According to those pushing the (Australian) carbon tax, 500 bureaucrats googling away quietly in Canberra and generating little useful except carbon dioxide exhalations, are more valuable than 500 farmers, foresters, fishermen, workers and miners whose machines also generate more of the same harmless carbon dioxide in order to produce the food, fibres, hardware and energy needed for our daily existence.
It is a suicidal policy to levy a carbon tax on people who produce things but not on those who don’t.
Such an attitude shows how removed from reality the deep green mentality has become.
It is only since humans learned to harness carbon energy that we have been able to generate sufficient surpluses to support art, culture, academia, bureaucracy and big cities.
In the green energy society, before coal and oil replaced our hay burning horses and bullocks, most of the food produced was consumed by the large farming families, their labourers and their draught animals. Any surplus went to service people like butchers, bakers, blacksmiths and saddlers. Cities were small and there was little left for the tax man.
It is not the bureaucracy or the carbon tax that produces eggs for breakfast, electricity for the toaster, gas for the barbie or petrol for the car. It is hard working men and women with resources, skills and carbon powered machines.
Making things matters.
Viv Forbes,
forbes@carbon-sense.com
I am happy for my email address to be published.
In the quote in my comment above MJP seems to have bolloxed his numbers a bit. The data he referenced is here.
http://www2.census.gov/econ/qfr/current/qfr_mg.pdf
After-Tax Profits and Sales, Third Quarter 2011 – Seasonally Adjusted
U.S. manufacturing corporations’ seasonally adjusted after-tax profits in the third quarter of 2011 totaled $149.5 billion, down $7.1 (±0.5) billion from the after-tax profits of $156.6 billion recorded in the second quarter of 2011, but up $25.3 (±1.0) billion from the after-tax profits of $124.2 billion recorded in the third quarter of 2010. Seasonally adjusted sales for the quarter totaled $903.0 billion, not statistically different from the $900.8 billion recorded in the second quarter of 2011, but up $141.6 (±9.4) billion from the $761.5 billion recorded in the third quarter of 2010.
Seasonally adjusted after-tax profits per dollar of sales were 9.1 cents for the quarter, compared with 9.7 cents for the second quarter of 2011, and 8.5 cents for the third quarter of 2010.
Seasonally adjusted sales for the quarter totaled $1,648.0 billion, up $24.6 (±4.7) billion from the $1,623.4 billion recorded in the second quarter of 2011, and up $193.5 (±16.5) billion from the $1,454.5 billion recorded in the third quarter of 2010.
Yes indeed.
I am a dollar multi-trillionaire. Zimbabwean dollars, sadly. I have a Zimbabwean $100 trillion dollar note. So why aren’t I dancing around Bill Gates going “Sucker on you mate, I’m number one?”
Because the money’s worthless. And it’s worthless because their Government fell prey to the same error that you rail against in your post and they made their currency worthless.
It’s the same error the Australian Labor Government is making with their Carbon Tax. You phrase ithat mistake as “(Not understanding that) Making things matters.”
There’s an old puzzle, somewhat like an IQ test, we give to pre-pubescent children to teach rational thinking. It goes “You’re in a lifeboat lost at sea. It contains a large amount of food and gold coins. It’s overloaded, and you must throw something overboard or it will swamp and you’ll die. What do you throw?”
The correct answer of course is to throw the money. But the carbon taxers would all fail that particular test.
Australia’s Labor Government loudly proclaims that they’ll compensate people for the higher prices caused by carbon taxes by giving them the cash raised by carbon taxes. Thus, they conclude, no-one will be financially worse off with carbon taxes in place. But as Jo Nova points out, they can’t compensate the Nation for the productivity loss the taxes cause. Making stuff matters.
When comparing ‘makers’ and ‘not-makers’, pay attention to ‘voluntary transaction’ and ‘forced transaction’. If my accountant saves me money, I voluntarily pay him. If a bureaucrat costs me money, I am forced to pay him.
Anyone reading the comments this far must think we Australians are thick-headed dolts. After all, how hard can it be to produce a chart of what our free democracy earns and spends?
Supporting a huge bureaucracy also means that we must never know how much it costs to support this huge bureaucracy.
Good luck to anyone trying to find the figures!
jl says:
January 30, 2012 at 12:08 am
Anyone reading the comments this far must think we Australians are thick-headed dolts. After all, how hard can it be to produce a chart of what our free democracy earns and spends?
Supporting a huge bureaucracy also means that we must never know how much it costs to support this huge bureaucracy.
Good luck to anyone trying to find the figures!
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Actually, the figures are easy to find, in State and Federal Budget Papers, ABS reports, research papers etc.
What is it that you are unable to find out?
As I mentioned in my post above, the public sector is about 35% of the Australian economy. However, most of this is not spent on shiny bum bureaucrats but on public sector services and their employees such as roads, schools, hospitals and other health services, police, defence, etc.
I am not commenting on this figure one way or another, merely pointing out what it is and what it means.
Quite right. Of course we need “stuff” – in fact, as there are more of us now than ever there used to be, we need more stuff, particularly if developing countries’ citizens are to be dragged out of abject poverty. We (all) need services, too – health care, education, even banking, although that has become more like a cancer on society than a service in recent years.
When I was a spotty sixth-former in school in the late 60s, we sat round discussing how, as “automation” spread across industry to remove the need for people to do the most dangerous and dirty work (think, e.g., mining, the old-fashioned way), the model would have to develop from “40-40-40” (working 40 hours a week for 40 weeks a year for 40 years of your life) to 30-30-30, 20-20-20, or whatever it panned out to. Well, four decades or so later, we see many families struggling to survive with both parents working, where they used to be OK with one; most people having to work ever longer hours for their crappy wages; everyone, employed or not, paying ever more in tax for public services which yet struggle to do their jobs satisfactorily. Meanwhile, a few at the “top” of this system take more and more and more as they tell everyone else to work harder and feel guilty about “contaminating” the environment. Factories which used to employ thousands now employ – probably in a “cheaper” country – hundreds, or even fewer, to make the same amount of stuff; sure, the stuff is slightly “cheaper” in price, but the increased profit margins serve only to feed an ever-greedier “élite”, with no provision made for finding useful employment for the workers who have been thrown out of work by this “improved efficiency”, still less for moving towards that “20-20-20”. What’s the real price of those goods? Kids, who used to be able to look forward to being useful citizens in useful jobs, now see – rightly – that their options are shrinking out of sight and are rarely, in any real sense, useful – and when you ain’t got nothing, you ain’t got nothing to lose. There has been no attempt at all to spread the “goodies” even nearly equitably; all profit is now leached out, mostly into the banking sector and away. Where those in the boardroom used to earn a dozen or so times the average wage, they now help themselves to hundreds, thousands of times as much, leaving the rest to starve. The situation is quite untenable.
I was poleaxed by the first sentence in the first programme of a recent BBC series, “Money”, which illustrates the extent of the problem: “There is enough money in the world today to make every man, woman and child alive a millionaire.” … What??? Just pause for a moment and think about that.
There’s nothing wrong with riches as such, of course: if there weren’t an incentive to use your smarts to get ahead, nobody would bother and society would stagnate, at best. What is absolutely missing today is the philanthropic spirit of the likes of Andrew Carnegie, who observed that “he who dies rich, dies disgraced” – he has taken, but given nothing back. The occasional, much-publicised Bill Gates vaccination project, or whatever, simply does not begin to compensate the human race for the wholesale parasitism of those who just take and take and keep quiet about it because they can, because they own the governments which make the rules and the lying media which keep their activities discreetly out of sight. That parasitism is what is destroying – has already largely destroyed – our once über-competent Western societies: these people must have a really good laugh when they hear the rest of us referring to them as the “élite” – literally, the “best”. Yeah, they’re the best, all right. The best at helping themselves and screwing everyone else. The best parasites. The best destroyers.
When – if – we can work out a structure of society which enables most people to earn their living honestly and gain respect by doing something useful, rather than condemning them to life in a desperate “underclass” and making them into a problem, then maybe, just maybe we’ll be able to work our way – literally – towards living in a decent, and safe, society. In recent decades, all I have seen is accelerating progress in the opposite direction, and that is a profoundly worrying, terrifying thought.
Sorry about the length of this comment, but it’s a huge subject, and one which drives me to despair whenever I think about it. Even so, thanks for putting it here.
Thanks Viv for an interesting comment on the distribution of Australia’s national income, expenditure and product.
The finance/insurance wedge, categorised as a service industry is labelled as increasing 146% between 1984-2003.
The paper, Ambler (2012) In the Eye of the $torm discusses the US and UK insurance industry and the securities market which ‘spreads risk related to the <occurrence of natural disasters.’ (my bold).
Reinsurance risk as an asset class (p9) states that Insurance Linked Securities (ILS) ‘have outperformed other financial instruments in recent times.’ (my bold)
Description here of ILS http://www.naic.org/capital_markets_archive/110207.htm
Ambler’s paper provides a link to Consumer Affairs, where complaints about Homesite Insurance discuss tree overhangs, shingle roofs and the consequences following storm damage for home owners.
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/insurance/homesite.html
Ambler http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/eye_storm.pdf
In Australia, given that property is valued by the Value-General to determine site and capital value, rates and levies proscribed by state and local governments and regulations enforce vegetation, building material and design that reflect a carbon market, this all becomes something of a quagmire.
Additionally when the Federal Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) implements and then controls classification and data collections of environmental factors: biodiversity, water allocation, green house gas emissions, land use and management, climate and natural resources, sustainability………………….well, what more can one say?
ABS Environment AND Energy http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/c311215.nsf/All+documents+by+Title/Environment+and+Energy?opendocument#from-banner=LN
note link to Other Related sources of Information.
Well the calculations of the impact of the carbon tax have been done and added up to less than the impact of the recent flood disasters.
So given hand waving vs sums I go for sums.
LazyTeenager says:
January 30, 2012 at 4:41 am
Well the calculations of the impact of the carbon tax have been done and added up to less than the impact of the recent flood disasters.
So given hand waving vs sums I go for sums.
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Without entering into calculations, I am intrigued by your conception of economics.
How does one loss (eg by flood) negate another loss (eg by an additional tax)?
A loss is a loss. The whole point of civilisation is to minimise losses. Are you telling people who lost their houses in the floods, and will now cop an extra tax, that it is all relative?
Improved image colors that are more visible to the red-green colorblind.
http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/9128/australia27srealgdpbyin.gif
Larry
@ur momisugly Steve C
The economy is not the reason for despair that you conclude.
Certainly parasites and theives are an oppressive burden; like muggers and governments they take what you have produced to use for their own purposes.
But that does not apply to any of the individuals that you’ve mentioned. There’s not a one of them that has taken one cent, without returning greater value in the opinion of the person who’s paying the money.
Steve Jobs never stuck a knife in people’s ribs demanding they give him their money- instead he produced products that people wanted more than they wanted the cash used to buy it. Bankers don’t sneak into your house at night with a gun in hand. Instead they provide services that people want so desperately they’ll seek out the bank, chase up proof of their identity, and references, and proof of income and ability to repay, and evidence of their assetts. Those in the boardroom ‘helping themselves to thousands of times the average wage’ are worth their salaries in the opinion of the people who actually pay those salaries. Otherwise they wouldn’t pay them.. If you were paying their salary you’d be entitled to a vote. Otherwise it’s none of your business and no skin off your nose. It’s certainly not one penny out of your pocket.
It’s worth noting that this is unlike the situation where Governments pay their employees ‘wages comparable to the Private Sector’- because in that case every penny comes out of your pocket.
As for ‘sharing the goodies around’- the per capita charity of U.S. citizens is the highest in the world.
You refer dismissively to ‘The occasional, much-publicised Bill Gates vaccination project, or whatever’. It’s worth pointing out that this individual’s charitable donations are bigger than the total charitable giving of my entire nation in it’s entire history. And unlike government generosity, he is not giving away other people’s money. In addition, he is encouraging others to do likewise.
The average newlywed couple moves into a house five times the size of that which our parents did at the same stage. They start their married lives with the plasma televisions and new cars that our parents envisioned as the rewards due at the end of their working lives.
You seem to believe our standard of living has declined. Let me quote:
Indeed, research that my colleagues and I at Per Capita have been conducting on the cost of living and quality of life in Australia confirms that Australians have it better than most and better than ever.
More of us have jobs, make and save more money, pay down our debts with less difficulty, own bigger houses and better cars and take more trips abroad. Furthermore, the costs of many of the products we regularly buy are decreasing. According to a recent CommSec report our average wages are now buying us more milk, bread, margarine, cheese, steak, chicken and petrol than it did a year ago.
From Australia’s ABC article on the cost of living.
Check your facts. The things that you’re complaining about are either not true, or are the things that make you a rich citizen of a rich nation.
@ur momisugly Lazy Teenager
The logic of your post escapes me.
It seems to be along the lines of ‘a kick in the teeth is not as bad as cancer’, wrongly implying that we should therefore all be willing to accept a kick in the teeth.
Nevertheless I would be keen to see the ‘sums’ that you refer to. Since the carbon tax is supposed to be forever, isn’t that an infinite amount of money? I’d appreciate a link.
Gary said @ur momisugly January 29, 2012 at 2:31 pm
I thought that blaming price rises on the carbon tax had been made illegal. Even listing the tax as a separate item would be an offence.
hotrod (Larry L) said @ur momisugly January 29, 2012 at 5:50 pm
REP Replacing colour in a graphic is fairly trivial in Photoshop, or PhotoPaint. Think Search & Replace in your word processor. If Anthony’s too busy, he can send me a graphic & I will do the edit for him. Bear in mind time zone differences between the US Left Coast & Australian Eastern Time.
Service industries by their very nature cannot “create wealth.” They can concentrate it, and facilitate cash flow, but the services do not create value.
Manufacturing creates value by converting something of lesser value into something of greater value. For example, a steel mill takes ore (low value), adds dollars in the form of work and energy, and produces steel (high value) and more dollars. A service industry simply moves those dollars from one place to another, often times extracting value from the process at the same time. A service-based economy is by its very definition unsustainable.
hotrod harry, good on you but I provided a much more up to date set of figures in black and white a long way above.
Leo Morgan, you have been too kind. What the LT is discussing is that first you get kicked in the teeth, then you get cancer. But, you should be grateful that new teeth are cheaper than chemotherapy. Or something like that. Anyway, the fact that new teeth are cheaper than chemo means … could someone please remove these lizards … of course a natural disaster plus a tax is better than a natural disaster minus a tax.
Damn lizards. Every time I interact with LT, there they are.
True enough that is why there is no excuse for the originator of that graphic to have used such a horrible set of colors. If you are presenting data graphically on the web it is YOUR job to make the data understandable for the reader.
The point is that color blindness is one of the most unrecognized handicaps and we need to fix that. Especially among those who present data graphically on the web.
Did you ever take a color blind test as part of enrollment in a chemistry class? You need good color vision to do many required tasks in chemistry like solution titration. How many boys fail chemistry simply because they have an unrecognized color blindness handicap.
I did not even know I was red-green color blind until I went into the military!
Do your data processing devices and house hold accessories assume you have normal color vision and only tell you of a fault by changing a green indicator light to a yellow or amber light? Or change a dark amber light to a similar tone red light?
How many charts of essential information presented in lecture halls and business conferences assume that all the people in the room have normal color vision?
Are you even aware that some laser pointers used in lecture presentations are absolutely invisible to those who are red-green color blind?
It is not my job to fix a document presented for public presentation. That responsibility falls to the presenter of the information. I can change it so I can see it (although I did — and routinely do, so I can evaluate the information), but many times it is simply not worth my time to fix someone else’s screw up. Like you said, it took me all of 5 minutes on my home computer where I have the editing tools to do it, about the same time it takes to spell check a document.
Rules for colorblind friendly graphic presentations.
NEVER use pale pastel colors, especially yellows, greens and cyans on a white or near white background. They can work (poorly) on a contrasting dark background.
Always separate colors of similar gray tone (if presented in black and white) with other strongly contrasting colors.
Give users an alternate visual key to the content by including line shading or key letters in the color block, or some other means besides color like line weight in charts to make similar colors distinctive.
Make sure that the color of a chart or graphic element is “identical” to the color key used in the chart.
Many times folks use a color grabber to pickup a color not from the actual data presentation but from a color grabber chart and the actual color triplet RGB code for the keys is slightly different from the actual color used in the data presentation. For those of us required to use color tools to discriminate colors based on their html hex or decimal color triplet that sometimes leaves us with a color key who’s actual color triplet is half way between two similar data colors so we still have no clue except verbal context to figure out the data.
Larry
Steven Bellner says:
January 30, 2012 at 10:15 am
Service industries by their very nature cannot “create wealth.” They can concentrate it, and facilitate cash flow, but the services do not create value.
Manufacturing creates value by converting something of lesser value into something of greater value. For example, a steel mill takes ore (low value), adds dollars in the form of work and energy, and produces steel (high value) and more dollars. A service industry simply moves those dollars from one place to another, often times extracting value from the process at the same time. A service-based economy is by its very definition unsustainable.
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Steven, I suggest that you go and live in a ‘sustainable’ economy like Mali if that is what you believe. They have an economic system such as that you espouse, and are possibly the poorest people on the planet.
Far from being wasteful decadence, the growth of tertiary industry has meant that millions of people can be educated, get health care, be protected by police and fire services and so on.
Your model of ‘service industries’ as adding no value was tried and failed – look at East and West Germany. By all means, be a Puritan or a Marxist in your private life. But, it has nothing to do with economics.
Reverting back to the topic, the mining industry in Australia is at the cutting edge of techniques of extraction, transportation, processing etc. People who charactertise it as “digging stuff up” have no conception of what a modern mining operation looks like.
hotrod (Larry L) said @ur momisugly January 30, 2012 at 11:15 am
Preaching to the converted (in my case) Larry, I’m happy to say 🙂
Man, did I ever cop stick for blogging about web page useability & accessibility these many long years ago:.
Why don’t you give this tax a more descriptive name. The Ban Ki-Moon tax.
@ur momisugly Leo, thanks for the response. You make some interesting points, which show some differences in perception between us.
In particular, I’m not convinced by your saying that the (to me) overpaid boardroom boys are defined as being worth their remuneration by “the people who are paying the money”. But who is paying that money? Ultimately, most of the highest-paying sectors are mighty international companies, banking, and so on: their customers are the governments who tax us ordinary folk to the hilt to provide the money in the first place. The decisions are made by the peers of the beneficiaries: the “old boys’ network” is a present that just gives and gives. Result, we all pay, but get no say. Even where we get to buy an actual product from a company, we’ll be paying plenty tax on top, and there are many “financial instruments” designed to screw Joe Public hollow.
Here in Britain, for instance, there is continuing unease about the fallout from widespread use of “Public-Private Initiative” contracts, whereby large quantities of public money are committed to contracts with private companies to build public assets like hospitals. The deal, apparently, needs to be “sweetened” to tempt the company into it by guaranteeing them so many million a year profit for the next xx years. One budget-build hospital with maintenance “issues” later, we find that the company has exercised rights buried deep in the small print, and cheerfully walked off with their guaranteed millions which we all have to go on paying for decades, with interest. And if you suspect that it would have been far cheaper just to have built that hospital as a public project, don’t bother looking for any information: that’s all covered by “commercial confidentiality” and is safely out of sight. As is, of course, the entire, euphemistically named “defence” sector – now there’s a business, the customer deliberately blows the expensive goodies to bits and comes back for more and more! It’s all pennies out of all our pockets. It’s “the privatisation of profit and the socialisation of debt”, over and over.
I’ve no real issue with a Steve Jobs, or a Paul McCartney, who has given the world a better mousetrap or an unforgettable song, being able to live well – and if I seemed “dismissive” about Bill Gates’ generosity, I unreservedly apologise. I have every respect for him doing what he is doing, and was alluding more to the fact that for every million he disburses, there are an awful lot more millions doing no more good than just enriching the few who play with them. A few who haven’t given the world that mousetrap or song, but just like the millions. Whether one person should be taking personal decisions on the scale of mass vaccination is also a moot point, of course, as is the morality of Sir Paul’s copyright, after his death, being hawked around among the Sonys and Disneys of the world to rules heavily influenced by those companies’ lobbyists.
That BBC figure again – they will have been using GBP, so that’s at least £7,000,000,000,000,000. That’s a lot of goodies up there while ordinary people in our rich western countries are thrown out of jobs and homes, millions starve in Africa, and whole countries teeter on the edge of bankruptcy. I think that shows a problem, and by and large it’s not the ordinary person in any country who has made any of the decisions which led to it. Every time, cui bono? Not us ordinary folk.
As for life being better than ever, I would agree there, in material respects at least. My view is undoubtedly coloured by things like living in a country which has now, for many years, e.g. encouraged tenants of public-sector (council) housing to take out a mortgage and buy the property cheaply, while deliberately then not spending the income from that process to build any more public housing. All good dogma, it all “frees up cash” for sinking into more Public-Private “Initiatives” to beggar us all over again, but there are many young couples over here who would dearly like to be able to move into any home, a “commodity” currently in very short supply. Meanwhile, a few astute operators buy up those same houses when former tenants can’t pay their new mortgage, or when the market dips, as “Buy to Let”. Let at a multiple of the old council rent, and with a much less secure lease, probably to students (who will be paying the debt in the future) or maybe benefit claimants (paid from the public purse). And thank goodness (/sarc) we’ve got rid of those embarrassing old Rent Tribunals, which used to be able to decide whether a rent was fair at that price. Really cramped the style, that.
From what you say, Australia isn’t going down the pan quite as fast as us, and good luck to you. Let’s hope your standard of living can withstand your shiny new Carbon Tax, an area where you’re surely ahead of us and won’t be benefiting. 🙁
Maybe I’m just a pessimist. At least that way you don’t get any unpleasant surprises!