seems like a plan like this would make a fair bit of sense for you. Their number is: 888-344-8234. I'm sure that Lifewise and others have similar plans. Now that you are aware of these facts, any sums that you spend on health insurance over and above these figures will represent a choice you've made concerning the nature of your coverage, rather than a circumstance with "the system" has forced you to accept.

Agreed. However, you have more than a healthy mistrust for government -- you fear that expansion of even an existing and by all accounts highly efficient and successful medicare insurance system would lead to state sponsored oppression. Conversely, you show no apparent mistrust for power in the form of corporate greed. Whether it is big tobacco or the military industrial complex, you argue for "free market" efficiency -- or do I misconstrue? As to questionning where your money goes -- when was the last time you actually did this? You complain about how bad our roads are or lament the possibility that there might be a toll on a new 520 bridge but I have not seen where you took even the smallest step to research what the revenue and budget issues actually are. We have institutional protection against corporate monopolies, and they have no authority to tax, arrest, or otherwise impose their will on free citizens - so the notion that "corporate greed" constitutes anything like the threat to personal freedoms and essential liberties as the state does is to take a position that is fundamentally at odds with reality. Did corporations bring about Prohibition, The War on Drugs, or outlaw all manner of other activities that individuals engage in alone or in the company of consenting adults, and which cause no direct harm to anyone else? Also - could you oblige me and define precisely what it is that differentiates "corporate" greed from other kinds of greed. Since most legal firms operate as partnerships, is there something this form of legal organization that renders any greed that they may exhibit of a finer and more beneficial character? They certainly seem to spend quite a bit of money attempting to advance legislation that will secure their interests in Washington D.C. Are we to assume that "partnership greed" renders the trial lawyers are impartial arbiters of the public good, and that we should look upon all of their efforts to influence legislation accordingly? How about sole proprietorships? What distinguishes the greed that an enterprise organized under these auspices may exhibit from the "corporate" variety.

You are aware of the fact that most countries have both public and private healthcare systems, yes? Canada is atypical in this regard. Why the dogmatic insistence on a single-payer/administrator? If the government provided all citizens with either a tax-credit, vouchers, or direct subsidies sufficient for them to purchase some basic level of health-services - but individuals, rather than the state, were in control of their coverage - this would still be a single-payer model, no? Would this be acceptable to you, or would you insist on having the state serving as the central administrator of all health care decisions/spending? If so - why? This point isn't necessarily for Matt alone, but I'm also kind of wondering of the efficiency stats that people cite for public healthcare include the cost associated with tax collections (private health insurers include the cost of raising money through premiums in their "overhead"), and of fraud, waste, and overbilling.

Alt-A ARM Reset chart inky no worky. But to answer the above question... I hear that they're literally dense enough to be stacked on top of one another, and rising above the pool at the popular hole in the Frenchman Coulee parking lot...

I'm pretty sure the trout in the icicle will take absolutely any fly you drift their way. I saw a few folks fishing above the road closure on my way to ida lake saturday. Looked like some nice holes up there. I suspect the closure will improve upper creek fishing. For whatever reason, they haven't been digging the terrestrials at all, despite the abundance of hoppers and ants. No love for Nymphs either. The latter may be due to the fact that I've always only fished with nymphs or streamers when nothing would hit dry flies, so my technique may not be up to par - but it was surprising to watch as the fish let a tasty looking nymph drift right past them, but rise through ~3 feet of water to hit a #14 dry. Optimal foraging - hmmph. Kind of neat to see dozens of Chinook holdovers from the spring run in the pools below Snow-Creek rapid. I suspect they're strays from the hatchery program, but nice to see any fish making it through the dam-gauntlet on the Columbia.

The price/income multiples in much of Europe make most of the US look like a model of probity and wisdom by comparison. Spain and Ireland, and England look particularly scary - but there's probably more. Maybe the percentage of home ownership is significantly lower over there, and constrained to a sector of the population with incomes that are significantly above average...but I think that the pain over there will be at least as bad as it is in the US before all is said and done. On the upside, the demand for a No. 14 Olive Caddis from the trout in Icicle Creek seems to be pretty strong at the moment, so I'm off to add to the supply...

Just thought I'd chime in to suggest that anyone paying 8K a year in premiums might do better by looking into a catastrophic plan with deductibles in the 5-10K range and banking the savings.

Actually, it will go something like "If you liked sub-prime, you'll love Alt-A (and prime ARMs)." While housing/real-estate had all of the hallmarks of a classic speculative mania that would end badly for the country - and I have very sympathy for the folks who were out to profit from stoking the frenzy in some fashion or another* - I do feel quite a bit of sympathy for responsible people who are forced to bear the costs of the speculative excesses along with everyone else. I'm personally *very* sorry to hear about Rob's dilemma, and hope that it works out for the best. Unfortunately, the housing-implosion driven carnage in the credit market is so severe at the moment, and has become so self-sustaining, that the balance of probabilities stands decisively on the side of continued decline and stagnation until sometime in 2010 at least, although markets where the capitulation process has already driven prices down to the point where the rent that they'll yield exceeds the monthly cost of owning them will probably start to stabilize soon and recover before then. Anyone with zero or negative equity that doesn't have to sell now, or in the foreseeable future (and can afford the payments) would probably be better off staying put. Anyone with equity that has to sell should price below the market and take their lumps instead of chasing the market down. Anyone with negative equity who has to sell should do the same, and either bring cash to the closing table if they have it, or try to work-out a short sale with their lender if they don't. On a related note, it looks as though there's plenty of inventory available in Leavenworth at the moment, and the asking prices still look otherwordly to me. I don't think that there's any waty that local earning power can support these prices, and I'd be astonished if the rental yield could come anywhere close to covering the cost for the places near the river that anyone would want to rent. The only hope is second-home buyers/investors who are banking on appreciation and are willing to eat the negative monthly cash flow for however long it takes to sell for more than they paid, or folks who are rich enough, and love the area enough not to care about any such considerations. Hopefully there are more of those folks than you'd think out there. IMO second-tier vacation/rental markets are going to see the largest price declines, particularly those quite a ways from population centers. Hopefully Leavenworth fares better than Bend.

Private health care or private health insurance. Let's be clear wtf we're talking about. Actually that is a good point. The Swiss system is universal and private - and much cheaper and successful than ours. I'd be ok with that one. "Switzerland's consumer-driven health care system achieves universal insurance and high quality of care at significantly lower costs than the employer-based US system and without the constrained resources that can characterize government-controlled systems. Unlike other systems in which the choice and most of the funding for health insurance is provided by third parties, such as employers and governments, in the Swiss system, individuals are required to purchase their own health insurance. The positive results achieved by the Swiss system may be attributed to its consumer control, price transparency of the insurance plans, risk adjustment of insurers, and solidarity. However, the constraints the Swiss system places on hospitals and physicians and the paucity of provider quality information may unduly limit its impact. The Swiss health care system holds important lessons, including evidence about its feasibility and equity, for the United States, which is now embarking on its own consumer-driven health care system." Quite a while ago I remember someone encapsulating the central dilemma that anyone formulating public health-care policy would have to contend with as follows: "-Universal coverage. -Unlimited care. -Cost Containment. Choose any two." I don't personally think that a single system can fully resovle this dilemma, but the swiss model probably comes as close as any single system in the world at the moment. Why the Canadia system has become the foremost model in everyone's mind, when there are literally dozens of other models in the world that work at least as well is a bit of a mystery to me. Kudos to Jim for at least realizing that the Canadian model is but one of many alternatives to our current system.

Wow! Another MattP! I'm "claiming it works". You guys are laughable. one more try- why do you think a cost of a physician working night should be $450 more per shift. can you answer one fucking question straight without using communist methods of relativism? I'm pretty sure that the answer is "supply and demand." After socializing with ~ 30-40 ER residents periodically over the course of three years, I feel pretty confident that most ER docs don't like working nights any more than anyone else. The rough consensus I gathered seemed to be that working nights sucks, so hospitals looking to staff ER's overnight have to offer ER docs a payment sufficient to outweigh all the negatives that come along with working overnight shifts.

Word. Guarantee that the percentage of fixed-gear cyclists skews waaaay high relative to their distribution amongst all cyclists. Not that I'm suggesting that there's a correlation there or anything...

Word.

Source please? Given taxation burden of $100 dollars a day for a climber on Kilimanjaro I'd say there's plenty of value, just most of it's wasted on the corrupt, Western supported, government. Given the insularity of most, I'd say the vastly underestimate the value of them for those as well. California without snowpack would cease to function; there goes the 5th largest economy in the world; there goes the food basket of the world. 1. http://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/bradley/kaser2004.pdf 2. Fact. Agriculture counts for like ~2% of the state's GDP. Prediction: changes to the water infrastructure and more efficient farming techniques and more appropriate crop choices would mitigate much of the impact, and production elsewhere will pick up whatever drops off in California, and perhaps Tvash's hobby garden will become more valuable, and the local boutique farms he's so enamored of will become more competitive relative to the mega-farms in the Central valley.

I don't think that this is an especially accurate summary of Nordhaus's work, which you are clearly intelligent enough to understand if you try to - despite the cogniyive handicaps you've been fettered with by your education. Here's a brief summary from that notorious Necon rag, "Science," http://nordhaus.econ.yale.edu/nordhaus_stern_science.pdf and a slightly longer journal article that you can peruse at your leisure. http://nordhaus.econ.yale.edu/nordhaus_carbontax_reep.pdf I personally think that the balance of probabilities is now on the side of those who have concluded that the world will eventually settle on and enact a mechanism to limit carbon emissions. I also think it's likely that assumptions about how to best allocate humanity's resources to reduce carbon emissions in a manner that maximizes human well-being, both in the present and the future, will play a central role in determining which mechanism we end up with. Assumptions about discount rates are likely to be a critically important part of those mechanisms, whether the general public understands them or not - and economists are going to be at least as much a part of creating these mechanisms as climate scientists, and likely considerably more so. Technocrats who care about these things are going to play a considerable role in determining your future, for better or worse. The question becomes which kind of technocrat you are more comfortable with, and how much power you'd like them to have over your life. Are you most comfortable with a framework in which a central authority makes decisions about which technological solutions to allocate resources to and when, which alternate uses for the same resources get neglected, tells you how much, how often, and for what purposes you may engage in activities that require fossil fuel consumption, and imposes fixed, arbitrary limits on CO2 emissions irrespective of the cost? Then fixed-emission schemes are the way to go. I personally think that such schemes will simply be too costly and onerous to get anywhere, and will be promptly ignored or abandoned. Squeeze the people in the present too hard, and they stop caring about the future. Even the relatively mild perturbation of fuel prices means that people have to expend more resources to grow the same amount of food, and the result is that hundreds of millions of people have less to eat. Artificially jack the price of energy up too high, and you'll see significantly more hunger and sufferng, and the political pressure to eliminate or relax the constraints will simply be too great to resist. I personally prefer the kind of technocrat that has as little power over my life as possible, that favors creating tangible incentives for people to voluntarily reduce their C02 emissions, for others to profit via innovations that enhance efficiency and exploit new sources of energy, but that leaves them free to make their own choices about what they do and don't wish to sacrifice instead of relying on rationing and quotas. I'm even less enamored of the idea of granting *any* government the power that'd be necessary to monitor and enforcement that any such rationing scheme requires, much less the power to decide who gets what, or that creates massive new incentives for influence peddling and corruption. The other point worth considering when pondering the question of discounting is whether it makes sense to invest so much of humanity's existing wealth foisting a contemporary solution on a problem that will persist well into the future. If someone had been able travel back to the 1950's with a set of figures that showed the number of calculations per second that it'd take to keep the global economy running in 2008, what would the most sensible response have been? Attempting to construct a death-star sized ENIAC with five septillion vacuum tubes? Or allowing the demand for calculations to drive the technological evolution necessary to generate the desired output to work over time? Some solutions to climate change are objectively worse than doing nothing (I suspect that the corn ethanol fiasco is just the opening act), at least in terms of mitigating human suffering, and I'm personally glad that there are at least a few smart and influential people out there who are aware of this fact, so that someone puts the brakes on before evironmental equivalent of the planet-sized ENIAC gets too far underway.

Hasn't the snow loss on Kili been at least partially attributed to defortestation of the adjacent lowlands by people who are chopping down the trees and burning them because they have no other options? If that's the case, economic development that provided them with enough income to buy their food from more productive farmers who grow their crops in less sensitive areas, and kerosene/propane/methane/etc for their cooking and washing would be a much better way to keep the snow on Kili than adopting policies that are more likely to insure that wood is the only source of fuel that they can get their hands on.... I'm not so sure that people conducting economic analyses put *no* value on glaciers/snowpacks, but I'd imagine that but within the scope of any analysis that they conducted, the majority of the value they assign to them is related to their importance for providing for irrigation, habitat, drinking-water, industry, etc rather than their aesthetic/recreational value.

Is this based on something that you know about Nordhaus in particular, or something else? In any event, I think there's a good debate at realclimate.org, which, from my skimming, comes down to a disagreement about whether or not it's ethical to apply a "discount rate" when considering the costs and benefits of various responses to limiting CO2 emissions. I'm not sure that it's completely accurate, but I've always thought that questions about the "discount rate" always came down to whether it makes the most sense to spend a dollar of money on something now, or if you'd be better off investing the dollar now and buying the same thing at some point in the future, after accounting for inflation. The higher the discount rate (which I think of as something analogous to an interest rate), the more likely it is that you'll be better off investing the money now and making the purchase later. E.g, would you have been better off if you had spent a thousand dollars to buy a state-of-the art VCR in 1981, or invested the $1000 in T-Bills and bought a VCR or its technological equivalent in 2008, then kept whatever was left over in the bank? Easy call now, but in 1980 I suppose that one could make the case that the answer depended on your assumptions about the rate of technological change, productivity growth, the fate of civilization/mankind, etc. Most economists believe that it's insane to leave assumptions about discount rates out of calculations that will serve as the basis for constructing rational policies to address global warming, while it seems that there are many passionate environmentalists who have a variety of objections to making assumptions about the "discount rate" a central component of any plan to address the risks and costs of global warming. As I see it, amongst those who are convinced that we should do *something* to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions, there's a wide spectrum of ideas, with an extreme at either end. On one on side, there are people who believe humanity will be better off if we embark on a program that requires immediately spending a significant proportion of the total wealth that humanity has accumulated to combat global warming now, and forgoing the accumulation of far more wealth in the future (to combat global warming). Then there are those who believe that humanity will ultimately be better off if we stick to the least expensive, least economically constrictive means of reducing CO2 emissions now, and consider the resources that we don't use now (or deprive ourselves of in the future) an "investment" that we've dedicated to increasing human material and technological wealth in the immediate and long-term future, which will ultimately leave people in the future better able to cope with and adapt to any climate changes that resulted from a low-cost approach to dealing with CO2 emissions before they were born. I fall into the latter category, and think that there's a strong practical/moral case to be made for taking whatever we propose to spend on limiting carbon emissions in any given year (even with the lowest cost scenario), and spend the money instead on efforts to provide the world's poorest people with improved drinking water, education (especially women), vaccinations, improved agricultural practices, etc - then spend whatever's left over on curtailing C02 emissions. I'd also like to see it used to eliminate trade barriers, which sustain much of the poverty that results in all of the above, but that's a different conversation...

Just came across an interesting article by Freeman Dyson in the New York Review of Books, which summarizes the content of a recent book by William Nordhaus, a Yale economist. Nordhaus doesn't take issue with the scientific consensus concerning global warming. Instead, his purpose is to attempt to determine the optimal response to rising CO2 levels. Optimal, in this case, means the response that maximizes human well-being, by comparing the costs and benefits associated with approaches ranging from CO2 emission-limitation schemes ranging from those far more restrictive than Kyoto, to doing nothing. Here's (most of) Dyson's summary of Nordhaus's model and its outputs: "William Nordhaus is a professional economist, and his book A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies describes the global-warming problem as an econ-omist sees it. He is not concerned with the science of global warming or with the detailed estimation of the damage that it may do. He assumes that the science and the damage are specified, and he compares the effectiveness of various policies for the allocation of economic resources in response. His conclusions are largely independent of scientific details. He calculates aggregated expenditures and costs and gains. Everything is calculated by running a single computer model which he calls DICE, an acronym for Dynamic Integrated Model of Climate and the Economy. Each run of DICE takes as input a particular policy for allocating expenditures year by year. The allocated resources are spent on subsidizing costly technologies—for example, deep underground sequestration of carbon dioxide produced in power stations—that reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, or placing a tax on activities that produce carbon emissions. The climate model part of DICE calculates the effect of the reduced emissions in reducing damage. The output of DICE then tells us the resulting gains and losses of the world economy year by year. Each run begins at the year 2005 and ends either at 2105 or 2205, giving a picture of the effects of a particular policy over the next one or two hundred years. The practical unit of economic resources is a trillion inflation-adjusted dollars. An inflation-adjusted dollar means a sum of money, at any future time, with the same purchasing power as a real dollar in 2005. In the following discussion, the word "dollar" will always mean an inflation-adjusted dollar, with a purchasing power that does not vary with time. The difference in outcome between one policy and another is typically several trillion dollars, comparable with the cost of the war in Iraq. This is a game played for high stakes.... .................... Here are the net values of the various policies as calculated by the DICE model. The values are calculated as differences from the business-as-usual model, without any emission controls. A plus value means that the policy is better than business-as-usual, with the reduction of damage due to climate change exceeding the cost of controls. A minus value means that the policy is worse than business-as-usual, with costs exceeding the reduction of damage. The unit of value is $1 trillion, and the values are specified to the nearest trillion. The net value of the optimal program, a global carbon tax increasing gradually with time, is plus three—that is, a benefit of some $3 trillion. The Kyoto Protocol has a value of plus one with US participation, zero without US participation. The "Stern" policy has a value of minus fifteen, the "Gore" policy minus twenty-one, and "low-cost backstop" plus seventeen. What do these numbers mean? $1 trillion is a difficult unit to visualize. It is easier to think of it as $3,000 for every man, woman, and child in the US population. It is comparable to the annual gross domestic product of India or Brazil. A gain or loss of $1 trillion would be a noticeable but not overwhelming perturbation of the world economy. A gain or loss of $10 trillion would be a major perturbation with unpredictable consequences. The main conclusion of the Nordhaus analysis is that the ambitious proposals, "Stern" and "Gore," are disastrously expensive, the "low-cost backstop" is enormously advantageous if it can be achieved, and the other policies including business-as-usual and Kyoto are only moderately worse than the optimal policy. The practical consequence for global-warming policy is that we should pursue the following objectives in order of priority. (1) Avoid the ambitious proposals. (2) Develop the science and technology for a low-cost backstop. (3) Negotiate an international treaty coming as close as possible to the optimal policy, in case the low-cost backstop fails. (4) Avoid an international treaty making the Kyoto Protocol policy permanent. These objectives are valid for economic reasons, independent of the scientific details of global warming." I'm not sure what the degree of uncertainty associated with an economic model of the sort that Nordhaus has devised is, but I can't help but wonder how well it compares with the uncertainties inherent in the computer models that have served as the basis upon which to argue for many of the calls for subjecting carbon emissions to strict regulatory limits established and enforced by national governments, either alone or in some kind of confederation with one another. Whether it's something as trivial as asking people to imbibe a shot or two of first-world eco guilt on their fossil-fuel powered trips to the mountains, or as weighty as asking the hundreds of millions of the world's poorest people to forgo the many comforts and advantages of first-world life in order to "save the planet" (IMO the planet and life will be just fine, irrespective of whether we're around to observe either, but this is perhaps a topic for another conversation), it seems strange to me that a serious attempt to reconcile the costs and benefits of various approaches to climate change hasn't become part of the standard, non-specialist discussion of this issue. Review: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21494 Book: http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300137484

Before I address this point, I'll start by saying that I found myself agreeing with one of Tvash's earlier posts. When it comes to conservation - there is a lot of low hanging fruit that we could harvest in terms of personal conservation, most of which comes down to priorities and choices. Take shorter showers, use the cold cycle when you wash, wear warm clothes all winter, get rid of drafts, etc. Easy and inexpensive. It's certainly also possible to make an investment in conservation technology these days, and realize savings in that manner - but at the current price structure, many of them don't pencil out. "How far out is the break-even point? How does my return thereafter compare with the return I'd get if I put the money in a short-term government bond fund? More importantly - how likely is it that I'll be in the same house in ten years?" Most people are understandably reluctant to make an investment that someone else stands to profit from, or that will yield less than putting the same money in a stable, low-risk asset. It'd be possible to reduce this risk with a different tax/incentive structure than we have at the moment, and while my preference would be to eliminate all subsidies for home ownership - given that there's not a chance in hell that'll ever happen - the best course might to try to modify the incentives so that instead of encouraging people to take on the largest loan that they can handle, they're encouraged to make investments in greater energy efficiency. Speaking of incentives - and this gets to Prole's riff on planning - there's a world of difference between the government establishing a legal/regulatory/incentive structure that leaves people free to make their own choices and allocating their own resources as they see fit, and a "plan" that involves the government making the choices and allocating their resources for them. Not only is the latter model incompatible with a free society, it always results in a massive misallocation of resources that ends up doing more harm than good. The corn-ethanol fiasco is just the latest example. When it comes minimizing the negative impacts that humans have on the environment, in the end, outcomes are the only things that matter - and it's quite easy to see how dramatic policy initiatives could actually bring about more destruction and human suffering than the environmental damage it was intended to avert. When you enter in to the realm where you are talking about imposing massive, precipitous changes on the global economy - it's especially important to keep this in mind, as the current escalation in food and commodity prices should make quite clear. In a global marketplace, when your neighbor can't afford to commute to work in his diesel F350 anymore, there's a good chance this means that a few hundred million desperately poor people can't afford to eat. Like it or not - we need energy to live - and when you raise the price of energy inputs without a corresponding increase in efficiency - the end result is a reduction in outputs. When the resources required for the inputs equal the resources generated as outputs - the result is a slow decline in the standard of living, even when population growth is zero. Net output growth equal to population growth equals a stagnant standard of living. When outputs fall below inputs - and consumption exceeds production - once the accumulated savings are gone, you are looking at a fairly rapid descent into accelerating poverty and misery, especially for the people who start out with the least. Something to think about before deliberately increasing the price of energy. There may be smart ways to mitigate these effects, but first you have to be aware of them. Bad policy responses to real problems *are* often worse than doing nothing (War on drugs, anyone?), and I'm glad that FW has brought this reality into the ongoing debate over energy/environmental policy here on cc.com. I personally hope that we'll be hearing more voices like his in the broader debate, but I'm not optimistic. Any policy that

Aha - many thanks for all of the helpful suggestions. Spreadsheet is dead and it's off to bed. Word.