Mark Hickey wrote in message . ..
(JP) wrote:
What act are you talking about? The rules you referenced were released
as required under the existing Clean Air Act. Nothing new there,
except for the rules that the Sierra Club forced the Bush
administration to revise.

Sure if you consider the portion of the Clean Air Act that the Clinton
administration slipped in AFTER Bush was elected, but before he
actually took office. Clinton did nothing to actually improve air
quality. Bush reworked the act to make it both evironmentally AND
economically viable, and turned it into law. Like it or not, it's the
biggest improvement in over a decade (spin it as you will).

You really don't know what you're talking about. You don't seem to be
able to differentiate between the Clean Air Act and EPA rule-making,
statute and regulation. Such confusion is practically a requirement
for you to twist history in this way.

Yes, as a lame duck, the Clinton Administration did try to implement
some EPA rules which Bush promptly rolled back. I believe this
included the arsenic drinking water regulations. Contrary to the
implication in your tangled statement above, these were not rushed.
They had been studied for years and the rules were made final as a
last bit of business for the outgoing administration. There was
nothing wrong with Clinton finalizing rules for issues that had been
carefully studied. What was stupid was for Bush to rescind them
arbitrarily simply because they were created by Clinton and were at
odds with some of the Bush corporate backers.

For God's sake, that maybe the US Senate is not the last word on
whether Kyoto "is a really, really bad idea".

The whole premise of the Kyoto accord is to reduce carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere. As written, a HUGE portion of the cost for doing this
falls to the US - a crippling amount, actually.

Probably because a HUGE portion of greenhouse gasses are emited by the
US, way out of proportion to its population.

We went over (and over and over) this subject recently. In the end,
carbon dioxide in the atmoshere - if the worst-case scenario is played
out - will result in warming totalling a whopping 0.2 degrees C in the
next century. The computer models used to justify Kyoto predict HUGE
increases in temperature over the last 25 years - increases that
simply didn't happen.

This is just plain nonsense. The computer models are being refined
daily to take into account the latest observations and better
understanding of the variables involved. As the models get more
sophisticated, the situation looks worse.

You might wanna check with the folks at NASA to see what the real
"warming trends" look like...

http://www.ghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/MSU/msusci.html
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/head...d13aug98_1.htm

Which should I consider NASA to be an independent source? Under the
Bush administration there have been numerous instances of government
agencies removing web sites that contained information at odds with
the official right-wing party line on the environment.

See Paul Krugman ins today's NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/25/opinion/25KRUG.html

Can't - it requires a subscription. Besides, the NYT isn't the most
reliable, unbiased source of news on the planet (akin to me posting a
link to something on Rush's blog). ;-)

A. It only requires registration, not subscription.

B. You should register just to read their apology for their
misrepresentation of the intelligence on WMD before the war. You would
be hard put to provide any proof that the NYT actually has any of the
liberal bias that the right wing so loves to attribute to it. If you
want liberal bias in a daily newspaper, you pretty much have to go to
the UK Guardian or Independent.

C. Paul Krugman is without a doubt a progressive economist. He is also
without a doubt widely respected in his field, with a PhD from MIT in
Economics, holding an endowed chair at Princeton, and the recipient of
an important economics prize. You'd better have your ducks in a row if
you're going to try to make an argument counter to his (or talk
really, really loud).

I posted figures - investment increased dramatically following the tax
cuts.

What figures? From where?

This isn't the link I used, but it has reams of information on the
increasae in investment...

http://www.house.gov/jec/fiscal/tx-g...al/optimal.htm

Hardly a definitive document. It was issued by a Republican-controlled
Congressional Committee to support a decrease in the capital gains
tax. I am not qualified to critique it, but it is not exactly a
peer-reviewed article from a major journal of economics. Furthermore,
it is discussing the relationship between the capital gains tax
specifically and economic growth. It has almost nothing to do with the
question we were discussing, whether investment increased enough after
the Bush taxcuts to stimulate the economy significantly. The document
you reference dates to 1997, so it obviously does NOT show that
"investment increased dramatically following the (Bush) tax cuts".

I already did. It takes into account the 900k gained since last
August. Again, see Krugman.

Lessee... 2 million minus 900 thousand equals 2 million. Is Krugman
the guy in charge of their subscription statistics? ;-)

No, it is more like about 3 million jobs lost minus 900 thousand
(crappy) jobs gained back.

Or, you could just throw more money at the failing public schools and
expect them to get better. They won't - it's clear there's little
correlation between money spent and results.

Show your evidence. I think that if you made an effort to correlate an
INCREASE in spending to results you would find there is quite a strong
positive correlation.

Washington DC has the
highest spending per student and the worst results.

This isn't evidence, it's what a statistician would call an anecdote.
But besides that, to test your thesis, that "there's little
correlation between money spent and results", we would have to try
spending (statistically significant) more money in the DC public
schools to see whether kids' performance improves. The fact that there
is a lot of money spent there now does not prove that it could not be
helped by more money. (My daughter goes to a top private school in the
DC suburbs, and believe me, we pay a lot more than DC spends per
student- I wonder what results DC would get if it spent the same
amount per student.)

Until the schools are held accountable to some measurable standard,
it's NOT going to get better. I wish there was another alternative
(one that would work, that is). Throwing money at the problem
certainly won't fix it.

No one has ever actually tried spending more money on schools to fix
them. What has happened over the last 25 years or so is that the
property tax revolt begun in California has pretty much spread
everywhere and reduced the spending (adjusted for inflation) per
student. Of course, some places have always been poor and have always
had crappy schools.

The large number who don't pay federal income tax nevertheless pay
Medicare and Social Security payroll tax. Their tax revenues are being
used to cover part of the deficit created by the Bush taxcuts. In
other words, those payroll taxes are being used as general tax revenue
by the government. Why shouldn't they be entitled to a taxcut as well?

Because the two programs are funded in expectation of receiving an
eventual return.

Then why is George Bush talking about cutting that return? Answer:
because the money is being spent as general revenue to cover deficit
spending, and the government will be unable to repay the Trust Fund
without a major tax increase if they do not eventually significantly
reduce the benefits.

What happens to the premiums is an entirely
different issue - you won't get a refund on your car insurance if part
of the premiums are spent on something other than paying out accident
claims, for example.

Where do you come up with this stuff? It sounds good on the surface
but it is completely delusional. Are you being deluded or are you
trying to delude us?

That is a completely false analogy. The money we pay in Social
Security taxes is earmarked SOLELY for Social Security. When it is
used to cover the deficit, the US Treasury loans money from the Trust
Fund to a general revenue account; the Trust Fund receives Tresury
Bonds in return.

In the real world, when someone borrows money from an institution with
no intention of repaying it, it is called fraud. A better analogy
would be if I invested my money in a stock, let's call it Enron, and
the management of Enron sucked all the value out of the company
leaving me with nothing but worthless paper stock certificates.

O'Neill did not write a book, he gave extensive interview; and he was
already incredibly wealthy. It strains credulity to suggest that he
criticized the policy-making process in the Bush White House for the
money.

Money, power, fame - whatever.

What power, what fame? He didn't get power, he was already famous.

Clarke is obviously a liar, based on nothing more than his own
statements.

Give an example of where he lied.

Give them a refund on their Social Security Tax.

Do we cut their benefit as well then?

They are already paying enough to receive the current Social Security
benefit and more. What we are doing already is talking about cutting
the Social Security benefit so that the wealthy can get income tax
cuts. Why not a Social Security taxcut, then?

They pay a lot more than 4% federal income taxes. Just because you
refuse to admit that Social Security and Medicare taxes are income
taxes does not mean that they are not. Social Security and Medicare
taxes ARE federal income taxes.

They are programs that return value directly to the investors - just
like any other insurance policies / annuities. Are you suggesting
that we should rework the system so that some pay in a lot more than
others for the same benefits?

No. I am suggesting that we should rework the US tax structure so that
we do not have to rob the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds to
pay for taxcuts to the very wealthy.

But I'm not even saying that they should pay less; I'm saying that the
top 2% should pay more. Those people making a quarter of a million a
year under the old tax rates were actually living pretty comfortably.
I think they'll survive. Probably won't even have to cut back on their
maid service.

What entitles you to demand that they subsidize your tax bill? Just
curious. I personally think that ~28% is more than enough for anyone
to pay.

I don't think they are subsidizing my tax bill or should. I think
their affluence benefits in a manner that is all out of proportion to
their relatively low tax rates.

I don't see a direct connection - the jobs we're sending overseas tend
to be those Americans don't really want to do.

That is a distortion. The jobs we are sending overseas are jobs that
we don't want to do for the wages that they are paying to the workers
in the Third World. No, the fact is that they are taking jobs that
paid a "living wage" in the US and offshoring them to people for wages
that would not even be legal if they paid them here. It goes right
back to what I said- it extrapolates to an averaged standard of living
between the US and the Third World.

Yes, there are
exceptions - some of which are getting a LOT of visibility (especially
in the computer industry). But no matter what we do, the global
economy will continue to change and adapt - the move will be away from
the manufacturing sector to the service sector.

The manufacturing sector will grow as long as the worldwide standard
of living increases.

We could impose
artificial limits on sending production overseas, but that would only
mean that our ability to remain competitive would dwindle.

Not at all.

I guess I'm a believer that the economy will always adjust to the
situation at hand.

It will but a lot of people will be unhappey with the adjustments.

Permit me to suggest that it's just "what you've been told". There
are certainly localized issues, but overall I don't see anything
worthy of the word "crisis" going on.

It has nothing to do with what we've been told and everything to do
with the reality of the job market.

I would hardly try to extrapolate a single anecdotal data point into a
nationwide trend, personally.

It was an illustration of a point, not an extrapolation.

Besides, they are using me for
something else I'm very good at (making me more valuable to them than
I would be in Iraq).

And they've got all the poor slobs they need in Iraq already, which
certainly indicates something to me- a lot of desperate people. (There
have been some things written in the aftermath of Berg's murder about
how economic conditions here are driving people to seek their fortune
in Iraq.)

So if I were to extrapolate the trend, it would
have to show 100% employment at higher-than-ever salaries. ;-)

You must be very proud. Perhaps your good fortune, which runs counter
to the real trend for the middle class (longer periods of
unemployment, less job mobility, lower real salaries) has something to
do with why you are so callous about the economic realities of 2004
and the future.

JP