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...

People are often confused with biased media reports that "unemployment" is going down, and that's supposedly a good thing. There's much more to the picture - but you'll never hear it from the media. The number of jobs needed per month to keep up with population growth depends on the rate of population growth, and the labor participation rate. CBO estimates show we need 260,000 new jobs per month just to keep pace with population growth (new Americans entering the labor force). It would take 187,000 jobs added per month over the next year to hold the unemployment rate steady if the participation rate rises to 64.6%. If the participation rate stays steady, it will only take 95,000 jobs added per month. If the economy does start adding more jobs per month, one would expect more people will then join the labor force - keeping the unemployment rate elevated. Of course more people could give up, and the labor force participation rate could fal...

The egalitarianism and welfarism of modern liberal government are incompatible with the facts of human nature and the human condition. But the rise to power of the liberal agenda has resulted from the fact that the people of western societies have irrationally demanded that governments take care of them and manage their lives -- instead of protecting their property rights. The liberal agenda gratifies various types of pathological dependency; augments primitive feelings of envy and inferiority; reinforces paranoid perceptions of victimization; implements manic delusions of grandeur; exploits government authority for power, domination and revenge; and satisfies infantile claims to entitlement, indulgence and compensation. Modern liberalism rejects, to one degree or another, the competence and sovereignty of the common man and subordinates him to the will of governments run by liberal elites. The modern liberal reveals his true character, including his madness, in what he va...

We get a lot of confusing information from the media. One important figure that consistently gets under-reported is the Labor Force Participation Rate . This is the percentage of working-age persons in an economy who: Are employed, or Are unemployed but looking for a job Typically "working-age persons" is defined as people between the ages of 16-64. People in those age groups who are not counted as participating in the labor force are typically students, homemakers, and persons under the age of 64 who are retired. The Labor Force Participation Rate is currently at a 30 year low. We just had the largest absolute jump in 'Persons Not In Labor Force' on record...and biggest percentage jump in 30 years: When the Labor Force Participation Rate starts going back up, and unemployment rate goes down, then you have a real economic recovery. Right now we aren't even adding enough new jobs each month to keep up with population growth. The numb...

The amount of money the federal government takes out of the U.S. economy in taxes will increase by more than 30 percent between 2012 and 2014, according to the Budget and Economic Outlook published today by the CBO. At the same time, according to CBO, the economy will remain sluggish, partly because of higher taxes. Between 2012 and 2014, revenues in CBO’s baseline shoot up by more than 30 percent, mostly because of the recent or scheduled expirations of tax provisions, such as those that lower income tax rates and limit the reach of the alternative minimum tax (AMT), and the imposition of new taxes, fees, and penalties that are scheduled to go into effect. The U.S. economy, CBO projects, will perform “below its potential” for another six years and unemployment will remain above 7 percent for another three . According to the CBO report, federal tax revenues equaled $2.302 trillion in fiscal 2011, and will increase to $2,523 trillion in fiscal 2012, $2,988 trillion in fiscal i...

WASHINGTON—The Senate voted to defeat a resolution that, if successful, would have held up an increase in the country's statutory borrowing limit. The vote triggers a $1.2 trillion increase in the debt ceiling on Friday. The increase brings the total federal government borrowing limit to $16.4 trillion, enough to support Treasury borrowing until past the November elections, but likely not through the end of the year. That could mean that after the elections, a lame-duck session of Congress would have to deal with another increase in the borrowing limit as well as the litany of other divisive issues that will need to be resolved including the question of whether to extend the Bush-era lower tax rates. If you ever doubted that debt is related to the value of the dollar, have a look at this chart (courtesy sharelynx). The price of gold has historically tracked with our national debt. Now: ask yourself what would happen if our debt became so unsustainable that we cou...