Crowded crowd-funding for solar projects

On Monday, Mosaic announced it would do the first-ever crowd-funding of solar projects, with a $25 minimum investment.  Yesterday I tried to buy in myself but their four new projects are fully funded.  They look like they might be having the same problem that Kiva used to have - more money than projects (it also seems like a different model than Kiva, the money goes directly to the projects rather than paying for a general fund).

Crowd-funding seems like a good way to get micro-investors involved in startups that would otherwise be impossible, to open up a new source of money for investment, to fund smaller projects that are too small for traditional investors, and to fund entirely new and different ventures that venture capital funders find uninteresting.  My impression is that Mosaic serves all but that last interest.  Obviously no one knows if it's going to succeed but it's just as obviously worth a try.  Maybe eco-grandparents will start buying Junior shares in solar projects instead of a stock as a college investment.

The other advantage is for people who want to do something renewable but can't do it on their own property.  Our townhouse has a small roof facing east/west with shading on the east - not an ideal place for solar.  Mosaic might be a better use of money to offset our emissions, and as an offset that others can use.

A modest carbon tax has modest carbon reduction results

Been meaning to highlight Brad Plumer's post on a paper about the effect of a carbon tax on emissions (full paper here).  A tax of $20/ton, with an inflation-adjusted 4% annual increase, knocks emissions down 14% by 2020, and a larger number in 2050 if you believe economic projections that far in the future.

I include my caveat about 2050 because economics modeling is far harder than climate modeling.  In particular I can't tell what assumptions they make about the cost of renewables in the future, which seems like a game-changer to me.

Still this seems a reasonable argument that a carbon tax has only modest benefits.  By all means we should do it, but also use the funding for renewables, and pursue stricter regulation.  One aspect that surprised me is how much money this tax would raise, over a trillion dollars in the next decade.  That can really help with deficit reduction and maintaining social welfare programs as well as renewable energy funding.


UPDATE:  I really should've mentioned that an annual 4% real increase is not enough in their model to drive large decreases in emissions.  The implication is that if you choose a small initial tax then you need a higher annual increase.  The California cap's minimum price is even smaller than this study ($10/ton), and has a 5% annual increase.  Still it's just part of the pricing system, with emission allowances hopefully functioning as the real control on the amount, together with regulation.

Good Yglesias, Bad Yglesias

In the Good Yglesias category, we have "the spice must flow" problem in that stopping the Keystone XL pipeline and other pipeline-fighting as led to a boom in shipping oil by rail.  This correctly points the problem with a regulatory approach to carbon reduction - someone looks for a way around the regulation.   OTOH, oil is not the same as Herbert's spice - it's a lot more price elastic in the long run, and anything running up the price will reduce the quantity purchased.

Regulation is an imperfect substitute for a carbon cap or carbon tax, but it's better than nothing.

For Bad Yglesisas, we have a cursory rejection of the idea that people making over $400,000 could have their entire income taxed at the highest rate instead of just the amount falling in the highest bracket.  The flaw is a simplistic approach Yglesias takes - identify a problem and then pronounce the whole thing dead.  Yes, as he describes, a ten-dollar increase in income could result in tens of thousands of dollars in additional taxes.  He fails to take the next step to see if the problem has a solution.  In this case, just alter the proposal so that the more a person's income exceeds $350,000, the larger the share of that person's income under $200,000 that gets taxed at the top rate.  It satisfies the Republicans' inane criteria of not raising the top rate while getting more tax money out of the top earners.  The solution isn't too difficult.

That's not to say it's a good idea when compared to simply raising the rate as Obama proposes, along with restoring estate tax rates to the 2009 level.  John Sides notes this proposal protects the ultra-rich by going after the rich.  That seems to be a common theme in Republican Party policy.


UPDATE:  Pat Robertson finds a nut.



Climate change would also fall under a "revealed science" category to the extent that category equals "about as proven as you're going to get in science."

That stagflation they predicted in 2009 doesn't seem to be happening

Here's me bloviating in February 2009:

Conservatives choose inflation as a test of whether the stimulus will be a failure

I've seen conservatives railing against the stimulus package as something that will bring inflation without economic growth, or a return to stagflation. Sounds like we've got a good, Republican-chosen, measurable parameter of whether the stimulus fails.

If inflation in the next year or two spikes dangerously far above last year's 3.85%without being caused by something external like an oil shock, then the Republicans turned out to be right. I don't think the absence of inflation by itself proves the stimulus worked, but it will show the downside risk was very low.

Of course, I expect conservatives will attempt to have people forget everything they said about stagflation when the time comes around, but this is one way to make it slightly harder.

For related fun, here are the Republican prophecies of doom at the time of the Clinton 1993 stimulus plan.

Now with the latest action by the Fed, we hear more of the same inflation nonsense from the same people, such as this genius given a February 2009 Op-Ed space in the NY Times:

Thirty Years Later, a Return to Stagflation  

CONGRESS has made a terrible mistake. Amid a rhetorical debate centered on words like “crisis,” “emergency” and “catastrophe,” it acted too fast. While arguments were made about the stimulus bill’s specific components — taxpayer money for condoms, new green cars and golf carts for federal bureaucrats, another round of rebate checks — its more dangerous consequences were overlooked. And now the package threatens a return to the kind of stagflation last seen in the 1970s.

 Be sure to check out the entire entertaining read from the future Vice-Presidential nominee of the GOP.

A "Rentership Society" sounds like a good society

To the Point asks "Is the US becoming a 'Rentership' Society?" as the home ownership rate plummets in the last six years.  I don't see a problem with it.

In the olde times of 15-20 years ago, the ubiquitous 30 year fixed rate mortgage with limited refinancing operated as a useful nudge for increasing the savings rate, but those days are gone.  It now doesn't make that much sense for middle class people to tie up such a large portion of their limited assets in a risky investment.  The few poorer people who could buy, should invest instead in either something safer or something more liquid in case something happens to them like a medical emergency.  Homeowner sale costs also limit job mobility.

Renters are probably somewhat less interested in making community improvements, but they can provide incentives for the same by voting with their feet.  More acceptance of renting can also facilitate more dense housing that works well with renting.  If only we eliminated or greatly reduced the mortgage tax deduction then we'd do a ton to fight sprawl, but that's a dream.

What's apparently not a dream is trend of people moving back from the worst of the exurban sprawl in the US.  That's good, although some of the urban counties they describe that I happen to know - Alameda and Contra Costa - can have plenty of people living pretty far away from the Bay Area's urban core.

A Randian zealot, Alan Greenspan, is partially responsible for the US and global financial meltdown because he openly manipulated the housing market to support his political ideology.  Less manipulation in a rentership society sounds like a better choice.

(FWIW, my wife and I own a townhouse in a 30 unit association.  It's fine, but I can also see us renting.)

And Matt Yglesias followed it with a post on economic bubbles

I have trouble understanding how a smart guy like Yglesias manages to keep going further down this path, but when I've said that he prefers society to always have more younger people than older people, I meant it as a somewhat joking criticism.

The joke's on me, because he's pretty literal about it now as a path for growth:

 [If immigration and lax land use regulation prime a state for population growth] then you don't need any particularly optimistic beliefs to see that the state is primed for certain kinds of investment. We're going to need new houses for these new people in the short-run, and we'll need new schools & hospitals, new car dealerships, and new highways for them in the medium run. So we're investing. And with that investment happening we need new Whataburger franchises and new H-E-Bs and probably new power plants as well. And now suddenly we're on the high equilibrium. We need more accountants and more wedding planners, we're going to need some fancy restaurants, we'll need hotels, we'll need more of everything. And since we'll need more of everything and the price of new homes will remain moderate, we'll expect the population to keep growing as people from around the country tend to move here in search of work.

As for how long that all is supposed to last, he's silent.  Ironic that the very next (not so good) post was about economic bubbles, so he acknowledges issues of unsustainability, while missing his own huge blind spot.

And yes, population growth can help economic growth, but it's unsustainable in any number of senses of the word.

15% estate tax with $100,000 exclusion?

I often disagree with the conservative/libertarian/lukewarmist Tigerhawk blogger, but not always (and it's good that he doesn't take himself too seriously). He had this reaction to Romney's proposal to end the estate tax:

Sure. But also eliminate the step-up in basis at death. (My own view is that the best estate tax would be one with a very low exemption -- say, $100,000 -- but also a tax rate so low that people would not go to a lot of trouble to avoid it. I suspect that a 15% rate with a $100,000 exemption would both generate more revenue and redirect estate planners and lawyers to more productive work.)

I think he might be right, especially if you also include that elimination of step up in basis for purposes of calculating capital gains. I googled around and couldn't find stats on average estates at death, but I doubt it's $100,000 (especially including people with no net estate). Even someone with $200,000 would only be effectively taxed at 7.5%. The current rate is 35% and exempts the first $3.5 million. (UPDATE: actually the exemption is $5 million through 2012. It's then caught up in the Bush tax cut issue - unclear what will happen post 2012.)

Tigerhawk misses that his own proposal might even be more progressive than the current system, assuming it does bring in more money. Most of the money would come from people with estates well over $200k, maybe over $500k. These people are far wealthier than the average American. The obvious downside is while it may be more progressive overall, it catches the moderately wealthy at the expense of giving a huge windfall to the superwealthy.

So of course it's not the ideal estate tax system, which would exempt $50k, start at a rate of 15% and gradually ratchet up to 60-90% at $5m (depending on how effective evasion is), but maybe it's worth considering.

UPDATE: See L's comment below, that an on-paper capital loss from the immediate sale of estate capital items (and due to step up, there should always be a capital loss) can be set against an inheritor's capital gains. You get free money and a tax break on your own taxes. I'd like to get that verified, but it seems plausible and amazing.

My Progressive Caucus/Obama/Ryan budget plan

1. I'd change everything by following Gore's proposal of ending payroll taxes and substituting a carbon tax for them:

But that completely sound approach is even more unlikely to happen than anything listed below, so moving on....

2. I would reinstate Clinton era levels for estate taxes. I'd split the new revenues 50-50 between reducing deficits and reducing income taxes for the top 10% (this would still be a progressive tax shift, because the people who pay estate taxes are far richer than the top 10% of income earners).

3. From the Progressive Caucus Budget Proposal, I'd keep the new tax brackets for millionaires (minus their share of the estate tax revenues), tax capital gains the same as income, add the public option for ObamaRomneyCare, negotiate market prices for Medicare Part D, and reduce defense expenditures by at least as much as they say, 15%-30%, maybe even more. I would keep half of present troop levels in Afghanistan, though, limited to cities, highways, and portions of the country where Karzai didn't steal the election/where the government is perceived as legitimate.

4. From Obama, I'd keep the phaseout of Bush cuts for incomes above $250,000, and of course ObamaRomneyCare.

5. From Ryan's plan, I would adopt the voucher proposal for Medicare, which is basically ObamaRomneyCare applied to seniors, with some changes. I'd include the public option that would basically be existing Medicare, and the vast majority of seniors would probably just stay in that system. I'd index the vouchers to GDP instead of inflation, because medical costs way exceed inflation but cannot exceed GDP increases forever. And I'd include the cost containment mechanisms of ObamaRomneyCare.

Mostly I'm adopting each plan's version of increasing revenues and cutting costs. And since this is my magical pony wish list, I'll keep going.

6. Limit the dependent child tax credit to one per adult, and then create a new and more generous credit for adopted and foster children with no limit on number.

7. Eliminate oil and other corporate subsidies, and farm subsidies.

I'm sure this will all happen, very soon.

Gaddafi out by the end of next week

(UPDATE: guess I'm back to my pre-2008 predictive ability. I still think Gaddafi's toast, though.)

We'll see if this prediction is as bad as my political predictions usually are, although I've improved a bit in recent years. My prediction is based on Gaddafi's attempt to retake eastern Libya with military force, an attempt that's apparently failed. If the opposition could stand up to him miltarily with one week of organizing, then they're only going to get stronger.

I don't know what the long term holds for Libya - the strong tribal structure seems worrying for national unity. I was very mistaken in the case of Iraq to think in early 2003 that chaos would be preferable to the rule of an incompetent tyrant. I won't assume chaos is preferable in Libya either, but I'm hoping the wave of people power in the Arab world might also lead to a different result.

One other note: conservative blowhards condemn Obama for not taking stronger action in Libya, while failing to notice that hundreds of Americans and other foreigners were still in Tripoli. Now that they're gone, Obama is taking stronger action. Adults are moving things forward.

UPDATE: See here for the American version of why it's important to remove the bad guys from power - that clears the way to punish them for their crimes. We didn't do that with the financial leaders of Wall Street, and now they're getting away.

Let the voters decide the California budget, through a pendulum-arbitration-style vote

Jonathan Zasloff has a great idea for addressing California's budget crisis: each of the two main political parties presents a budget to the voters, with an honest description by the Legislative Analyst's office, and the voters get to choose one. There's some hand-wringing in the comments about how this could be established, but a constitutional amendment voter initiative seems like the way to do it to me.

This sounds much like pendulum arbitration, which tends to force each side to be reasonable - if it's not reasonable, then the other side wins. Voters have enacted so many limits on legislative budgeting (and I'm guilty of voting for some of them) that we might as well force voters to take responsibility for this.

My one hesitation is that the passage of Proposition 25 means only a majority and not two-thirds of the legislature is needed to pass a budget. Maybe that will start fixing things. OTOH, this is a way to put taxes and budgets on the same level, instead of requiring a two-thirds vote.

More generally, I think progressives need to get over the fact that conservatives sometimes win voter initiatives, and just get out there and fight for good ones, like Proposition 25 and medical marijuana have proven to be.

Volokh Corrections #28 and #29: Adler should study environmental groups, Lindgren should review abstracts more carefully

Several weeks ago I was listening to Environmental Defense Fund's Insider Podcast where they described how their advocacy of "catch-shares" for commercial fisheries (allocating a percentage of fish caught to individual fishermen, instead of a quota) has created an ownership interest among fishermen that supports sustainable fishing. It was also a short time after the election where the California electorate preserved our premier climate change law, ratifying the way for the second-largest cap-and-trade market in the world to begin functioning in 2012.

About the same time, Jonathan Adler is writing about the "decline of the environmental movement" as it supposedly veers off course. Personally, I'm not surprised that environmental concerns played a lesser role than economic ones in the worst economy since the 1930s. Even then, climate legislation got further at the national level than it previously had in 10 years, California and other states move forward, the EPA will take its own actions on climate, and environmental groups continue to innovate. Adler could benefit from undertaking some research on these issues.

And more recently, Jim Lindgren complains about the pernicious effect of long-term unemployment benefits, quoting a study as finding "a 0.4% increase in the unemployment rate because of extending benefits for up to a total of 99 weeks." What he missed in the study is its main conclusion, that:

Analysis of unemployment data suggests that extended unemployment insurance benefits have not been important factors in the increase in the duration of unemployment or in the elevated unemployment rate.

Yes, it also found a 0.4% increase in unemployment from extending benefits, but that is minor in comparison to the real factors driving long-term unemployment. This makes clear the level of hardship Lindgren and friends would impose on people who are jobless and are sincerely looking.

There's also a bias in the study that suggests the 0.4% figure doesn't represent slackers. The study authors can think of two reasons why extending benefit durations could increase unemployment:

First, the extension of UI benefits, which represents an increase in their value, may reduce the intensity with which UI-eligible unemployed individuals search for work. This could occur because the additional UI benefits reduce the net gains from finding a job and also serve as an income cushion that helps households maintain acceptable consumption levels in the face of unemployment shocks (Chetty 2008). Alternatively, the measured unemployment rate may be artificially inflated because some individuals who are not actively searching for work or who are unwilling to take available jobs are identifying themselves as active searchers in order to receive UI benefits.

A third possibility is the rate is artificially inflated because people who would've given up in the absence of UI benefits accept the condition placed on receiving benefits, that they seek actively seek work and would accept jobs. They're not liars, and no one is being harmed by extending their benefits.

So just like Adler, Lindgren might benefit from studying the subject he's writing about more closely.

Applying the Chilean fiscal model to California state budgets

I've been meaning to blog about this idea for a while:  the Chilean counter-cyclical fiscal strategy could be used at the state level here in California and elsewhere.  The very simple idea is to run a governmental surplus in good times and a deficit in bad times, so the governmental spending reduces overheated economic bubbles and helps speed recovery from recessions.  They also used independent panels of experts to make sure the government isn't just skewing forecasts so it can spend as it desired.

As the link mentions, the panels correctly determined that copper exports were driven up by a bubble and saved the money, which came in very handy when the price collapsed.  So much for the excuses by many Bush-era policymakers that you can never tell if you're in a bubble until it collapses - you can tell (like the gold price bubble we're experiencing now), you just can't predict exactly when it will collapse.

I think the idea would work better if it begins implementation during a non-recession time period, but I'm not sure that's absolutely required.  It would also be interesting whether local level governments could apply it.

Superfreaking lame response on global cooling issue

The Superfreakonomics publishers are scurrying around and shutting down online access to the horrible chapter on climate change that says "don't worry, but if you do, spew sulfates instead."

Much great stuff tearing it apart has been written elsewhere (DeLong's as good as any here). I'm just going to focus on this accusation:

The chapter opens with the “global cooling” story — the claim that 30 years ago there was a scientific consensus that the planet was cooling, comparable to the current consensus that it’s warming.

Um, no. Real Climate has the takedown. What you had in the 70s was a few scientists advancing the cooling hypothesis, and a few popular media stories hyping their suggestions. To the extent that there was a consensus, it was that there wasn’t much evidence for anything, and more research was needed.

Dubner's response to this accusation regarding how they hyped the global cooling "controversy" of the 1970s:

The real purpose of the chapter is figuring out how to cool the Earth if indeed it becomes catastrophically warmer. (That is the “global cooling” in our subtitle. If someone interprets our brief mention of the global-cooling scare of the 1970’s as an assertion of “a scientific consensus that the planet was cooling,” that feels like a willful misreading.)

Okay, let's read what they said in the chapter. Unhelpfully, their publisher has been shutting down online access to what they actually said. You can currently get the entire relevant chapter here, but in case they shut that down, I'm retyping the relevant part below (but before that - Dear Superfreakonomics publisher: I assume you won't even notice my tiny blog, but if you do, I strongly discourage filing a DMCA notice against me. I will most definitely file a counter-notice. Any groundless DMCA notice such as one filed against what your authors describe as a "brief mention" in their book could be construed as fraudulent. I urge you to consult your lawyers instead. Hugs, Brian):

The headlines have been harrowing, to say the least.

"Some experts believe mankind is on the threshold of a new pattern of adverse global climate for which it is ill-prepared," one New York Times article declared. It quoted climate researchers who argued that "this climatic change poses a threat to the people of the world."

A Newsweek article citing a National Academy of Sciences report, warned that climatic change "would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale." Worse yet, "climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for climatic change or even to allay its effects."

Who in his or her right mind wouldn't be scared of global warming?

But that's not what these scientists were talking about. These articles, published in the mid-1970s, were predicting the effects of global cooling.

Alarm bells had rung because the average ground temperature in the Northern Hemisphere had fallen by .5 degrees Fahrenheit (.28 degrees Celsius) from 1945 to 1968. Furthermore, there had been a large increase in snow cover, and between 1964 and 1972, a decrease of 1.3 percent in the amount of sunshine hitting the United States. Newsweek reported that the temperature decline, while relatively small in absolute terms, "has taken the planet about a sixth of the way towards the Ice Age average."

The big fear was a collapse of the agricultural system. In Britain, cooling had already shortened the growing season by two weeks. "[T]he resulting famines could be catastrophic," warned the Newsweek article. Some scientists proposed radical warming solutions such as "melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot."

These days, of course, the threat is the opposite. The earth is no longer thought to be too cool but rather too warm.

So. Standard denialist argument to the effect that scientists were wrong in the 1970s so they're no more likely to be right today. The rest of the chapter then goes on to point the oh-so-easy solution if it turns out that global warming is true.

Going back to Krugman's critique that Dubner calls a "willful misreading," I don't see that at all. Dubner and Levitt portray the media misunderstanding of the state of science in the 1970s as the actual state of science then, and for no other purpose than to downplay current knowledge.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, even in the 1970s the science leaned towards a prediction of warming. Try wiki articles global cooling and history of climate change science for more.

Too bad the Superfreakonomics authors and editors didn't spend a half-hour on wikipedia before writing up their results, and denying the reality of what they wrote now isn't helping.

Discounting dilemma for enviros - Reilly and Stern can't both be right (I think)

Climate Progress quotes the Republican congressional claims that cap-and-trade legislation will cost $3100 per household in increased energy costs. They came up with this figure by taking MIT Professor John Reilly's estimate of total costs of the legislation up to 2050 and then dividing the figure by total households. Reilly has issued a letter protesting how completely wrong this is and a misrepresentation of the study. Among several mistakes, the Republicans used a 0% discount rate, saying we have no preference between incurring a cost now and incurring the same cost in 40 years. Reilly, by contrast, uses a 4% discount rate typical for the value that the stock market exceeds inflation.

The Stern Review famously concluded that costs from unchecked climate change between now and 2100 will be very large. Part of the reason is that Stern assumes a low discount rate, about that of government bonds (which I believe is around 1%). To confuse matters, or maybe just confusing me, Stern assumes a near-zero "social discount rate" which I think is different from the monetary discount rate, but regardless, Stern uses rates of 1% or less.

The dilemma for those of us supporting action on climate change is that Reilly and Stern can't both be right. It might not be a problem for Republican leaders to talk out of both sides of their mouths, but the reality-based community can't accept one set of discount rate assumptions for assessing costs of climate change and another for assessing costs of actions to address change.

So it's fine for Climate Progress to quote without dissent Reilly's estimate of cap-and-trade costs of $340 per household, but it's contradictory to also say Stern's discount rate wasn't flawed. I'm sure that the bloggers there just overlooked the contradiction and that many other enviros made similar mistakes. It's also possible for both Reilly and Stern to be right on their overall conclusions, based on many factors beyond discounting. But Reilly and Stern can't both be right on their cost figures and discounting assumptions.

FWIW, which isn't much, I'm leaning towards Stern on discount rates for John Quiggin's general reasons. I also suspect the assumptions on the historical rate of return for stocks will have to be reduced after recent years, even long after this recession fades from memory.

So yes, climate change is going to be very bad. I also suspect doing something about it won't be cheap. Better then to get started soon on a big and expensive project.


UPDATE: Just noticed the first Climate Progress post is a guest post and not by Joe Romm, so I've changed the wording throughout. Joe and his guest blogger are contradicting each other.

Wall Street execs shocked to learn that life isn't fair

I haven't weighed in on the small-potatoes scandal of the AIG bonuses, but I think there is a useful connection to the bigger issue of bank nationalization.

Apparently a few of the AIG millionaire execs who might be taxed out of their bonuses have little to do with the problem (a tangent - interesting legal issues with taxing bonuses, and I don't think anyone knows the answer about legality). It's impossible to sort between the undeserving and the deserving though, so the fair approach according to the execs is to give all of them the money.

The problem is that the money comes from taxpayers who rescued the company from bankruptcy that would've voided the obligation to pay the bonuses. It's hardly fair to taxpayers to punish them twice for something they have even less relation to than these AIG execs, even the less-sinful ones. As between unfairness to the AIG execs or unfairness to the taxpayers, I think it's time for some rain to fall on the heads of the execs.

The same issue arises for toxic assets - if the market is undervaluing them due to a lack of liquidity, it would be unfair for the government to take them from banks at a near-market value. On the other hand, if they are truly toxic assets, then taxpayers are screwed if the government buys at inflated value. Finally, if we buy the assets at near-market prices, the banks would go under and their creditors would suffer potential disastrous losses.

My guess is that the best thing is to make the creditors suffer as disastrous losses as they can bear before overloading the international financial system. Nationalization, government takeover of toxic assets, and partial payments to bank creditors should be the alternative to massive subsidies or to bankruptcy. Obama's taking it to easy on them.

For an alternative view that's far better informed than me, try Brad DeLong.

Conservatives choose inflation as a test of whether the stimulus will be a failure

I've seen conservatives railing against the stimulus package as something that will bring inflation without economic growth, or a return to stagflation. Sounds like we've got a good, Republican-chosen, measurable parameter of whether the stimulus fails. If inflation in the next year or two spikes dangerously far above last year's 3.85% without being caused by something external like an oil shock, then the Republicans turned out to be right. I don't think the absence of inflation by itself proves the stimulus worked, but it will show the downside risk was very low.

Of course, I expect conservatives will attempt to have people forget everything they said about stagflation when the time comes around, but this is one way to make it slightly harder.

For related fun, here are the Republican prophecies of doom at the time of the Clinton 1993 stimulus plan.

It's not the idea, it's the execution

I hope the scan from my little invention notebook in 1997 is readable. The video is what somebody else has done with their own version of the idea to make it a reality. I did play around with the idea way back when, and even had some prototypes made, but that was as far as I got. I've thought for some time now that carrying out a good idea is far harder than having a good idea, something that really struck me when I watched the documentary on the fall of Enron. The Snuggie people understand execution.

Requiring parity for autoworkers - what about management?

Kevin Drum has a good point:

"[Republican Senator] Corker today put forward a plan that would impose far more stringent auto industry restructuring standards than the House bill. It would reduce the wages and benefits of union workers at domestic car manufacturers by requiring the total labor costs of GM and Chrysler to be 'on par' with those in non-union U.S. plants of foreign automakers such as Toyota and Honda."

OK, but I have one question: Is Corker also insisting that the total labor costs of GM's white collar management staff be on on par with those of Toyota and Honda? Just curious.

I doubt it. And token one-time $1 salaries for CEOs isn't a response.

I'm in

I've been sitting on a fair amount of cash and just today put a large chunk on a socially responsible index fund (DSEFX), that tracks the S&P 500 pretty closely. We'll soon see if now was the right time.

Virtually all of McCain's "gas tax holiday" savings would go to refinery owners

I'm outsourcing this post to Dean Baker. Summary: refineries are the choke point in gasoline production, so they can easily raise prices if the gas tax is lifted. No one else will get the benefit.

UPDATE: I think this is a corollary of a discussion at Gristmill a while back, to the effect that a modest tax on oil imports wouldn't really raise prices and reduce consumption but rather would claw back some profits from overseas producers. In that case, the environmental value isn't so much in the existence of the tax but in what could be done with it.