Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

  UN? Here’s how to get your mojo back on global warming: (1) Stop holding sustainability conferences in the world’s most exotic locales, like Rio, and stop booking yourselves into five-star hotels on everybody else’s dime. People’s BS detectors are pretty much set on “high” all the time these days, given the beleaguered state of the global economy. When you preach that everyone else needs to adopt a more modest lifestyle while living high off the public teat and emitting enough greenhouse gases to choke a whale, you undercut your credibility. (2) Stop organizing conferences attended by 50,000 people. Seriously, 50,000? That’s a fuster cluck, not a meeting. (3) Stop pushing ways to make fossil fuels more expensive (through carbon taxes and the ineffective and corrupt cap-and-trade market in Europe) and start pushing ways to make renewable energy less expensive. The economics are simple. Tell people your entire plan for saving the planet means they have to go ...

The Danish health care system is the nightmare of any anti-government free market believer -- it's a tax-funded state-run universal health care system. Denmark provides "free" health care to all residents, funded through taxes. There is an optional private health care sector, but it is tiny compared with the vastly larger public system that is used by most of the population. Users pay for a few procedures, such as fertility treatments (from the third attempt onwards) and non-essential cosmetic surgery, as well as most of their own dental care and a portion of prescription medication.    Apothecaries are privately owned, but doctors" visits and hospitalization, including tests, treatment, follow-up care, and some medication, are fully covered. The Danish health care system is not cheap. According to OECD's Health Data 2009, Denmark's health cost per person, public and private, was $3,512. But in the US the cost is more than double at $7,290! In addition,...

Google (and most other search engines) have special operators and search url suffixes that many internet users are unaware of. Here is a fresh list for your searching pleasure. intitle: Restricts the search to the titles of the web pages, for example if you want to search for the web pages having WordPress or Blogging in the title, use the syntax intitle:WordPress or intitle: “digital photography” (multiple words can be grouped into a phrase by putting them inside quotes). inurl: If you include this keyword in your query, Google will restrict the results to documents containing that word in the URL (address of the website). The query inurl:teaching will return documents that mention the words teaching in their URL. intext: The query using intext:term results in documents containing the term in the text/content. For instance: intext:Globalization will return documents mentioning the term globalization. Additionally, you can use allintext:term with phrases or combination of word...

I’ve seen several pieces over the last week that maintain this as economic fact: http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntharvey/2012/06/17/job-creators/ http://whowhatwhy.com/2012/05/27/rich-guy-on-how-middle-class-are-the-job-creators/ http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/06/17/1100766/--The-Only-Real-Job-Creators-Are-Consumers I think what happens here is that some liberal blogger, professor or pundit writes something like this and then everybody else jumps aboard and starts echoing the meme without doing any critical thinking. Consumers do drive an economy, but these authors miss the mark. Lots of businesses happen to be consumers of other businesses. So when you tax businesses and pass legislation that makes it harder for business to succeed, businesses stop buying things, which ultimately hurts consumer spending. All of this does not even touch on the fact that small businesses are the true engine of growth for this country. And, most small businesses are taxed like individuals...

According to Keynes, the root cause of economic downturns is insufficient aggregate demand. During  World War II and it's immediate aftermath, Keynes was immensely influential. By the 1970's when the great inflation was unfolding,even Keynes' chief critics such as Milton Friedman or Robert Mundell still retained many Keynesian assumptions. With the crisis of 2008, Keynesian policies came back with a bang and reoccupied center stage. Following the Crash of 2008, these policies are no longer satisfactory. If the entire global economy is to follow Keynesian medicine, which requires more money printing, spending, borrowing and bailing out - on top of all the money printing, spending and borrowing that preceded the crisis, then we need to look at them with fresh and critical eyes. The place to begin is with what Keynes actually said. First of all, Keynes did not believe that fiscal stimulus alone could ‘kick’ the economy into full employment equilibrium as many of his mode...