One of the most common complaints (I hesitate to call it a counter-argument, because it's not really an argument, just a reflexive cry) against any kind of environmental stuff is always "It's expensive and it will hurt businesses! It'll slow down economic growth!"

This argument basically relies on innumeracy. It depends confusing people with numbers that sound big, but aren't in their context. There's an excellent post over at Crooked Timber about sustainability and living standards, there's a lot of economist-speak in it, so let me highlight the key paragraph.

"Even the sharpest critics among economists only suggested that Stern’s estimates were at the optimistic end of a plausible range, the upper end of which might be 5 per cent of national income, or around two years of economic growth. That is, by 2050, a low-carbon economy might have the material living standards that would otherwise have been reached by 2048."

That's the thing about economic growth. If we grow more slowly than we might have, we're not poorer, we're just less richer than we theoretically might have been. But we're still richer!

This has been tonight's installment of explanations.

John McCain, April 3, 2008: "I know economics very well, certainly better than Senator Clinton and Senator Obama. So let's clear that up,"

January 21, 2008: "At a recent meeting with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, Republican presidential candidate John McCain admitted he "doesn't really understand economics" and then pointed to his adviser and former Senate colleague, Phil Gramm - whom he had brought with him to the meeting - as the expert he turns to on the subject, The Huffington Post has learned.

The incident was confirmed by a source familiar with the proceedings of the meeting."

Now, part of "Maverick" John "Straight Talk" McCain's recent comment could be true. The part about "knowing economics very well" directly contradicts himself from a couple months ago. But the part about knowing economics better than Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama could be true.

Somehow though, I doubt it. Especially when McCain's citing Phil Gramm as an economic advisor, and from listening to his recent speeches about economics.

Funny how reporters can't remember things that happened a couple months ago, though.

The European Union just slapped Microsoft with a $1.3 billion fine, the biggest ever, over Microsoft's anticompetitive actions.

For last year, Microsoft earned about $14 billion. That incredible $1.4 billion fine they make back in just over a month.

In related news, Exxon-Mobil is in court, yet again, about the Exxon Valdez spill, 19 years ago. They're appealing punitive damages levied because of the damage done by the giant spill. The captain had been drinking and wasn't on the bridge at the time, and Exxon had known he was a recovering alcoholic and had fallen off the wagon. They've appealed the punishment damages down to $2.5 billion.

Last year, Exxon-Mobil made a record profit of $39.5 billion. They make $2.5 billion dollars in about three weeks.

So, retail sales over December were flat at best. (Here's some stats</a>) And credit card debt went up over that same time, which meant people were spending money they didn't have just to stay where they were.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke yesterday said "The outlook for real activity in 2008 has worsened," and "We stand ready to take substantive additional actions as needed to support growth and to provide adequate insurance against downside risks,"

The second translates to interest rate cuts. But basically he's saying the economy is not doing so hot, which most anybody could tell you. o in response? "Stocks in Canada and the U.S. shot up in the hours after Mr. Bernanke speech."

The stock market reacts exactly opposite to how common sense says it should. A company lays people off, its stock goes up. The chief banker of the US says the economy sucks, stocks go up. These people are insane.

If America had $100 and 100 people.

This graph is the key point, though. The top 1%'s share of the national income has more than doubled over the past 30 years. Everybody outside the top 10%'s share has gone down.

#8: The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

This book was absolutely fascinating. The idea behind the book is what would happen to all our stuff, and the world, if humans all disappeared suddenly? No specifics as to why, if it's zombies, aliens, the Rapture, nanotech, whatever, because that's not the point. But in the process of that, it ends up being much more about society and civilization and what it takes to keep them running. And what effects humans have already had on the world, and continue to. It's extremely well written. The parts about wildlife returning to Chernobyl, and sea life returning to nuclear weapons test atolls are scary, yet amazing. They have photos of the mountaintop removal "mining" for coal, and I'd heard about it, but pictures are worth a thousand words. See some here.

This book is amazing, and I totally recommend it to everyone.

#9: Marx for Beginners by Rius

It's a cartoon introduction to Marx and his economic theories, and the history he lived in. It was published first in 1976, so it's kind of dated. I'm trying to read some more economics stuff and so figured I'd start with the cartoon compressed version.

And frankly, some of the quoted passages of Marx looking at the inequalities of capitalism could come from a modern analysis of how Wal-Mart works and treats its workers. (In short: Not Well.)

#10 (or 10-13): Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki

I'm not sure to count this as 1 or 4, since it's a 4 book manga series, but all one story. I guess I've included other comics as individual books, but sometimes it feels slightly cheaty. Depends on the comic, I suppose.

Anyway. I haven't seen the movie version yet, though I've seen many of Miyazaki's other ones. It was interesting, and good. Though the end, like a couple of Miyazaki's other stories (such as Castle in the Sky) makes it seem like he has serious issues with technology. I think I'm just tired of the trope of "Humanity can't be trusted with this knowledge! So now we'll destroy it!" Aside from that gripe though, it was a very good read. Fantastic environments, good characters, and the other main theme is the futility and waste of war, which I don't have any issues with.

Previous Books:
#1: Grave Peril
#2: Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
#3: DMZ Vol. 3: Public Works
#4: Bad Prince Charlie
#5: Making Money
#6: How to Win Friends and Influence People
#7: H.I.V.E. - Higher Institute of Villainous Education

There's still people who claim we need "real money" based on gold, not just "fiat money", because gold's really worth something, regular money's only worth something because the government says so.

But gold's only worth anything because people say so also. (Yes, gold has applications in electronics and a lot of other things, but when people talk about the "value" of gold, that's usally not what they're talking about.

Last year, the top 1% of Americans made 21.2% of the total income in the US.

That's probably why, despite all the "great" numbers for the economy, most people don't think it's going so well. Because they're not. And neither is anyone they know. All the economic gains of the past almost decade have been going to the same tiny subset of people, rather than being spread out through society. All that extra productivity and work people are putting in doesn't come back to them, it gets hoovered up to the top.

And it doesn't trickle back down.

Last month at work, we started putting up a display of Christmas bargain books. In September. SEPTEMBER. Now there's not only that, but also a table of Christmas cards, and a table of random holiday books. In the first week of October.

I detect the not-so-faint wiff of desperation animating it all. "Consumer spending" has been soft this year, for a simple reason. People don't have money. All the rest of the money people have been spending was coming from their savings, and the mortgages on their houses. And now suddenly the whole pyramid scheme animating the mortgage market has fallen apart, and people don't have thousands of dollars to spare. So people haven't been spending, and the corporate retailers are panicking, because they don't know what to do, how are they going to squeeze out their next quarter of record profits?

So they've played their ace card. Christmas cheer and spending! Now now now! Come and spend! You have to! Otherwise, you're failing your family and kids and everyone you know! It's that time of year, even though it's October!

And then I saw a report on the local news yesterday, about how Wal-Mart had dropped prices on lots of toys to try and kick into holiday mode. And other stores have been following suit. The customers they interviewed didn't care, because it was 90 frickin degrees out yesterday, who wants to go Christmas shopping in the heat? Also, it's the beginning of October.

And they had a professor from one of the colleges around here, I missed his name or expertise, but he was crediting it to desperation too. Obviously I agree with him.

But I probably disagree with him in the fact I hope it fails. I hope it fails because then maybe they'll stop shoving Christmas forward until the "Holiday Season" literally begins in July. And I don't think it'd be bad for the whole edifice of corporate consumer retail bullshit to be shaken up. It's a fragile construct, based on marketing and advertising and other lies, which results in people working jobs selling plastic shit to each other so we can afford to go buy plastic shit from other stores. It's completely fucked up our culture, and it can't last. I hope it doesn't, but I hope it doesn't bring us all crashing down with it.

It's the end of an era. I can't make fun of Canadian money any more.

U.S. Dollar Exchange Rate Canadian Dollar
1 Sep 28 0.9944 0.9944
(Chart and stuff)

For all that I'm joking about it, the fall in the dollar is a Bad Thing, at least for the US. It means imports are going to be more expensive, and we import practically everything. It's a sign of how weak our economy is. And it means inflation is going to up. On top of the collapse of the lending scam housing bubble, and on top of all the growth for the past seven years going to the very richest

The following is the text of an email I sent to NPR's Marketplace show today, after they had a hack from the WSJ editorial page spouting nonsense straight out of the "Fairtax" book. Here's the article in question.

And my letter:
This morning, on the Marketplace Morning Report, you had Stephen Moore on, praising the benefits of a national sales tax.  His ideas and numbers come entirely from the book "FairTax" by Neal Boortz and John Linder.  And unfortunately, most of what he quoted is inaccurate or false.  A 23% sales tax would not replace all of the government income, the percentage was picked as near the maximum amount people would tolerate as a sales tax.  A national sales tax, despite his claim, would be extremely regressive and complex.  Most families who are out of the top 1% spend most of their income each year, which would make their net tax rate at LEAST 23%, plus the increases in cost that would come from this kind of tax.  Whereas the richest few don't spend all their money, which would make their net tax rate far below the 23% the rest of us would pay.  That hardly qualifies as "fair" by any stretch of the imagination.  And his idea of a $20,000 rebate for the sales tax spent?  That would be at least as complicated as the current income tax.  The rest of the work of tax collection would then be pushed on to the companies who sell products.  It would require just as much work, and we would still require the IRS to investigate cheats and other things.

His entire presentation was misleading at best, and outright false at worst.  The entire idea of a "fair" national sales tax is snake oil, designed to cover up for a gigantic tax cut for the rich and a tax hike for the rest of us, not any kind of serious policy suggestion.

The Hippies Were Right!

Why do you think reactionaries hate hippies so much and have spent the past 40 years trying to discredit hippies? Because they know the hippies were right. :)

Also, here's an excerpt from another economist on why the hippies were right about happiness over growth.

theferrett sent a letter to Circuit City the other week, about their firing their 3,400 most experienced and highest paid employees. Which inspired me to do so also, and I just got back a form letter (of course).

But today, he posted a link to this article from the Washington Post: Circuit City's Job Cuts Backfiring, Analysts Say.

""I think even though sales were soft in March, this is clearly why April sales were worse. They were replaced with less knowledgeable associates," said Tim Allen, an analyst with Jefferies & Co.

In particular, the televisions showing disappointing results are "intensive sales" requiring more informed employees, Allen said. "It's a big-ticket purchase for somebody. And if they feel like they're not getting the right advice or are being misled by someone who doesn't know, it would be definitely frustrating. They will take their business elsewhere.""

Can you say Duh?

And Circuit City's stock's dropped about $3 since the actual firings. Maybe Wall Street's wising up to the fact that "downsizing" usually isn't great for companies? I can hope.

So the FDA is testing all sorts of food we get from China to make sure it wasn't shipped over in bags that used to hold pesticides and that sort of thing now, after the pet food and reports from South Africa and so on.

The question is though, why are we importing so much food from China? Especially things like wheat, which grows perfectly fine in the US. I can see importing foods that grow better elsewhere, but why stuff like wheat and corn where we grow so much the government pays farmers to throw it out?

Recently, reading a couple blogs, I came up with a completely non-moral, non-religious, non-soft-hearted-liberal, etc reason to try and do away with poverty. It's inefficient. Wasteful. Not just of human lives, but of potential. Imagine all the inventions and businesses that could be started, if people weren't in the deathly grip of poverty, or weren't scared that if they failed they'd lose everything. If there were some reasonable minimum level of security, people would be more free to try something new, get out of the dead end jobs, etc. And then maybe we could get society as a whole out of this position where the most common jobs are dead-end jobs, mostly selling crap we don't need to each other.

But think about it. Think about all the things that people could do if they weren't trapped in their situations by crushing poverty. Think of the things people could do if they weren't trapped and clinging as tight as they can to the crappy place they are now for fear of that crushing grip of poverty. Think of the chances people'd be willing to take if there was something there to catch on besides the hard streets. And then think of what all that could do for the country, hell, the world.

Of course, the problem with presenting this as a practical solution to certain kinds of folks is they don't want people to try, to dare, they'd rather have people scared and dumb, it's easier to get money out of them, and easier to give them somebody else to blame and get their votes. There's quite a few people who use talk about things like economics and stuff only so long as they help them get the answers they want.

But there you go, a completely non-squishy reason to try and end poverty, that doesn't require any concern for your fellow man, just consideration of what that kind of society could do for you.

The moral or ethical or religious or similar reasons are perfectly good too, and general concern for your fellow man should be enough reason on its own. And the people it's not good enough for probably won't be convinced by this either, but this is just yet reason to add on there.

Technically, it's tomorrow, but some quick numbers from Hilzoy over at Obsidian Wings

All numbers are in billions of dollars.

Total Receipts: 2,407
Total Outlays: 2654
Total Deficit: 248

Total Spent On Debt Service: 405.9

Just like an individual, there's plenty of good reasons for the government to run up debt some times. War, for example. (real wars, not this bullshit War On Some Terrorists) Or during recessions, to set the stage with infrastructure and jobs for the recovery. Tax cuts for the rich don't quite make the "good reason" cut, though. Especially since if you REALLY wanted to lower taxes, you could, say, take the surplus we had before Bush took office, and use it to pay down the debt, which would lower the interest payments. Or that money could be used for y'know, infrastructure, or teachers, or universal health care. Most of what we've spent it on hasn't been anything like that that would help the economy grow in the future, most of what we've spent it on is shit like the Iraq war.

But remember folks! The Republicans are the Party of Fiscal Restraint! (Which apparently means the party of "cut taxes and spend" which is what they've been...pretty much as long as I can remember, going back to Reagan etc, and definitely for as long as I could vote.)

And here's a short "oversimplified" video about the budget by Good Magazine

(Via Kevin Drum, who did the math)

Unions put pressure on again-profitable airlines.
"When the airline industry went into a deep slump after the 2001 terrorist attacks, American Airlines' pilots, flight attendants and mechanics agreed to billions of dollars in cuts in wages and benefits to keep the carrier afloat.

Now AMR Corp., American's parent, is back in the black, so much so that 874 top executives will receive more than $150 million in stock bonuses next week.

As for the 57,000 rank-and-file employees, they're seeing red.

"We made huge sacrifices," said Dana Davis, an 18-year American employee and spokeswoman for the Assn. of Professional Flight Attendants.

The airline's 18,000 attendants took an across-the-board 16% pay cut and gave up vacation days. "We're not getting anything back for it," Davis said."

Reminds me of the Safeway thing from a few months back, where they negotiated pay and benefit cuts for all their new employees, because otherwise they'd like go bankrupt or something. Then, oddly enough, a couple of months later, they reported record profits. Funny how that works out. Even with the stock options distributed to employees that are allegedly worth a billion now, that doesn't make up for the pay cut the employees took, and plus, what good are stock options when you don't have the money to buy them?

And then there's the matter of the billions of dollars of taxpayer money that was just given to the airlines as bailouts after 9/11.

On the sort of plus side, "Delta Air Lines Inc. stands in contrast. Its chief executive, Gerald Grinstein, has refused to take any extra cash, stock awards, stock options or a pay raise. And Grinstein cut his salary in half during the carrier's bankruptcy proceedings, to $338,000 a year, among the lowest for any major U.S. corporation."

Nothing more need be said. But if you want to read Republicans treating this as just rhetoric that needs to be re-aimed, here you go. The article's pretty good though, but the chart really says it all.

This post over at Worldchanging has a lot of good links, and is a pretty good summary of everything they're trying to get at there. And many of the articles linked to there are full of good ideas. Especially the tool library one, how many things do we have that we don't use that often and don't really want or need the thing, just what it does? Washing machines etc, for one, we don't want the machine, just clean clothes. You're smart folks I bet you can come up with dozens of others.

But the MAIN point of the article is the feel I was trying to get at in the visions post a while back. Some people look at a problem and say we all need to cut back and live like it's the 50s or 1900s or whatever, but a) that's not going to fly with most people, and b) We really don't. But in the end, if they're for the same kinds of things that need to get done, they're on my side, even if I think their reasons aren't always right. That doesn't mean I have to agree with them about everything, or anything like that, but at least we both see the same problem and can work together on some of the solutions, and argue about the others. And frankly, to redo all the systems that have just grown up and been kludged together into something that can work for everybody, and without ruining the world, we're gonna need all the help we can get.

Strip malls are just one of the many signs of things that need to be fixed.

It's kinda sad. Even though I know perfectly well one of the biggest flaws with any kind of hierarchy (such as say, the structure of a business) is that people tell the people above them what they want to hear, not what they really think, I still didn't ask our district manager all the things I wanted to. Partly it's the above mentioned thing, (though the threat to my job really isn't great, and it's not that great a job anyway), and partly it's being pretty much certain in advance what the answer would be. I mean, if I suggest to the DM that "Y'know, if we have to constantly run the store with the bare skeleton crew to have any chance of making the sales per hour goals, then maybe the problem's not us, maybe the problem's the goals," I don't think she'll suddenly have a revelation and agree with me and everything will be happy. Her raise and bonus, after all, depend on making sure the numbers we get are higher than our numbers last year, because the people above her's raises and stock options and bonuses depend on the numbers being higher each quarter. Which means the concerns of the working underclass (that's me and everybody who's not a manager) don't really matter, because her incentives that make her better off are set at odds with the incentives that would make most of the workers (and probably many of the customers) better off. And it's the same all the way up.

Yes, it's true there's plenty of times people could end up standing around "wasting the store's money", but there's also plenty of times when running the store on the bare minimum number of people means there's nobody at the customer desk, or there's nobody to cover when somebody calls out, or there's no time to get cleanup and all the other things done because of the number of people available.

There's a lot of factors to get considered in the scheduling and stuff, but the way the incentives are set up for the people making the schedule, it's almost always going to come down on the side of trying to meet ridiculous arbitrary goals rather than the side of making sure there's enough people to take care of the customers and clean up the store and close down quickly and all the rest.

And of course, the easiest solution to this problem, from my point of view? Quit and find a new job, therefore making this foolishness not really matter to me.