I’m sure there will be lots of wailing and beating of the breasts about the National Debt, which just topped 12 trillion (and make no mistake, that is a disaster), from the usual suspects on the right. Since the last eight years didn’t happen, and they are free to pretend that Obama spent all 12 trillion in the last nine months propping up ACORN and SEIU “union thugs” (have you noticed right-wingers can’t use the word union without adding “thug?” Unless of course, they are talking about civil unions, and then they always have to tack on “oh, hell no.”), I’m sure the commentary will be quite interesting at the Corner and elsewhere in wingnuttia.
I would love to hear how the Republican plan for slashing the deficit and tackling the debt will work. I’m interested in how capital gains tax cuts, making the Bush cuts permanent, ending the “death tax,” continuing the prescription drug plan while ignoring the rising costs of health care, permanent war in the middle east and privatizing social security are going to bring our books back into the black.
I’m all ears, guys.
The Grand Panjandrum
Pixie dust. It always works in Never Never Land.
Morbo
Well, according to the Laffer curve, we could just set the tax rate to zero and then the government would have infinite revenue! Problem solved.
bystander
Whatever the response, it will boil down to the invisible hand.
JenJen
On Nightline last night, Sarah Palin told Baba Wawa that if she were President, she’d cut taxes and the economy would be AWESOME.
So there. It’s settled, right?
Steeplejack
I’m sorry, Cole, we’re going to have to leave it there for the time being. Lemme do a little research and get back to you. Heh.
rob!
Tax cuts and keeping gays from marrying. WHAT DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND JOHN?
Skepticat
You’re all ears and they’re all ass.
beltane
They must eliminate free lunches for poor kids, especially the black ones. That right there will reduce the national debt by 110%.
Kryptik
Just let the Health Insurance companies raise premiums and move to laxly regulated states, and the campaign contributions the GOP will get from them in response will take care of all the rest.
Oh, and tax cuts. Always has to include tax cuts.
El Cid
Also, wars are free, and don’t cause any national debt.
r€nato
America NEEDS a party that preaches fiscal responsibility… and PRACTICES it too.
The GOP’s failure to practice what they preach (and preach and preach) for the past 8 years, when they had complete control of the White House and nearly complete control of Congress, does far more harm than demolishing their own credibility.
Long term, these deficits are a huge problem. We need an opposition party to keep in check the tendency of Democrats to spend, spend, spend.
But who puts any stock in what Republicans have to say about this?
r€nato
@El Cid:
also, government stimulus doesn’t create jobs, military spending does, and all military spending is not government spending.
Brian J
I’m sorry if this is a stupid question, but isn’t a substantial portion of that debt due to government assuming the liabilities of Fannie and Freddie? If so, what happens once we aren’t in such a position any longer?
On another note, one economist who is kind enough to respond to my questions over e-mail once said to me he would place no emphasis on paying down the debt. He also said he wouldn’t balance the budget, but I’m not sure if he means until we are out of the woods as far as unemployment goes or at any point. My guess is the former, but I can’t speak for him. Since I’m not an economist, take this for what it’s worth, but I think that deficit/debt phobia has moved us too far in the other direction. If that’s the case, then is a growing debt really that big of a problem as long as the economy is growing and thus the debt-to-GDP ratio is under control?
On a more specific note, since it looks like White House is going to try to jump start hiring by any means, including possibly another stimulus of some type, why doesn’t it also come out with a list of tax increases and possible spending cuts that will be enacted once unemployment is reduced to a certain level? It’s almost certainly easier to consider tax increases than spending cuts, since those who would be affected by the spending cuts will use the advance notice to rally against them, but detailed accounts aren’t important right now. I mean, remember how, right around the time the stimulus was enacted, they announced $17 billion in cuts to programs that were superfluous? It was obviously negligible in the grand scheme of things, but it made a point that they had spending controls in their minds. Get that number up to, say, $100 billion, and announce new tax increases besides those based on income–once again, financial transaction taxes seem like a prime target, since it doesn’t take a lot of courage to stick it to Wall Street these days–also totaling $100 billion. The deficits are projected to be more than that, but over ten years, that’s $2 trillion less in spending and more in revenue. And that’s before we even get to interest payments.
Whatever the package is, he should start to call the Republicans out. He can ask them to sign on to a bill designed to start in a few years, and if they don’t, he can use it against them when campaigning. Egg them on and reveal them for the hypocritical assholes they will almost certainly be.
Derelict
Here the GOP/TeaParty plan:
1. Eliminate welfare. That alone will save more than $1 trillion a year.
2. Eliminate foreign aid. There’s another trillion.
3. Stop funding the U.N.–another trillion.
4. Privatize Social Security
5. Eliminate the Estate Tax and the Capital Gains Tax while creating a new tax-free classification for dividend income. The resulting economic prosperity will allow us to quadruple the defense budget.
They know those numbers work because EVERYONE knows that 150% of our budget goes to welfare and foreign aid.
r€nato
(my father spent nearly his entire career in defense electronics. He was militant against all government spending except of course that which benefitted him personally, like the street in front of his house and the police and fire protection in his city. Any suggestion that he was sucking at the teat of Big Government as much as any career politician, was very likely to lead to a literally violent argument.)
Brick Oven Bill
Here is a plan. Cancel Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, federal housing programs, and all other types of federal benefits other than those specifically mentioned in the Constitution (Post Office, Patents, Defense, etc.).
Declare all debt accumulated since the election of Obama null and void, as he was not Constitutionally elected.
There will be social unrest with this arrangement, but this social unrest will be less than the social unrest that would occur with the disintegration of the dollar. People need to go back to relying on themselves, and their families. The dollar will soon be in an out-of-control feedback loop:
Inflation – Inflation Indexed Benefits Rise – Print More Money – More Inflation – Inflation Indexed Benefits Rise – Print More Money – More Inflation – Inflation Indexed Benefits Rise – Print More Money – More Inflation – Inflation Indexed Benefits Rise – Print More Money – More Inflation
Ka Boom
Kryptik
@Brian J:
Taxes are the devil, though. Coming out with a defined list of tax increases ahead of time and publicizing them is the equivalent of saying ‘Hey, I don’t want to be elected next term! Please fire me!’.
Sad, but true. Taxes have pretty much gone from an essential evil to an absolute evil, in the American Political Discourse’s perception.
r€nato
@Brick Oven Bill:
everyone relying on themselves, that sounds like anarchy.
you might want to look up this thing called, ‘civilization’. It was invented so that we could rely on one another and thus be stronger united, than divided.
Egypt Steve
Instead of “beating of breasts,” couldn’t we have “massaging of breasts”?
rob!
@BOB:
…also, unicorns! Unicorns wearing flag pins.
Chad N Freude
@r€nato: Rely on one another! That’s Soshalism!! [Misspelled to evade the Moderation Police.]
stinkwrinkle
Just remember what Reagan said: “….pill lady good! friend pill lady!”
I’m not sure how it applies, but it’s hard to refute.
danimal
@Morbo: I’ve always wondered why a bright, young GOP intellectual hasn’t proposed a 50 year budget plan with incremental tax cuts every year until the tax rate is 0.0001% and the budget surplus is 200 gazillion dollars.
Evil soshulist plotters control the guvmint, I suspect.
jrg
Math has a liberal bias. That’s why Jesus was a carpenter instead of an accountant.
How much you want to bet that the right will pretend that this is all Bush’s fault, while conveniently forgetting the talking points they spewed from 2003-2008 (anti-war is objectively pro-saddam!) , and ignoring the fact that they held both houses of congress for the majority of that time period.
These idiots will bankrupt the country before they are through, and we will have nothing to show for it but holes in a desert halfway around the world. Fucking morons.
Brick Oven Bill
That was Step One. Step Two is:
1. Illegal Aliens = Gone
2. Borders = Wall
3. Tariffs = 40%
4. Oil Shale = Energy Independence
5. Manufacturing Base = Returned
6. Economy = Recovered
By this simple Two-Step process, domestic anarchy is prevented.
Face
This is too easy:
Tax cuts begets more spending money
More spending $$ helps the economy
The economy employes people
People buy things
The government taxes the things people buy
WOOLAH! Revenue. And ponies.
Kirk Spencer
@r€nato:
I disagree. I will state instead that the better plan is to do what was done under Clinton’s tenure (only without the off-the-books stuff) and ensure spending is balanced by revenues.
And re that off the books thing,
@Brian J:
Actually, the largest part of the jump in Obama’s deficit was the move of a number of off-books debt to on-books debt. If you add that 1.3T or so back over the past 15-20 years you’d have a much more accurate picture of our real debt of the time.
This little touch of reality gets ignored a lot. We got more honest accountants, and we’re blaming them for exposing the past. (note -not fully honest. There are still some off-books things that would make the books look even worse. But still, more honest than it’s been in a while.)
cmorenc
Remember when, in the spring of 2001 when we still had a federal surplus and it was projected that we’d actually PAY OFF the entire accumulated national debt within the next eight to ten years? And one of the notions conservative economists (and the Bush Administration) cooked up to support their huge tax cuts was that it would economically be a counterproductively BAD thing if the federal government had no debt (the private market needed Treasury securities as part of the essential financial mechanisms), and it was all bookkeeping shuffling anyway whether we technically had a debt or not? I recall none other than Randoid-in-Chief Alan Greenspan spouting this bullcrap.
We can add not just an enormous portion of the federal debt to the leger of deliberate or recklessly stupid malevolence by the Bush administration (part of the strategy of some in the Bush circles was to “choke the Beast” in its own debt excrement), but a thoroughly blown chance to clear off enough debt within a few short years to GENUINELY be able to implement across the board tax cuts, AND do a number of expensive worthy things as well (health care).
Brian J
@Kryptik:
Maybe, but imagine if the tax increase was nothing more than a tax on financial transactions that totaled $100-150 billion each year. Imagine if this was pitched purely as a way of getting something back from Wall Street banks after saving their asses, which would be true since this sort of tax would not affect the average family in a big way. Now imagine it being bitched with an equivalent amount of spending cuts.
Before any other sort of tax increases that might be worthwhile are proposed, such as those on income or some sort of new VAT, this seems like one that could be sold fairly easily. They simply need to repeat what I just said above, over and over and over again. Or, since they are better at this than me, they could design a better pitch.
Hunter Gathers
@Brick Oven Bill:
Yes, THAT will play well with your average FOX News viewer.
Well played, sir. Well played.
Alan
Bruce Bartlett has promoted a VAT. But he goes further, questioning Hayek’s Road to Serfdom theory.
Balconesfault
“Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter”
Dick Cheney
What else do you need to know?
Malron
I was just watching the Chicago affiliate of FOX News discussing the Senate’s announcement of its version of the health care bill and they cut to Major Garrett’s report where he said “….the Republicans are already voicing their problems with the bill even though they haven’t seen the details of the bill yet.”
Later in the same broadcast the local affiliate newsmodels were all chortling about how clever it was of the tobacco companies to get around Obama’s tax increase on cigarette tobacco and save themselves billions of dollars by renaming their products as “pipe tobacco.”
All of this while whining about the ballooning deficit.
Fuckity fuck. I believe the solution to this country’s woes isn’t health reform, job creation, reforming Wall Street or solving global warming. All we need to do is beef up the FCC and repeal Bill Clinton’s 1996 Telecommunications Act. These lying, smarmy bastards are the ones who are really destroying this country.
Kennedy
Don’t forget deregulation. What we really need is more deregulation for Wall Street and the health insurance industry. Tell government to get out of our way and let the private sector be as efficient as possible. Also, wealth creation, not destruction. Only the free market can free us from Obama’s tyranny.
jetan
@Brick Oven Bill:
Those are very good ideas, Brick Oven Bill. I fervently hope that all self-respecting Republicans run on that exact platform. Should ensure a Democratic majority for about 100 years. The Dems could even take back Oklahoma and Alabama.
Declaring our debt void would, by the way, have such immediate catastrophic effects that we would likely all be emigrating to Mexico to look for work
Kryptik
@Brian J:
Considering how good the right has been about framing taxes on the wealthy as looming evil government willing to tax the middle class out of existence, even that wholly specific measure would likely be spun to gain opposition from those who would see nothing but good come of it. Look at the Estate…ahem…I mean “Death” tax.
Kryptik
@Malron:
I’m sure Comcast is saving up for a buyout of the FCC in the next two or three years, so it’ll be a moot point, friend.
ppcli
@Derelict:
Don’t forget the trillions of dollars that go to ACORN.
Also, too the simple expedient of outlawing Bear DNA studies and volcano monitoring would save so much money that all taxation could be abolished.
Balconesfault
@cmorenc: I recall none other than Randoid-in-Chief Alan Greenspan spouting this bullcrap.
Yes, he did. When many in Congress questioned if Bush’s tax cuts would be budget busting, Greenspan actually worried that we would eliminate the debt too fast if we didn’t give money back to rich people.
That should be the centerpiece of every obit when he dies.
SFAW
Why would they want to, though?
Brian J
@Kirk Spencer:
I know about that, and it’s one reason why I am so happy to have Obama in the White House. Whatever else you can say about him, at least he’s trying to govern like an adult.
But what about Fannie and Freddie? I seem to remember reading something about how they had a massive impact on the debt, but I can’t find what I read.
Kryptik
@ppcli:
But we gotta make sure to keep that ol’ GOP Bridge to Nowhere going, you betcha.
zoe kentucky in pittsburgh
@BOB-
You wouldn’t happen to be an independently wealthy man, would you? Because only someone who feels so financially comfortable as to never ever need any help from anyone other than their family members could get behind such a plan. Hell, you sound like someone who has a trust fund. That sure would explain a lot. Frankly, I’ve never met a poor libertarian. Even the college students I knew who went through a libertarian phase were all rich kids who didn’t worry about money, they didn’t understand wanting or needing beyond superficial things.
Shorter libertarian– tear down all of society’s safety nets, let the poor, sick and disabled starve and die, it’ll be better for us all.
SFAW
Why wait? It should be shouted from the rooftops any time he is sought out, dead or not, for his “wisdom”.
The Grand Panjandrum
@Kirk Spencer: Well said. I remember Cole writing about this very fact earlier in the year when the new administration announced it would put all the debt on the books. And look what has happened. The righties have in fact tried to use this against Obama just as Cole predicted.
SFAW
Even shorter: IGMFEE (I Got Mine, #$%^&* Everyone Else)
SFAW
Well, yeah, but that’s like predicting the Mets will choke sometime between April and October.
Col. Klink
Defund Acorn and we’d save, like, 28 trillion dollars.
Jamey
Because shut up. that’s why.
Balconesfault
Also – the Administration is taking their time doling out the stimulus funds (there was an extensive process of taking applications for projects to fund, rather than just spraying money in all directions like a fire hose) … and so a lot of the stimulus funds won’t be spent until 2010.
Republicans are mad about that too.
Kryptik
@SFAW:
Or that the Pirates will suck this year.
(Sorry John, but it’s true)
Punchy
Uh, no thanks. That’s like adopting a methed-out crack dealing glue huffing unitarded teenager with tats and a forked tongue.
Brick Oven Bill
People need to come to grips with the fact that this is going to be a rough Century. Last Century, the Fossil Fuel Era began, and the carrying capacity of the world increased seven-fold, from one billion to seven billion people.
This Century, conventional petroleum production will decrease, and the carrying capacity of the earth will fall. There will be many resource-based wars, which are best fought elsewhere. The optimum solution for America is isolationism, as we are food independent and energy independent.
Through the use of Charity, we can take care of each other.
SFAW
Good thing you didn’t say “Steelers” – then John would have given you the BoB treatment.
After he recovers from the Steelers getting beaten TWICE by the Bungles in the same year, that is.
Alex S.
Free-market fanatics should man up and demand an estate tax of 100%.
Col. Klink
Absolutely! Running ye old North Korean development strategy is bound to end in Juche goodness.
SFAW
BoB @53
If there were a Bulwer-Lytton Prize for socio-political writing, I think you’d win hands-down.
Balconesfault
Yes indeedy.
We have been achieving greater efficiency via a million different ways, many having to do with fossil fuel consumption. But efficiency is based on assumptions that certain underlying parameters will not vary too much – significant changes (climate change, peak oil, a series of other natural disasters, war) can destroy the balance that the efficiencies rest on.
Or, will destroy the balance.
rob!
Through the use of Charity, we can take care of each other.
Like the Catholics are threatening to STOP doing because of teh gays? That kind of charity?
Kryptik
@SFAW:
Well…big difference is that Steelers tend to be good year in and year out. Not necessarily dominant, but…yeah.
Pirates…not so much.
This coming from someone who was rooting for the Seahawks and Cardinals in those two SBs, mind.
jetan
@Brick Oven Bill:
I’m going to take a wild guess and say you read a lot of Heinlein books when you were a kid. But how do you get the idea that we are anywhere close to energy independent? Our imports have outpaced domestic production for many decades. We produce about5.7 million barrels a day. We consume more than 20 million barrels a day.
Kirk Spencer
@Brian J:
Ah. The Mae/Mac emergency bill spent ~$245B. That’s approximately 50% more than congress authorized as an emergency bill for Iraq and Afghanistan in each of the last four years of that administration. Yes, it was large and it added to the deficit. HOWEVER, it is (just like the GM bailout) on track to having the money spent be recovered from normal operations (repayments of moneys lent to homebuyers and other lenders).
Funny, that. The emergency bills the Republicans despise have this habit of being repaid (TARP, GM/autos, MAE/MAC). The emergency bills they desire seem to go out without a chance of recovering the money. Tell me again about “fiscal conservatism?”
Chad N Freude
@Brick Oven Bill:
Ah, yes, Sweet Charity. We could start by following the example of the Catholic Church.
John Sears
@Brick Oven Bill: Yes, let’s build a giant wall across our entire border to keep people out.
It worked SO well for China. And Rome. And France.
Wait, what’s that? Incredibly expensive defensive fortifications can’t solve all social or international disputes?
Darn.
(Though, for what it’s worth, the Maginot Line wasn’t entirely as retarded as popular thinking believes. It just needed a lot more backup)
Chad N Freude
@Brick Oven Bill:
Ah, yes, Sweet Charity. We could start by following the example of the Catholic Church.
John Sears
@Kirk Spencer: Eh, I wouldn’t put TARP in that list. TARP may someday be repaid, but never for what a loan of that size, to companies that desperate, SHOULD earn the lender.
Plus, the money they’re using to repay it they just stole from the taxpayers, small investors, etc, anyway, whether it’s Goldman Sachs style supervillainy or just plain old fashioned credit card usury.
I have my doubts about GM too, in that, if there’s a way to build a crappy car and lose money doing it, GM has always found said method. It’s tradition.
debit
@Brick Oven Bill:
debit
Blockquote fail. Damn you lack of preview button.
Kirk Spencer
@Brick Oven Bill: Setting aside the last sentence snark, yes.
We are going to see the price of oil go wild – up and down. That’s the standard history of critical resources that suddenly start to become scarce; surges in accumulation cause everyone to push the price to where they WANT it because it used to not be scarce, while constriction in supply sends everyone into panic for hoarding. All while speculators try to guess which way it’s going tomorrow. If you’ve a strong stomach and deep pockets as well as a tolerance for the ride, you can make a lot on oil over the next decade or two. You can lose a lot, too.
We will see alternate energy develop. When oil was cheaper, no, but at these higher prices the less efficient (often due to poor development) methods are competitive. Watch for better energy storage devices (batteries) and alternate energy extraction techniques (like fuel cells) that continue to allow us to be mobile; we are NOT going to change if we can help it. I don’t know which companies will be betamax “good but not our choice” losers and which vhs “our choice” winners, but the industry as a whole is going to replace a large part of the gasoline business.
Coal is still going to stick around – it’s plentiful. I would dearly love to see other things, nuclear being but one, replace the extremely dirty and dangerous fuel. But coal is still cheap and plentiful and a known technology.
Still, BOB is right. This next century is going to be different, and the change from oil to whatever is next is going to be highly disruptive.
Morbo
@Brick Oven Bill: You left out the part about the armored unicorn cavalry that will make up our self-defense force.
Brick Oven Bill
jetan;
Domestic oil consumption = 500 million barrels
Domestic oil shale reserves = 2 trillion barrels
2,000,000,000,000 / 500,000,000 = four hundred years
There is something very funny going on with oil politics. Either there is an evil genius on our team, or it is short-term OPEC interests with too much influence within our government.
In either case, the optimum solution for America is isolationism, and a return to Constitutional governance.
John Sears
@Chad N Freude: Ah yes, the Catholic Church, where ‘suffer the little children’ is taken an entirely different way.
BongCrosby
@debit:
Obama could use a guy like Moist von Lipwig in his Cabinet.
John Sears
@Brick Oven Bill: Are you even remotely aware of the incredible difficulties and enormous environmental impact involved in mining and using oil shale?
Yeesh.
Brick Oven Bill
The Russians are producing shale oil for $14-$17/bbl, but in an unclean manner (mine, heat in kiln, drip, dispose of spent shale in a pile).
I can produce it for probably $25/bbl, in a clean manner. The price of extraction depends on the thickness of the deposit.
John Sears
@Brick Oven Bill: Also, 2 trillion divided by 500 million is 4 thousand, not 4 hundred.
El Cid
And with just a few nutjob rants, BOB makes the comments about himself yet again. Well played.
Also, if we force all toddlers to play with electric trains, the gravitational weight of the Constitutional restoration of Plato’s photonic Christian Republic will counterbalance the need to massage oil shale into the shape of Glenn Beck.
John Sears
@Brick Oven Bill: Ha, sure you can.
I guess we should all buy stock in Brick Oven Billco, our new Carbon Energy Overlords.
What do you trade on NASDAQ under?
Brian J
@Kirk Spencer:
For some reason, I thought it was larger than that, but I must be thinking of something else.
Here’s something else funny about fiscal conservatism: it’s throwing away an enormous opportunity to borrow money at a cheap rate. As always, government spending has to be paid for, but right now, it’s less expensive than it might otherwise be. So why not spend the money to invest in the nation’s workforce and infrastructure now, when it’s cheaper to do so, when there just so happens to be a lot of people who are unemployed? A lot of the money will need to be spent at some point, but waiting could make it more expensive, not least of all because the economy could be back on track and it might be more expensive for the government to borrow.
Chad N Freude
@John Sears: It’s just a little punctuation error. The original text should have been translated as “Suffer, little children.”
Brick Oven Bill
Perhaps the correct number is 5 billion barrels per year domestic consumption then. But the lenght of four hundred years is correct.
There are times when I rely too much on memory.
The Moar You Know
@Brick Oven Bill: We’re not going to see energy independence in this next century with harebrained schemes such as Brick Oven Bill’s Brick Oven.
This brick and mortar behemoth might have been impressive to an Indus Valley denizen squatting in his own filth, making cuneiform markings in his clay tablets, but this is the twenty-first century, not the second. Stove technology has proceeded a long way. We can no longer afford to use our scarce resources in a vain attempt to heat a huge structure that just bleeds off the heat into the ground.
The brick oven is a technological anachronism, good only for making pizza, the food choice of slovenly fat drunken people. I do not recommend pizza as a food staple, the consumers of it frequently end up penning drunken peans to themselves, such as this choice ditty from our own BoB.
I’ll say it again; Brick Oven Bill is a fifth column agent sent here to destroy American society. He is likely in the employ of the Chinese, or perhaps Al Queda.
LD50
@El Cid:
Indeed, the military doesn’t even count as ‘government spending’.
Sanka
Of course, cutting the capital gains tax in the 1990s (with the prodding of a Republican congress) was what helped spur the economic boom of that decade, not to mention the surplus, which Democrats so love to cite as a hallmark of “Democratic policies”….
The solution of course is to continue to kneecap the middle-class with cap and trade and a massive new healthcare bureaucracy. Those can only help…
Liberty60
I actually wrote a diary entry at RedState (before I was banned) laying out how the governemtn spends money, and suggesting that the conservative movement make a balanced budget the centerpiece of its comeback.
Unfortunately, when you look at the numbers, it is mathmatically impossible to balance the budget without either:
1. Cutting defense;
2. Cutting Social Secutity/ Medicare;
3. Raising taxes;
What surprised me was not that I got flack for suggesting a combination of raising taxes and cutting defense; It didn’t surprise me that someone suggested cutting SS/ Medicare first;
No, what surprised me was the snarling response to my comment that “we must pay in taxes for the government services we receive“; That drew the most scorn and ridicule as a liberal talking point.
Even though it was literally a Reaganesque quote.
The Tea Party really doesn’t want or care about a balanced budget- Their agenda really is about cutting off welfare and school lunches.
John Sears
@Brick Oven Bill: Actually no, you’re wrong twice. Domestic oil consumption is something like 19.6 million barrels a day, and domestic oil production is about 5 million barrels a day, leaving 14 million barrels a day to fill with imports or your magic oil shale, which is 5,110 million barrels, or 5 billion barrels a year, roughly.
So you were only off by an order of magnitude.
John Sears
@Chad N Freude: Precisely so.
And they’ll make sure all the kids they can get their hands on find out the difference a comma can make.
slag
@bystander:
Indubitably.
@cmorenc:
Ahh good times. It’s kind of funny that people continue to ignore the fact that the rightwing of this country has lived in Fantasy Land for much longer than 8 years. One would think that having access to the Free Market Fairy Dust and the sagacity to mock Al Gore’s lockbox is all it takes to run this country. Into the ground.
LD50
@Sanka: Sanka, Reagan’s long dead, you should quit trying to dig him up and kiss his ass. It’s unseemly.
John Sears
@slag:
Don’t forget ‘And piss on it.’
They never forget to do so, after all.
b-psycho
@Brick Oven Bill: I’d much prefer anarchy to whatever the hell you want.
KevinD
@Kirk Spencer:
Do you have a source on this? I heard that Obama was doing this, but I have no source of info to point to.
Tom Q
Just to emphasize John’s original point: last night CNN at 6 opened reporting on the horrifying/awful/unprecedented deficit, and their one quote was Judd Gregg saying “It took the US 230 years to rack up a $10 trillion deficit, and the Obama administration bumped it to $12 million in 10 months”.
Putting aside the fact that it was Bush admin actions like TARP (and ongoing war spending) that helped push this year’s total, it might have been nice if someone asked Gregg how much of it happened between 2001 and 2008.
Alan
The Party of Fiscal Babies
Svensker
@Tom Q:
Well, somebody already said it upthread, but wars are free, so we haven’t actually spent anything on the war on Iraq. Besides, Paul Wolfowitz and other very smart people said that the war would pay for itself through Iraqi oil and Mr. Wolfowitz and his friends are very reliable guys. Ergo, it’s all Obama’s fault.
New Yorker
Reading BOB is what I imagine an acid trip is like:
Obama was not constitutionally elected.
Declaring our debt null and void will be a good thing (as it was, presumably, for Russia and Argentina).
Oil shale = energy independence
high tariffs are good for the economy
…..of course, he’s no more economically illiterate than your typical wingnut.
Jon
@Jamey: that never fails to make me laugh. ever.
Comrade Dread
About 11 trillion of that debt belongs to the fiscally conservative Republicans.
As for the Republican plan, it would probably boil down to:
1. More tax cuts for the wealthy
2. No more Estate taxes
3. Cut Federal funding to ACORN and other left leaning groups.
4. Invade Iran and spend fucktons of money that we don’t have until the Chinese get pissed and cut us off.
5. Bomb China, destroy the civilized world and start over with economy based on bottle caps.
Martin
I like how the conservative plan for balancing the budget is to reneg on contracts made with not just foreign governments but the American people as well.
Pixie dust, indeed.
Kirk Spencer
BoB, the biggest cost for oil shale production is water. Since large quantities of the US shale oil deposits are in low-water areas (the front range of the Rocky Mountains) this is a significant issue.
In my opinion, water is going to be one of if not THE biggest resource war issues of this century. Don’t be surprised if in a decade or two everyone laughs nostalgically at the idea of ‘free refills’ or drinking fountains for which there is no charge.
strainer3
In my opinion we are very close to a multi-year top in many stock markets around the world in part because of all of the mistepts by governments to try to control the business cycle and disrupt the free market. But there are still some individual names I like going forward because of what the govt is doing to try to help the economy. One of which is Golden Star Resources, ticker GSS, a junior gold mining company which reported earnings recently and whose stock has performed rather well this year. Here is a discussion on their earnings and some thoughts on Golden Star Resources . I wouldn’t necessarily step in and buy the stock today, but I would definitely would on a 5-10% pullback. I think the macro environment is going to remain very favorable for gold for the next several years because of the deflationary threats of the credit crisis and the inflationary policies of the Federal Reserve in trying to combat these issues.
Xenos
@Sanka:
Financial Boom != Economic Boom.
95% of the country is either at the same level or worse off than they were 20 years ago. That is not economic growth in any meaningful or worthwhile fashion.
Brick Oven Bill
Extracting oil from shale requires less water than it takes to run a 7-11 Kirk. A lot less. Probably less than it takes to run a drinking fountain.
Nutella
You’d think b0b would be making so much money in oil shale refining that he wouldn’t have time to pollute all the threads here.
John Sears
I kind of see where he got his fantasy 400 year number from, actually.
If you could magically access all that oil shale, which as Kirk notes requires a ginormous amount of water, and leaves behind an enormous toxic moonscape, you could supply our net daily consumption for 400 years, assuming of course that our daily oil production and consumption remain unchanged (total fantasy)
On a related note, 400 years ago we used whale oil for lighting our homes. Even if we wanted this magical cloud talking solution, in 400 years I doubt it will be much use. We should think shorter term, and in, say, the next century, there would be enormous benefits to going off fossil fuels and developing green technology, as opposed to strip mining our country for filthy oil shale.
Uloborus
Random addition on oil shale. There’s a lot of guesswork in predictions like how much oil shale there is, even before you get to the deliberate fudging. I had heard this, but it was confirmed for me by a friend involved in trying to come up with actually precise seismic models.
Basically, any time anyone tells you how much oil is left of any kind, laugh at them. It’s a guess.
John Sears
@Brick Oven Bill: BZZERT, wrong. According to the DOE it takes 1-3 barrels of water for every barrel of shale oil you process.
So unless you’re talking about a truly enormous 7-11, or a very small oil shale operation, once again, you are incorrect.
Brick Oven Bill
The extraction process cleanses the earth of hydrocarbons, and through the magical process of condensate return, uses negligible water.
This is good news for conservatives.
Elie
Just remember to those of you who advocate for taking apart Medicare and Medicaid to save money: These are provider payment systems, not recipient or beneficiary payment for care. The people they would also therefore screw are the big boy institutional providers, professional providers and all those ancillary providers who sell seniors shit like those stupid scooters…
Just sayin
John Sears
@Brick Oven Bill: Yes, it’s much better that those hydrocarbons end up in our air so we can breathe them, than locked up deep within the earth, in rocks.
And there’s a shit-ton of toxic waste produced, and air pollution by refining, and huge swathes of land left uninhabitable, and groundwater often contaminated with carcinogens and metals.
Other than that, yes, this is as always Good News for Conservatives.
John Sears
I’m done arguing with this idiocy for the day, heh. Someone tag me out.
I’m going to go read something to try to contain the damage talking to BOB does to my IQ.
jetan
I remember the good old days when we just had to argue about strip-mining.
trollhattan
Wow, it’s a virtual Marie Callendar’s over here! Make mine ala mode.
Didn’t Dick Cheney instruct us “Defecits don’t matter?” What about Dick’s statement don’t You People(tm) understand.
Spend more! Cut taxes to zero and revenues will reach infinity. Win!
Brick Oven Bill
John Sears, you can either believe the Department of Energy, or me.
Groundwater contamination = 0
Toxic waste = 0
Strip mining = 0
Water usage = Negligible
jetan
Also, catsup is too a vegetable.
Wile E. Quixote
@Brick Oven Bill
Actually those are steps 2 through 7, but since a conservative is doing the math, who’s counting?
Wile E. Quixote
Actually I kind of like one plank of BoB’s latest plan, but suitably modified.
I mean Bush wasn’t Constitutionally elected, there’s nothing in the Constitution that says “When in doubt throw the election to the Supreme Court and have them decide it”.
Kirk Spencer
@KevinD: You can get news cites, or you can read it in the 2010 budget (see page 36, and be advised that’s a HUGE file if you take the link).
trollhattan
@ Wile E. Quixote #116
bOb’s many things, but a conservative he’s not. At least not in any sense of what the word actually means. Modern-day Republican? You betcha! Also.
Rick Taylor
@Brick Oven Bill:
It scares me when you make sense, even if it’s only for a few sentences. Only thing is, we’re nowhere near being energy or food independent. Oil shale is a tremendously expensive environmentally disastrous method of getting oil; no one has proven it can practically be done on a large enough scale to make a dent in our oil usage. If we’re looking for models, Cuba managed to bite the bullet and drastically reduce their oil usage when the Soviet Union fell. But as they really are a socialist country, we’d have no interest in following their methods; plus they had the advantage of being near the equator, making it easier to grow food.
Maus
i’m sure it will involve blaming clinton and ignoring the problem.
SFAW
Well,the Tenth Amendment clearly states “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. Unless doing so means that a State Court will rule against conservatives. Or anything else happens that we don’t like. Also.”
So, obviously, your argument has no merit.
Ed Drone
@Svensker:
Actually, isn’t that one of the things people are bitching about now, that one of Obama’s officials helped the Kurds get autonomy — including ownership of their own oil — and now stands to make a bundle off it, and somehow this is bad, since it should have been a Republican making the killing?
Or something like that.
Ed
KevinD
@Kirk Spencer: Thanks alot.
Ed Drone
@strainer3:
Is this how ‘pump and dump’ works? Wow! I’ve never seen it in action up-close before.
Go away.
Ed
Liberty60
Whenever I read BoB’s comments, I immediately think of the German literary critic Hans Robert Jauss.
Corner Stone
@Liberty60: The key to using that snark is the addition of “Like a lot of others…”
Just IMO.
Corner Stone
@beltane:
Why did you add the redundant, “especially the black ones”?
There are no white kids on free lunch programs.
Sour Kraut
This is central to his point.
SFAW
I thought I covered that base with the “Also.”
Also.
Little Macayla's Friend
@John Sears:
#103:
This (and # 108 and probably the rest) sounds like the mockBOB.
/ & block quote test
Little Macayla's Friend
@Alan:
More Bartlett (bio – Repub admins.), on the fiscal year 2009 deficit and whose it is and revenues and velocity:
/& WP link test
mclaren
Nobody ever wants to explain exactly why a big national debt is bad.
Listen up, buckaroos:
A big national debt is bad because America has to pay interest on that debt, typically in the form of interest on bonds mostly held by foreign nations. The interest ranges from around 3% to 6% because the interest rate on long maturity bonds changes over time as inflation increases or decreases.
If you figure an average of 4% interest America has to pay on its national debt, you’re looking at 4% of 12 trillion dollars going out of American pockets every year into the pockets of third world investors.
Those tax dollars America pays for interest on its national debt don’t buy anything. America doesn’t get anything in return. When tax revenues get spent on education or basic scientific research or the U.S. military or federal highways, America gets something for those tax dollars. We get a more productive population, improved technology that cranks up our economy, we get defense of the nation, we get an infrastructure that lets us move goods and services more efficiently and improves our economy.
For the interest we pay on the national debt, we get nothing. We might as well gather together all those hundreds of billions of dollars and throw garoline on ’em and set ’em on fire.
4 percent of 12 trillion dollars is nearly half a trillion dollars a year. (480 billion dollars, to be exact, or 1/25 of 12 trillion.)
Think about that for a minute.
Having a big national debt means that America is obligated to pay nearly half a trillion dollars a year that we could otherwise use to build schools, pave highways, improve health care, fund basic science research.
America has to pay that half a trillion dollars a year because if we repudiate our long-term bonds, suddenly the American currency would become worthless and no other country would bother to deal with us economically, because after all…if as a country you issue a whole whopping huge amount of long-term debt and then you suddenly refuse to pay any interest on it, you’re essentially telling the world “Hey, folks, our word is economically worthless! If you do business with America or in America, there’s no guarantee we’ll follow through and deliver what you pay for!”
So America has to keep paying that interest on our national debt unless we want to become a total economic paraiah and never be able to do business with any other country anywhere in the world, except possibly if we were to buy stuff for shipments of gold bullion. (Here’s a hint for you: there isn’t anywhere near enough gold bullion in America to do business with the rest of the world.)
A huge national debt like 12 trillion dollars impoverishes all of us. It means that we’re pissing away half a trillion dollars a year that cold otherwise be spent on things to make life better for Americans.
A lot of people don’t understand why a large national debt is a bad idea. Idiots and sociopaths like Ronald “The cruel man with the kindly smile” Reagan and Dick “torture lover” Cheney have proclaimed “Ronald Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The bigger your national debt, the larger your deficit, the less money America has available to pay for basic necessities like highways and F-22s and cancer research.
As the national debt increases, the amount of money available for those basic necessities decreases. Large deficits and a big national debt make America poorer. They take food out of your childrens’ mouths, they cause potholes in our roadways to go unfilled, they prevent scientists from finding the cure to the cancer that killed your father or your mother.
That’s why a big national debt is bad.
mclaren
BOB is as usual spouting ignorant gibberish. Basic facts about oil shale:
[1] Around 11% of North American oil shale deposits are economically viable to extract as oil. With advanced techniques, that percentage could rise to as high as 315 million barrels total.
That’s less than one year of America’s oil consumption over and above domestic production.
In other words, if all the oil shale in North America got turned into oil, it would supply America’s energy needs for about 9 months.
[2] Extracting oil from shale requires immense amounts of energy. You have to burn oil to do it. As oil gets scarcer and more expensive, you slide down a steep curve of decreasing energy returns, with the oil you need to burn becoming exponentially more expensive for the oil you extract from shale.
Sadly, shale has very little oil in it. The extraction process is complex and energy-intensive. As you dig deeper, the extraction costs rise and the energy needed to process the shale skyrockets.
[3] Many thousands of American scientists and engineers have looked at all kinds of alternative energy sources. Shale oil, tar sands, geothermal, solar, wind power. None of these sources of energy has the potential to produce more than a fraction of the energy America currently consumes per year.
All these scientists and engineers are not stupid. They’ve examined the ideas BOB is talking about and rejected them for reasons specified above.
—-
Basic facts about shale oil here.
“According to the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board (AEUB 2003) the initial volume of crude bitumen in place is about 1.7 trillion barrels, which is the total for Canada. About 11% or 175 billion barrels are thought economically available for extraction (National Energy Board 2006), but according to Syncrude (Syncrude 2006), the recoverable fraction could rise up to 315 million barrels with advanced techniques.”
More basic facts about oil hale here.
“A 2005 estimate set the total world resources of oil shale at 411 gigatons — enough to yield 2.8 to 3.3 trillion barrels (520 km3) of shale oil.[2][3][4][5] This exceeds the world’s proven conventional oil reserves, estimated at 1.317 trillion barrels (209.4×10^9 m3), as of 1 January 2007.[22] The largest deposits in the world occur in the United States in the Green River Formation, which covers portions of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming; about 70% of this resource lies on land owned or managed by the United States federal government.[23] Deposits in the United States constitute 62% of world resources; together, the United States, Russia and Brazil account for 86% of the world’s resources in terms of shale-oil content.”
Sounds great, doesn’t it? We just process America’s oil shale and we’ve got 800 billion barrels of oil, right?
Wrong.
To process all that shale into usable oil would require so much energy that the net energy gain would amount to far less than 800 billion barrels of oil. Moreover, as we passed the first 15% of oil shale the energy cost of extracting the additional shale skyrockets because it’s much deeper and has much less oil in it. In fact, we’d get about a grand total of 100 billion net barrels of oil out of processing all the oil shale in America. That’s about 20 years of additional oil usage — but only at today’s oil usage.
Since the American economy grows by about 2% per year, this means that our use of oil keeps going up over time. So we’d actually only get about 16 years worth of additional oil if we strip-mined 5 whole states in America and turned ’em into toxic rubble fields and burned up hundreds of billions of dollars worth expensive oil to process all American oil shale into usable oil.
—–
Bottom line?
What counts is the total energy budget required to extract energy from a resource. If it takes 1 barrel of oil worth of energy to extract half a barrel of oil from some resource like oil shale, it’s not worth it.
Geologist Dr. Walter Youngquist points out:
“The average citizen . . . is led to believe that the United States really has no oil supply problem when oil shales hold “recoverable oil” equal to “more than 64 percent of the world’s total proven crude oil reserves.” Presumably the United States could tap into this great oil reserve at any time. This is not true at all. All attempts to get this “oil” out of shale have failed economically. Furthermore, the “oil” (and, it is not oil as is crude oil, but this is not stated) may be recoverable but the net energy recovered may not equal the energy used to recover it. If oil is “recovered” but at a net energy loss, the operation is a failure.”
See here for more details about the futility and uselessness of oil shale as an energy source.
You want to get really scared, study up on the total energy budget for creating so-called renewable energy.
Solar cells, nuclear power plants, geothermal plants, wind turbine farms, all require a tremendous amount of energy to produce. Steel must be melted and forged, complex eletronics must be fabricated, materials must be transported. It all take oil, gigantic quantities of oil, to produce these “alternative” energy sources. In many cases, these alternative energy technologies would demand more resources than are known to exist. To fabricate enough solar cells to power the United States would require more indium than is known to exist on earth, for example.
“s of October 2007 a barrel of oil costs about $75. The amount of energy contained in that barrel of oil would cost between $100-$250* dollars to derive from alternative sources of energy. Thus, the market won’t signal energy companies to begin aggressively pursuing alternative sources of energy until oil reaches the $100-$250 range and stays there for several years.
Once we do finally begin aggressively pursuing these alternatives, there will be a 25-to-50 year lag time between the initial heavy-duty research into these alternatives and their wide-scale industrial implementation. However, in order to finance an aggressive implementation of alternative energies, we need a tremendous amount of investment capital – in addition to affordable energy and raw materials – that we absolutely will not have once oil prices are permanently lodged in the $200-$300 per barrel neighborhood.
While we need 25-to-50 years to retrofit our economy to run on alternative sources of energy, we may only get 12-to-18 months once oil production peaks. Within a short time of global oil production hitting its peak, it will become impossible to dismiss the decline in supply as a merely transitory event. Once this occurs, traders on Wall Street will quickly bid the price up to, and possibly over, the $200 per barrel range as they realize the world is now in an era of permanent oil scarcity.
With oil at or above $200 per barrel, gasoline will reach $10 per gallon, assumming it is even available. This will cause a rapid breakdown of trucking industries and transportation networks which have all been built and financed under the assumption fuel prices would remain low. Importation and distribution of food, medicine, and consumer goods will grind to a halt as trucking and shipping companies go bankrupt en masse.
The effects of this will be frightening. As Jan Lundberg, founder of the Lundberg Survey, aka “the bible of the oil industry” recently pointed out:
The scenario I foresee is that market-based panic will, within a few days, drive prices up skyward. And as supplies can no longer slake daily world demand of over 80 million barrels a day, the market will become paralyzed at prices too high for the wheels of commerce and even daily living in “advanced” societies.
The trucks will no longer pull into Wal-Mart. Or Safeway or other food stores. The freighters bringing packaged techno-toys and goods from China will have no fuel. There will be fuel in many places, but hoarding and uncertainty will trigger outages, violence and chaos. For only a short ime will the police and military be able to maintain order, if at all.
More about the economic impracticality and technololgically unrealistic nature of most alternative energy sources here.
Experts have examined shale oil, solar nanotechnology, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, solar orbital power stations, geothermal power, tidal power, wind turbines, and scores of other alternative fuel technologies.
None are ready for prime time. Most require far more energy to create than they would return as electricity over their usable lifetimes.
BOB is spouting ignorant gibberish, as usual.
Brick Oven Bill
1 Unit energy (nuclear electric possibility) = 8-12 Units liquid energy from oil shale.
mclaren
Ever wonder why so few scientists are wingnuts?
It’s because the more highly educated you are, the more clearly and more forcefully reality smacks you in the face…and you get less and less able to sustain the delusions and dementia required to believe in the crackpot nostrums proferred by wingnuts.
As Jon Stewart remarked, reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Now let’s get a lesson in reality, as opposed to the wishful thinking and fantasies BOB has been spraying out like projectile vomit.
Pulverized limestone: 1400 kg/cubic meter (shale oil is mostly limestone)
source.
5760 acres of shale oil yields roughly 200,000 barrels per day for 50 years.
Source
200,000 * 50 * 365 = 3,650,000,000 barrels
Oil shale deposits go down between 1000 and 2000 feet.
(see link above)
1 acre = 4046.8564224 Square Meters
5760 * 4046 * 2000 feet = 46,609,920,000 cubic meters. At 1400 kg per cubic meter, this is a total mass of 1400 * 46,609,920,000 kilograms = 65,253,888,000,000 kilograms.
Call it 6.525 x 10^13 kilograms.
Limestone has a specific heat of 0.2 kcal per kilogram-degree centigrade.
Source.
Therefore it requires 0.2 * 6.525 x 10^12 kcals to heat up enough shale 3.65 x 10^9 barrels of oil from 5760 acres of shale oil. That’s raw kcals, however, assuming 100% thermodynamic efficiency in your heater — out here in the real world, we never get 100% thermondyamic efficiency. More typically, we get closer to 20% thermodynamic efficiency in typical real-world heaters.
1 barrel of oil yields 5.86 x 10^6 btus, and 3.968 BTUs = 1 kcal. So 1 barrel of oil = 1.4768 x 10^6 kcals.
With a typical 20% thermodynamic efficiency for heating (most of the heat that goes into a reactor vessel to process raw ore doesn’t go directly into the oil but into the surrounding air, into the vessel itself, and into various heat losses from conduction and convection), it therefore requires 2.2 * 10^7 barrels of oil to heat up that 5760 acres of shale in order to produce 3.65 x 10^9 barrels
of oil.
A typical light water fission reactor of contemporary design has an energy efficiency of about 20%, so to produce the electricity required to heat all that shale oil would require 5 times as much energy, or the equivalent of 1.1 x 10^8 barrels of oil to heat up that 5760 acres of shale to produce 2.65 x 10^9 barrels of oil.
This does not account for the energy cost of mining the shale, only the energy cost of heating it. Mining and crushing the shale wastes much more energy than
heating it, so assuming that mining and crushing the oil takes 4 times as much energy as merely heating it, since we have to strip-mine all the way down to 2000 feet to get all the shale, this makes the total energy b udget 5.5 x 10^8 barrels of oil to extract 2.65 x 10^9 barrels of oil from shale.
Therefore to extract 2.65 billion barrels of oil requires an absolute minimum of 550 million barrels of oil. That’s not a 15:1 extraction rate, that’s a 5:1 extraction rate.
Bottom line?
BOB is spouting bullshit, as usual, and the numbers prove it. Examine the above figures. Study the above sources. It’s all available in the published literature. It’s simple math. The facts are obvious and incontrovertible.
But wait — it’s much worse than the figures above indicate. Much, much worse.
We’ve assumed that building a nuclear reactor on the site of a shale oil mining dig will supply all the energy needed to dig 2000 feet down in a gigantic open-pit mine to extract all the shale and heat it to produce kerogen.
But that’s unrealistic. The 3-storey-tall Terex titan mining trucks and the gigantic backhoes and grinders required to do open pit mining don’t run on electricity. They use diesel engines. Adapting all those trucks and 300-foot-tall backhoes and gigantic acre-long ore grinders to run one lectricity rather than diesel fuel is a titanic undertaking, and that’s what would be required if we want to power all that equipment from the electricity supplied by a nuclear reactor on the mining site, as BOB suggests.
Then there’s the little issue that it currently takes 20 years to go through the permiting process to site and build a nuclear reactor. So if we start today, our nuclear reactor might start producing electricity on the mining site 20 years from now.
Lastly, there’s the issue that the energy budget for shale extaction is almost certainly wildly conservative. As you dig down deeper, the cost of mining skyrockets. Digging down 2000 feet is exponentially more expensive than scraping shale off the top 20 feet of a mining dig, so we have probably underestimated the energy cost of that shale extract by at least a factor of 5.
So BOB is full of it. Examine the numbers above. The proof is clear. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Like all crackpots on the far right, BOB has a head full of gobbledygook and nothing but vacuous nonsense comes out of his mouth.
This has been another episode of “cold hard reality hits the wingnuts like a 20 ton lead weight.” Tune in again tomorrow for more fun debunking wingnut gibberish, same time, same channel.
Brick Oven Bill
Listen bitch.
Electricity has a thermal efficiency of perhaps 33%, boilers have much higher efficiencies. Catagenesis is achieved at temperatures achievable by boilers. Through catagenesis we simulate millions of years of breaking down kerogen. This will buy us a few centuries.
You can boil water with electricity.
You can create electricity with Uranium.
Back in the day, we wondered how to do it. Now we know.
mclaren
BOB gibbered:
jon
@mclaren:
The national debt is not mostly held by foreign banks and governments. 70% of it is bought by American investors and American banks. So China now holds about 8% of our debt, which means China gave us a loan, not that China owns that percentage of us. (Slightly outdated link..)
The problem of foreign holders of our debt is a problem created by Americans who invest but aren’t patriotic enough to put their money into low-interest-yielding Treasury bills when there are so many fancy-schmancy investment vehicle things that have a much bigger potential upside. If American millionaires wanted to invest in America, this “Chinese menace” thing would fade away quickly.
Brick Oven Bill
1. 650F superheated steam exists at a pressure of 14.5 psig.
2. Shale deposits are ‘underground’, meaning that they are ‘insulated’, meaning that there are reduced heat losses, meaning that most of the energy that goes in, stays in.
3. You burn the coal, which adds heat to the water, which you then transfer to the shale via steam. This is not difficult. This is highly efficient.
4. Then, with a smart collection device, you are in like the Beverly Hillbillies.
mclaren is the most exasperatingly stupid person on the planet, with the exception of SGEW.
mclaren
I’m “exasperatingly stupid,” but BOB can’t point to any specific problem with my numbers. It’s basic physics. Do the math. Look up the specific heat of limestone and the specific gravity of limestone. Look up the number of kcals equivalent per barrel of oil.
It takes so much energy to produce kerogen from shale oil that it’s not worth it. End of story.
mclaren
As for the national debt, I stand corrected. It’s absolutely correct that most of the long-term treasuries are held by Americans, not foreign gov’ts.
Withal, my point remains valid — because, just as the human body contains around 120 gallons of water but you only have to lose 15 gallons by dehydration to die, in the same way only a relatively small portion of our national debt has to be called in by foreign govt’s or get repudiated in order to sink the U.S. economy.
The national debt issue remains one of those cases where technical quibbles aside, the basic reality remains that we’ve got a serious problem on our hands even though a relatively small portion of the national debt is held by foreign governments. In point of fact, foreign governments (including China) are currently subsidizing American military adventurism around the world. The day they decide to stop financing it, the Pentagon’s gravy train ends. That’s not a good position to be in if you’re “the world’s sole remaining hyperpower.”
SFAW
You sure about that?
jon
mclaren,
I wasn’t disagreeing with the premise that the debt is bad, but it really is worth knowing and repeating that the debt is mostly in the hands of Americans. The Chinese can certainly put a dent in our economy by not buying more bonds, but their incentive to do so just isn’t there. They’re much happier having us buy stuff, helping their balance of trade, and helping them modernize. They have worries, but they’re largely shared worries between them and the US.
Trevorlawrence
Economics is a somewhat settled Science, one can make it political if there is gain, but in Economics 2+2=4 is a settled theory, along with the Laffer curve, when the Government lowers taxes, they will reap more revenue.
Think of it as E=mc2 for politicians.
SFAW
If by “settled science” and “settled theory”, you mean “a theory popular among Republicans and conservatives, but disproved by years of evidence”, then you’re correct.
Otherwise? Not so much.