Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Here’s what we, the US taxpayers, have spent on climate since 1993 … can anyone tell me what we bought that is worth ~ $180 BILLION dollars?
Next week we’ll be spending another hundred and forty megabucks or so on this nonsense … where is it going, and what are we getting for our hard-earned taxes?
The world wonders …
w.
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We got Solyndra, but that was only a bit more than one half Billion dollars.
It sounds like the EU commission. They decided to get their accounts audited, got themselves a good honest woman to do the job and when she told them there was no control or accountability of where the money was going they did their level best to destroy her and her career. These are the same people who’s pay and pension is dependant on them never saying anything bad about the EU or any of it’s parts.
James Bull
Where’s the money going….
Very easy
It’s buying an illusion
Its buying the illusion that ‘Everything is well’
Its buying the illusion that ‘We have never had it so good’
Its buying the illusion of ‘Low unemployment’ (##)
Its buying the illusion of ‘High wages’ (##)
Its buying the illusion of ‘Really clever science’
And it works, we repeatedly hear the success stories here at what what:
…..more rice
…..more beer
…..more corn
…..more CO2= Global greening
…..more Crapple Swankfones
…..more bandwidth
…..more data
…..more oil & gas
….more Ford Fat Fifty Pickups
Inescapable because surely, Only Rich People Can Afford to Spend that kinda dosh
Right? How *can* you spend what you ain’t got?
##
These are the actual mechanics. The money goes into creating what are effectively Fake Jobs, employing folks with poor (fake) education doing imaginary (fake) work usually inside computers.
And they’re given shed loads of money tokens for doing it.
So they spend their tokens. And because they (the self-declared clever ones) get more money-tokens than a lot of folks, they pay more for the stuff they buy and simultaneously raise demand.
So its raises prices across the wider economy
Then everyone else wants more pay, and gets it
Thus, the ordinary punters can pay more for more stuff and because of their higher wages pay more (standard rate) tax and thus fund the money-token supply to the ‘clever ones’
The suppliers of ‘stuff’ will also find themselves paying more tax which will go to fund the ‘clever ones’
Win win win all the way.
What *is* the problem?
How can anything go wrong with such a closed, neat and self reinforcing system?
So why do I say ‘Its An Illusion’?
Exactly as why that oft repeated picture of the mutant (high-CO2) Christmas trees is an illusion- something is missing.
Something that no-one wants to see. Something no-one wants to think about.
(Possibly because the ‘clever ones’, i.e. the teachers, never mentioned it at the schools they teach at nor were even taught it at the school they went to etc etc)
And with Very Good Reason, it is very very scary.
Best keep up the illusion eh……
All previous attempts at Human Civilisation kept up The Illusion and it all Worked Out Fine For Them……
Very good Peta. A few years ago I crunched some publicly available numbers. That year, coal had produced 55% of the electricity generated in the US; solar produced 1.6%. Thus coal produced 34 times what solar did.
The coal industry did this with 80,000 employees. Yet the solar industry was touting the fact that it had created 250,000 jobs!
With 34 times more electricity generated using one-third the employees, coal was over 100 times (2 orders of magnitude!) more efficient than solar.
It’s as if you’d hire 100 men with shovels rather than one man on a backhoe to dig a long trench for a pipeline; 100 men dragging single plows behind horses rather than one modern tractor to plow your fields; 100 boys with grass shears rather than one kid with a riding mower to cut your grass; etc., you get the picture. Whoopie! A job for everybody!
For its entire existence, mankind has been struggling to invent “labor saving devices” to remove the burden of unnecessary drudgery and grinding poverty from its back. We’ve succeeded spectacularly with the use of fossil fuels–as they say, in the US, even the poor people are rich (when compared to the 3 billion people worldwide that subsist on less than $2 a day.) With our cheap, abundant, and reliable energy, we in the west have achieved a level of affluence that allows us to expend funds to attack the most pressing problems of the world, and solve many of them. But now comes modern day pied pipers that are leading us backward to those golden days of vastly shorter life spans, primitive medicine, and 14-hour work days just to put food on the table. Has the entire “civilized” world gone crazy? Or is it just the ruling elites desperately trying to maintain their hold on power and most of the riches of the world?
Anybody get the sense that we are swirling downward in a vortex?
You always start from where you are now. That $180bn is gone, forget it, worry about the next $180bn.
If the previous $180 billion can be shown to have been spent wisely, then an argument can be made for spending the next $180 billion. But if the previous $180 billion can be shown to have been wasted, than an argument can be made for *not* spending the next $180 billion on more of the same. But such arguments depend on knowing how that “already gone” money was spent.
I propose that inability to show where the money went is sufficient justification to redirect the next $180 billion – to something/someone/somewhere that can show not only where the taxpayers’ money went but also what we the taxpayers got for it.
I agree.
However, by not knowing where the money went previous, you still run the risk that the something/someone/somewhere will simply be just as non-transparent when all is said and done despite any assurances before-hand about being able to show where and what, as it’s a systemic problem with government spending that transparency is an exception rather than the rule.
Anthony,
You should apply to all the government agencies who give them for a climate grant. After all, you do provide a valuable c!image service by reporting on all the new climate “scientific findings” as well as alternative real scientific studies regarding climate and it’s analysis. How can they turn you down? Number one climate site on the web!
Suffice it to say that many who live ‘large’ accept the means for doing so unconditionally!
“Regardless, it makes no sense to me to stop climate change science funding unless we can be certain that AGW is not real – and very few scientists believe that”
Well there are a number of scenarios, projections and narratives:
You identify the first one : If it’s not real cease funding it
Others
“We’ve established it’s a disaster and nothing can be done about it” don’t fund it fund adaption and mitigation instead..
“We’ve played with this for thirty years now and are still not in a position to make a prediction that can be scientifically tested and proved/falsified in a reasonably current time frame” Stop wasting resources and F*ck off….
“We’re too stupid to apply the method outlined in our experimental decline and can’t meet the scientific standards required of 12 year old seccondary school students” Go play with this plasticene and let the grown-ups talk.
“Our error bands are so large compared with the effect we’ve measured we might as well not have bothered”
there’s the door….
“But why is risk-related cost properly allowable against tax? Isn’t risk part of business investment? Hmm, I do understand the point. Have to think more about it. It’s late, and my mind is numb.”
First thing here is that the economic fundamentalist position is that all taxes are ultimately paid by ordinary people. Either directly through income and purchase taxes, tariffs and duties. Or indirectly via the price paid for goods and services. In this view taxing corporations is a ruse to gain support from the ignorant and to conceal from people the actual burden of tax. And to be fair they have a point, no matter how armadillo hatty some of them get.
We have corporations to you Yanks, limited liability companies to us here; Because most people are deterred from taking risks by unlimited personal liability. The prospect of being financially destroyed if an enterprise fails. Having established the corporate entity, and decided that some of the tax burden is taken there rather than at the final point of sale, or from employees via income tax .. the guiding principle is that profit is taxable rather than turnover. Otherwise many industries with low gross margins but acceptable capital returns would be destroyed.
So corporate taxes are generally levied on revenue minus outlay. Over the years this has evolved into the tax codes which identify the outlay elements which are allowable when calculating tax. Of course it’s not allowed to be that simple….A problem for the government has been that in periods where a corporation is investing they might pay no tax even though notionally profitable and paying dividends. So outlay is categorised into Capital investment and expenses. Expenses are offset against revenue in the year they occur, Capital is recovered over multiple years, the exact number depending on the type of investment. This allows the government the prospect of recovering tax from a corporation with a large expenditure on investment projects.
So drilling a well, developing a new drug or indeed putting expense into any risk is allowable against tax. depending on the exact nature of that risk it might be pure expense immediately offset against tax or a long term capital project recovered over 25 years or a mixture of lots of these depending on the tax regulations applicable for each case.
All this gives the government either through pure and noble reason….. or via lobbying and maybe bribery.. scope to adjust the tax code to influence how corporate funds are spent. If you disagree with the allowable expenses or the depreciation periods applied in a particular industry, there is a temptation to call them “subsidies” which actually they are not. A subsidy being an actual payment made rather than a lower amount of tax calculated.
Where the regulations do seem more favourable to corporations than they could be, it’s always worth asking why. In the case of oil exploration it’s to make sure that the USA has sufficient well and storage capacity to withstand any disruption to the international oil trade. Such as a major conflict or a repeat of the 1970’s OPEC hissy fit. The government is pretty much obligated to do this as long as the miltary industrial and domestic sectors remain reliant on fossil fuel energy (oil, gas and coal)
A $700 billion military budget and they can’t even secure their southern border .
Trump asks for a fraction of 1% of that military budget and the Democrats give him the middle finger .
America is screwed because Washington actors look after their self interest , lobbyists , politicians , and super pac bag men while the public interest no longer rates .
Put all 2000 of those Syrian troops along the Border until the Democrats quit selling the country out .
$180 billion on pretending to set the earth’s temperature while the country crumbles .
Unlimited ,unaccountable debt has killed the American dream for hundreds of millions .
No wonder Trump got in .