For example, this discourse on how to 'pay for' the Green New Deal misses a major step.
This is equivalent to saying that of course we can afford a starship line to Alpha Centauri, because we can afford anything that is for sale in our own currency. Even if it's true -- as is quite debatable -- that you can really inflate the currency without damage to the economy, there is no such product for sale in our currency.
The same is true for this deal. Take just the provision that we're going to refit or rebuild all the buildings in America in ten years. I read a claim yesterday that this roughly means refitting 39,000 buildings a day. It might be twenty thousand or fifty thousand a day, but let's go with 39,000 as a round figure. To make it easy to accomplish, we'd start with America's 100 largest cities, so we'd need 390 teams in each of these 100 cities, each team capable of refitting a building per day. So we've got 39,000 such teams nationwide.
Maybe it's possible to hire 39,000 teams, 390 teams per city. Maybe it's possible to buy all the stuff that all 39,000 teams would need to refit a house today. But what about day two? We're going to have scoured every hardware store and warehouse in America by day two, or certainly by day three or four. But we've got to keep going, every single day for ten years. Where's all the stuff we'd need? It doesn't exist. It's not for sale.
That's just one bullet point. To make the goods available for sale in our currency over a ten year period, you'd first have to build thousands of new factories. You're also going to want to build massive new amounts of wind farms and solar panels, so you'll need to make lots of electricity-expensive aluminium. You want to build a railway system that is so big and active that it eliminates air travel -- so you'll need lots of new trains, and new steel tracks, and to cut down lots of trees to make the cross-ties, and you'll need to boil lots of tar to make the creosote to soak the cross-ties as a preservative.
This plan is going to reduce emissions?
While we're building all this stuff, we don't have it yet, so even while we're building up all this renewable electrical power we'll have to ship it from the factories to wherever it's going to be set up and put to use. Since we don't yet have electric trains, we'll need to do that shipping with diesel fuel. We'll thus need more diesel fuel -- so we need new oil refineries, to make a lot more diesel, which we're going to burn moving all this stuff.
Reducing emissions is the point of all this?
Why don't we just buy the starships instead, and export people to the Offworld Colonies? If practicality like money is no object, why not shoot for the stars?
16 comments:
You want a list of people who should be exported to the Offworld Colonies? There's a handy one available at Congress.gov.
Take 'em all. We'll do fine starting over.
Not to mention, as it wasn't, all the buildings and houses in the small towns and medium-sized cities.
This "Plan" is a valuable piece of info. Anyone subscribing to it's fantasy can be instantly dismissed as either an outright fool, or a communist.
The fascinating FAQ further explains why we obviously simply have to print the money to pay for all this: "The level of investment required is massive--even if every billionaire and company came together and were willing to pour all the resources at their disposal into this investment, the aggregate value of the investments they could make would not be sufficient."
It's so rare for anyone to admit this openly when they talk about financing things via massive tax hikes. Luckily, it doesn't matter whether the total assets of the country are sufficient even if commandeered. We'll just print the money! And as Grim points out, we'll use the printed money to buy stuff that doesn't even exist, because yes we can.
"You want to build a railway system that is so big and active that it eliminates air travel -- so you'll need lots of new trains, and new steel tracks, and to cut down lots of trees to make the cross-ties, and you'll need to boil lots of tar to make the creosote to soak the cross-ties as a preservative."
First, you will have to get the environmental approval for the proposed routes; figure on at least 5 years for that, optimistically. Then, you will have to fight off the various environmentalist and NIMBY lawsuits objecting to whatever those routes might be.
It is far more difficult to build large-scale infrastructure today than it was 70 or 80 years ago. See my post Like Swimming in Glue.
Of course, all of the difficulties would merely cause the Socialists to call for ever-more absolute government control, soon to include outright dictatorship.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/4435.html
This is equivalent to saying that of course we can afford a starship line to Alpha Centauri, because we can afford anything that is for sale in our own currency.
Sadly, this is same pseudo-thought underlying the premise that a universal basic income would be affordable and without effect on the economy. They're only partly right: it would have no effect on the buying power of the poor.
Eric Hines
As a case in point: here's the Atlanta-to-Chattanooga high speed rail project:
https://www.railwayage.com/news/fra-selects-tenn-ga-hsr-route/
Note this part:
“This combined FEIS and ROD is a product of NINE YEARS’ work from FRA and its state partners,” said FRA Deputy Administrator Heath Hall. " (emphasis added)
...and that's not the end of the paperwork by any means:
"The FEIS/ROD provides information on train technology, maximum operating speeds and station location options. However, decisions on these issues, as well as the exact alignment within the preferred corridor, will be part of a Tier II NEPA study, if additional funding is secured."
"This "Plan" is a valuable piece of info. Anyone subscribing to it's fantasy can be instantly dismissed as either an outright fool, or a communist."
Heh. Excellent response, Raven.
Reality isn't the point.
I am not just being snarky here. These are people who are not deterred by facts. they think these "facts" are thing evil people make up to prevent good things from happening. The solution really is to shake the trees of the evil ones and make them pay.
I think following up AOC with a spellcaster is perfect.
Westerners are wrong about space. Which is not so surprising since humanity has been wrong about pretty much everything.
Spellcasters really shouldn't be using internet market schemes. They should know better. If they don't, that just means their sect didn't properly educate them and they are loose cultivators.
Here's a good comment on the twitter feed that Elise or the next commenter sent us to: "Everything that's being done now would need to be replaced or existing transportation improved upon. We've done that for centuries in this country. What I'm amazed at now is how fearful people are of change."
The only change we have to fear is climate change. All other change is going to be unicorns and skittles. Also, the climate change was always going to happen some day even if it never did, but this Green Dream change is something we're actively supposed to inflict on ourselves.
It's like a 19th doctor who says we're not sick yet, but if we don't correct the balance of our humors we're going to be sick soon. Now swallow this very expensive arsenic to correct the humors.
From the same source: a commenter who works at an electric company: "I am on the back office side and not an engineer but while discussing the problems with intermittent generation like wind and solar with my boss, he actually said “What if costs and profit wasn’t an issue. Why does that always have to matter? If we didn’t think about that maybe we could come up with a better way.” This man is 50 years old and a Director level exec at a power company and he doesn’t seem to understand that economics is not just a conservative trick to stop us from doing “good things”."
One more I enjoyed: "The Green Leap Forward."
I saw "The Green Leap Forward" somewhere and thought it was brilliant. And I've just ordered a used copy of "Eighth Moon" from AbeBooks and reserved "Red Scarf Girl" at my library.
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