Tom Naughton

I’m back from Washington, D.C. — the belly of the beast — after delivering a speech there.  Time to resume posting rounds from my on-going debate with my Hollywood pal Paul.

Round 15(a) – Paul

Tom –

Amid our last exchange, which started with a Krugman column, I gleaned your interest in Economics is limited to “Theory”.  And you are not a frequent reader of daily or weekly financial news.  As evidenced by your balking when  asked if you could produce articles from FORBES, FORTUNE, or W J S to support your contempt for the Federal Reserve.

Are you sure your interest in Economics is genuine?  If indeed it is, then financial news should interest you every bit as much.  FORBES, FORTUNE and WJS should be your ‘favorite’ sources.  They are the professionals at reporting financial news.

One has to see how Theory plays out every day.  When affected by the variables of every day events.  And if you’re not tracking financial news, you can’t put your theory into any real-world context.  Which makes it easier, of course, to be  ideologically rigid.

Which makes me wonder if your views would change if challenged by the intrigues reported every day on financial pages.  It could be you have placed yourself in an intellectual vacuum.  And judging from those websites you referenced, I would guess that is your case.

If you were following financial news, on a daily or weekly basis, you would understand that corporate CEO’s miscalculate all the time.  You would know that major companies frequently engage in extralegal schemes.  And that perfectly viable companies are often driven into bankruptcy.

When you see these stories routinely reported, over a period of years, you develop a certain cynicism with regards  to corporations.  Which gives you an appreciation for government regulators.  An appreciation ‘you’ lack by ignoring financial news.

I am sending you (separately) an article first published in THE NEW YORKER in October of 2010.  “Confounding Fathers” is actually 7 pages long.  So if you don’t have time to read it, I certainly understand.  In short, the author traces most Tea Party beliefs to radical conservatives of the Cold War era.  Which is interesting because I recognized the roots of several arguments ‘you’ have parroted.

I am also sending you (separately) a report from yesterday’s N Y TIMES.  Regarding the surprising health of America’s manufacturing sector.  It seems that a cheap dollar has boosted exports dramatically.  In fact, this is precisely the kind  of story you miss by ignoring financial news.

Paul

 

Round 15(a) – Tom

Paul –

Amid our last exchange, which started with a Krugman column, I gleaned your interest in Economics is limited to “Theory”.  And you are not a frequent reader of daily or weekly financial news.  As evidenced by your balking when asked if you could produce articles from FORBES, FORTUNE, or W J S to support your contempt for the Federal Reserve.

Like I said, I’m not interested in the daily movements of the stock market, which companies earned an extra 3 cents per share this quarter, which executives are moving up in the world, etc.  I find that stuff boring.

Are you sure your interest in Economics is genuine?  If indeed it is, then financial news should interest you every bit as much.  FORBES, FORTUNE and WJS should be your ‘favorite’ sources.  They are the professionals at reporting financial news.  One has to see how Theory plays out every day.  When affected by the variables of every day events.  And if you’re not   tracking financial news, you can’t put your theory into any real-world context.  Which makes it easier, of course, to be  ideologically rigid.

I’d say reading 30 or so books on economics is a sign of genuine interest, yes … and no, I don’t need to follow the daily financial news to see how economic theory plays out.  We don’t change economic policies every other day, so the every-other-day shifts in markets don’t tell us anything.  The effects of economic policies show up in the long term.  Many of the books I’ve read (especially those by Thomas Sowell) go back through history and demonstrate how changes in economic factors affected the next several years, if not decades.

Which makes me wonder if your views would change if challenged by the intrigues reported every day on financial pages.  It could be you have placed yourself in an intellectual vacuum.  And judging from those websites you referenced, I would guess that is your case.

What exactly is being reported in the financial pages that would challenge the theories of economics I believe?  And in case you’ve forgotten, the blogs I referenced are written by people who work in finance, and what they wrote was later confirmed by sources you deemed credible.  So are you actually criticizing me for linking to writers who were proved correct, simply because you haven’t heard of them before?

Forming opinions on economic theories based on daily financial news is useless.  If you believe otherwise, I suggest you review the past decade.  When housing prices and stocks related to housing were rising steadily, the daily financial news was full of glowing reports about the health of the economy.  People who’ve read and actually understand the work of Friedrich Hayek — Peter Schiff being a prime example — warned that the apparent prosperity was a bubble based on an artificial increase in the money supply and that we were headed for a crash. Naturally, the usual pundits pooh-poohed his prediction — By gosh, look at the rising prices!  The housing market has never been this strong!  Blah-blah-blah.

In the excellent book “The Big Short,” Michael Lewis also recounts how quite a few people who understood the economics involved saw where the housing market was ultimately headed and made billions by betting on a crash.  Their colleagues thought they were nuts … right up until they were proved right.  (So much for “nobody saw this coming.”)

So who was right, Paul?  The financial reporters who wrote glowingly about the health of the economy based on day-to-day market reports, or the people who took the long view based on their understanding of an economic theory — Hayek’s — that has performed as predicted over and over?  Who would you say had a better understanding of what was actually happening with the economy — the people who read FORTUNE, or the people who read Hayek?

If you were following financial news, on a daily or weekly basis, you would understand that corporate CEO’s miscalculate all the time.  You would know that major companies frequently engage in extralegal schemes.

None of which disproves anything I believe about economics.  Of course CEOs miscalculate.  Of course big companies fail.  That’s always been the case, and nothing in libertarian economic theories would suggest otherwise.  The difference between you and me is that I believe they should be allowed to fail, not transfer their losses to the taxpayers.  Nor do I have to read Forbes to know that some executives break the law.  Again, the difference between you and me is that I don’t believe making illegal activities double-super-illegal is going to make a difference.

And that perfectly viable companies are often driven into bankruptcy.

You’ll have to explain your definition of “viable.”  If a company goes bankrupt, it isn’t viable — or necessary.  (Although I’d make an exception for the companies in Illinois that are going bankrupt because the “progressive” government there isn’t paying what it owes them.)

When you see these stories routinely reported, over a period of years, you develop a certain cynicism with regards to corporations.

Did you already forget that reply in which I explained that libertarians believe people act out of self-interest?  Isn’t that a cynical attitude?  You’re still arguing from the position that we believe the people running corporations are saints.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Which gives you an appreciation for government regulators.  An appreciation ‘you’ lack by ignoring   financial news.

Paul, if you really and truly keep up on the news, you should have also developed a certain cynicism about government regulators by now.  You have a major blind spot there because you believe (against all evidence) that while the people who run businesses act out of their own self-interest, government regulators don’t.  A true cynic would realize that giving a small group of people the power to pick economic winners and losers will always lead to corruption.  Only an idealist would believe that giving someone the title of “government regulator” magically transforms him into someone who only cares about what’s good for society.

I am sending you (separately) an article first published in THE NEW YORKER in October of 2010.  “Confounding Fathers” is actually 7 pages long.  So if you don’t have time to read it, I certainly understand.  In short, the author traces most Tea  Party beliefs to radical conservatives of the Cold War era.  Which is interesting because I recognized the roots of several  arguments ‘you’ have parroted.

I read through the article.  Not sure what salient point you believe it makes, other than some right-wingers are conspiracy nuts.  Some left-wingers are conspiracy nuts too.  (I’m going to assume you don’t believe the Bush administration blew up the World Trade Center.)

I had to chuckle at the term “extreme right wing” in the article.  As Bernie Goldberg pointed out in his book “Bias,” you can find thousand of references to the “extreme right wing” in media news stories, but you’ll almost never find a reference to the “extreme left wing” … because in the minds of left-leaning reporters, there’s no such thing as an extreme left-winger.

I am also sending you (separately) a report from yesterday’s NY TIMES.  Regarding the surprising health of America’s manufacturing sector.  It seems that a cheap dollar has boosted exports dramatically.  In fact, this is precisely the kind of story you miss by ignoring financial news.

I don’t need to read daily financial news to know that a declining dollar boosts exports, because:

1) It’s an obvious and expected effect, and

2) I have personal experience with that effect.  About a third of my income last year was from sales of my trademark and patent docketing system, much of it coming from firms outside the U.S.  When the dollar tumbled, my sales went up as foreign firms rushed in to take advantage of the exchange rate.  Those firms also elected to pay for the system up front instead of stretching payments over six months (an option I offer), just in case the dollar rises again.

I presume you sent that article in order to suggest that spending trillions of dollars we don’t have and creating new magic money to cover those debts isn’t so bad after all, since the resulting decline in the value of the dollar is good for exports.

Now … here’s where actually studying economics instead of forming opinions based on the daily news make a difference:  In economics, as in physics and chemistry, actions produce corresponding reactions.  The essay by Bastiat on the broken-window fallacy that I linked (and which I’m sure you’ll never read) refers to them as the seen and unseen effects.  The broken window benefits the glass-maker (the seen effect), but it harms the other merchants the baker won’t patronize this month because he had to buy a new window (the unseen effect).  Most daily news reports focus on the seen effects, but few reporters ask themselves about the unseen effects.

Does a declining dollar benefit exporters, including those of us who export software?  Yup.  I benefitted.  That’s the seen effect.  But who are the unseen losers?  I can name a few:

1) Anyone who buys anything imported.  If a declining dollar makes exports cheaper, it correspondingly makes imports more expensive.  So everyone who buys from overseas — whether they’re buying finished products or parts for their own products — loses.  This will, of course, include low-income people who buy inexpensive clothes, shoes, and other necessities made outside the U.S.

2) My girls.  Whatever the immediate effects on exports, the dollar is declining because the Federal Reserve is creating new magic money to cover the federal government’s massive debts.  Someday my girls will be expected to pay those debts.  I’m not interested in saddling their generation with a massive debt burden so I can sell a few more software systems overseas today.  When the massive debt crashes our economy — and it will — none of us will be suggesting that a temporary boost to exporters was a worthwhile tradeoff.

3) Everyone who doesn’t have the skill or luck to invest successfully.  If the dollar’s purchasing power is declining (which is certainly is), that means salaries and savings accounts are losing value.  Some people are able to invest and receive high enough returns to stay ahead of inflation, but they tend to be the financially sophisticated types.  Poor people, working stiffs, and little old ladies with savings accounts — the kinds of people you claim to care about — are simply going to see the value of their dollars dwindle.  You don’t need to read FORBES to understand that.

By the way, if the dollar is declining in value and boosting exports as a result, that means we have significant inflation — the declining value of currency is the very definition of inflation.  But earlier, you sent me an essay by Paul Krugman (who is never wrong because he teaches at Princeton) in which he claimed we have very little inflation.  So which article do you believe?  Is creating all that new magic money out of thin air devaluing the dollar or not?  While educating yourself on economics by reading the daily business news, have you formed any consistent economic beliefs?  Or do you simply believe whatever you read next in the NY Times?

Tom

 

Round 15(b) – Paul

Tom –

I think it’s great you  personally profited from the weaker dollar.  And your complaint is ‘what’?

I think the weaker dollar could only become a problem if the U.S. were to suffer a military disaster.  Like some cheap but effective missile sinks a carrier.  And our response is impotent.  Or maybe some dirty nuke melts down L A Harbor.  These are the type of events, coupled with huge debt-load, that could crash the dollar.  But even with a surplus, events like these are trouble!  Like 9/11 for instance.  We had a surplus then.

But getting back to the debt and deficit.  If they are time bombs that could crash the dollar, let’s all chip in to pay them down as soon as possible.  The rich could easily help and many of them want to.  But Libertarians would have us believe our only choice is going back to a Coolidge state.  Like 300 million people could live with a government that was inadequate when the country had closer to 100 million.

To think this goal is more realistic than everyone paying more taxes is absolutely asinine.  It would be so much cheaper if everyone took a smaller paycheck now.  Hedge funds could be paying 35% instead of 15%.  And hey, if we’re patriotic, and working for a common good, paying down the debt should be our national priority.  But oddly people who claim to know “economic theory” are telling us a Coolidge state is the only way to go.   And their acolytes in Congress have  been totally obstructing the more realistic approach of paying down our debt the old fashioned way.

Tom I think you’re generalizing.  Why assume that FORTUNE readers had no worries with regards to over-inflated housing prices?  And why assume the business press wrote ‘glowingly’ about the housing bubble years?  I’m sure if you went back you’d find a number of stories concerning sub-prime mortgages and consumer debt.  Those issues didn’t just spring to life after the Financial Crisis.

In fact, when Bush ran for re-election, back in 2004, several pundits noted his job creation record was actually pretty bad. Which indicated, way back then, that our economy was only prospering on paper (instead of actually growing).  And every reader of business news could guess that the collapse of Bear Sterns, in March 2008, was a harbinger of things to come. You didn’t need to study Hayek to realize something ominous was in the process of unraveling.

I am sending you, separately, THE NY TIMES, year-end weather stats.  Which strongly suggest Global Warming is real.  In fact, just before Christmas, THE WASHINGTON POST carried a piece about some coastal city in Virginia where flooding has become increasingly serious.  But when the city attempted to hold hearings, on what to do about the problem, a bunch of Tea Party militants showed up to heckle and make sure than no constructive discussion could possibly take place.  And when asked why they were so obnoxious, the Tea Partiers explained that the hearing lent credence to Global Warming theories which they obviously disdained.  Sorry I didn’t send the  article to you.  Because you should know the intellectual company you place yourself amongst.

Paul

 

Round 15(b) – Tom

Greetings, Paul –

Ahhhh, Sunday … time to relax, hang out with the girls, explore the woods behind the house, and write a long, wonkish reply to my favorite socialist

Tom I think it’s great you  personally profited from the weaker dollar.  And your complaint is ‘what’?

I already explained my complaint.  The dollar is weak because the Federal Reserve is creating new magic money out of thin air to paper over our massive federal deficits.  I’m not interested in dumping massive debts on the next generation or reducing the current value of salaries and savings accounts just so I can sell a few more software systems today.

I think the weaker dollar could only become a problem if the U.S. were to suffer a military disaster.

You’re basing that opinion on what, exactly?  When people barely able to pay their bills see the buying power of their salaries or savings accounts reduced, is that not a problem in your economic worldview?  Inflation is a tax on the people least able to afford it.  Their devalued dollars now represent less wealth.  But the wealth didn’t disappear; it changed hands.  The wealth they lose ends up in the pockets of 1) the government, who spends it, and 2) the wealthy bankers who took the government’s IOUs and used them as assets on which they could write loans and collect interest – money for nothing and your chicks for free.  Any liberal whose bleeding heart is still beating should be outraged by the whole lousy deal.

Like some cheap but effective missile sinks a carrier.  And our response is impotent.  Or maybe some dirty nuke melts down L A Harbor.  These are the type of events, coupled with huge debt-load, that could crash the dollar.  But even with a surplus, events like these are trouble!  Like 9/11 for instance.  We had a surplus then.

The debt load will eventually sink us even if a cheap but effective missile doesn’t.  We’re well on our way to becoming another Greece.  If do ever end up in another major war, we won’t be able to afford to fight it – who’s going to lend us the money?  The Chinese?  How would we pay it back?

We never had a surplus.  The supposed surplus was the result of spending Social Security revenues instead of saving them for future payouts.  We now have trillions of dollars in unfunded forward liability as a result.  It would be equivalent to me buying a bunch of expensive goodies I can’t actually afford, taking the “no payments until 2013!” option, then declaring myself in “surplus” because I have still money in my checking account.

But getting back to the debt and deficit.  If they are time bombs that could crash the dollar, let’s all chip in to pay them down as soon as possible.

By “let’s all chip in,” you of course mean “let’s all get together and raise taxes on the rich.”

The rich could easily help and many of them want to.

As a longtime observer of leftist (ahem) “thinking” on economic issues, I’ve noticed a pattern:

Good economy:  “With such a robust economy, surely the rich, who are benefiting more than everyone else, should be willing to pay higher taxes and share more of their outsized gains.”

Bad economy:  “With such a lousy economy, surely the rich should be willing to pay higher taxes and shoulder more of the burden.”

Good economy, bad economy, mediocre economy, it doesn’t matter … the left’s appetite for spending other people’s money is never sated.  That’s why we have a debt crisis.

Are you aware of who actually pays income taxes in this country and who doesn’t?  Here are the figures:

The top 1% of income earners pay 40% of all income taxes.  The top 5% pay 57% of all income taxes.  The top 10% pay 68% of all income taxes.  The bottom 50% — half of all wage earners – pay nothing or nearly nothing.  Many “rich” people already pay more than 50% in combined federal, state and local taxes, yet you want them to pay even more so the government won’t have to reduce spending.  (That’s an impossible scenario, however.  More on that later.)

Paul, if you feel morally entitled to confiscate other people’s incomes for you own benefit, be a man about it.  Buy a gun and start robbing rich people.  Asking the government to commit theft on your behalf is cowardly.  But we’ll set aside the moral issue and deal with the economics.

But Libertarians would have us believe our only choice is going back to a Coolidge state.  Like 300 million people could live with a government that was inadequate when the country had closer to 100 million.

On what evidence are you declaring the size of that government inadequate?  Inadequate for what purpose?  The U.S. became a powerful and prosperous nation with a small government.  If the government taxed citizens at the same rate as in the Coolidge era and the population tripled, then government revenues would also triple.  What we can say with absolute certainty is that a Coolidge-sized government wouldn’t be trillions of dollars in debt.

To think this goal is more realistic than everyone paying more taxes is absolutely asinine.

Well, let’s do a little math and see if the theory that we can tax our way out of these massive deficits instead of drastically cutting spending is realistic or, as you put it, absolutely asinine.

In 2010, the federal government collected 2.16 trillion dollars, 42% of it from income taxes.  Another 40% came from Social Security taxes.  (I already see a major problem:  Social Security revenues are still being spent every year to fund current government programs – more trillions in unfunded forward liabilities)  Well, no decent leftist is going to propose jacking up Social Security taxes on working Americans.  Nope, the solution is to raise income taxes on all those rich people who can easily help and may even want to.

So … we take 2.16 x .42 and discover that income taxes provided 900 billion dollars in 2010.  The federal deficit, meanwhile, was 1.3 trillion dollars.  That figure, if you’ve never written it out before, looks like this:

1,300,000,000,000

Well, I guess you’ve got me on this one, Paul.  If we can just raise income taxes by 145% — on everybody – we’ll have a balanced budget and stop piling up massive debts future generations will be expected to pay (thus reducing their net incomes considerably).

But wait … according to leftist theology, it’s only the rich who can “easily” bail us out of our debt crisis, not everyone.  Let’s just raise taxes on households earning more than $250,000 per year.  According to the 2010 census, there are 2,350,760 such households.  Once again, I see the wisdom of your anti-deficit plan, Paul.  All we have to do is demand each of those households pay an additional $553,013 in annual income taxes, and we’ll have a balanced budget.  That’s obviously far more realistic than the asinine suggestion that the government must drastically reduce spending to avoid a future default.

It would be so much cheaper if everyone took a smaller paycheck now.

If everyone takes smaller paychecks now, then everyone has less money to spend on products and services.  That means the GDP will shrink – a recession — businesses will fail (or never be started), unemployment will rise, profits will be reduced, and therefore the incomes and profits available to be taxed will decline.

Hedge funds could be paying 35% instead of 15%.

Sure, if you want to ensure that investors stop investing or take their money elsewhere.

And hey, if we’re patriotic, and working for a common good, paying down the debt should be our national priority.

Funny how the leftist definition of “patriotism” always boils down to asking other people to give the government more money.  Since paying down the debt is indeed a common (and necessary) good, and since it’s mathematically impossible to tax our way out of our current deficits, are you ready to do your patriotic duty and call for a smaller government?

But oddly people who claim to know “economic theory” are telling us a Coolidge state is the only way to go.   And their acolytes in Congress have been totally obstructing the more realistic approach of paying down our debt the old fashioned way.

Asking everyone who earns more than $250,000 per year to pay an additional $553,013 per year in income taxes is the realistic approach, is it?  It doesn’t require any familiarity with economic theory to know we can’t tax our way out this mess; all it takes is the willingness to pull out a pocket calculator and do some simple math.

The old-fashioned way of paying down debt is to stop spending money you don’t have and divert as much of your income as possible to paying off the debt.  But of course, that’s not what liberals propose.  In earlier rounds of this debate, you were demanding a national health-care program – another entitlement that would add trillions to our debt load.  If you’re in a “we all need to work together and make sacrifices” mood all of a sudden, are you ready to call for an end to new government programs?  Are you ready to support phasing out Social Security and Medicare, since they’ll eventually bankrupt the country no matter how much wealth we confiscate?  Or does “let’s all work together and make sacrifices” in your worldview still translate to “let’s keep pretending we can tax the rich enough to pay for all this, even though simple math says otherwise”?

I’d love to live in your liberal fantasy-land, Paul.  Sounds like a swell place … a place where there are countless rich people who can easily afford to support everyone else and pay off all our debts; a place where no matter how much you tax those rich people, they happily continue working, taking risks, starting businesses and producing wealth for everyone else to consume; a place where (as Thomas Sowell put it so eloquently in his book “The Vision of the Anointed”) the really smart people have a solution for everything and the only thing standing in their way is the fact that so many other people are either too mean or too stupid to do what’s right.  Unfortunately, liberal fantasy-land is just that:  a fantasy.

Here’s the reality you can’t bring yourself to accept:  government is an economic parasite.  Governments don’t create wealth, they consume wealth and destroy wealth.  The more wealth government consumes, the less wealth we have left over for the kinds of capital investments that raise productivity and create jobs.  No amount of taxation will solve the debt crisis, because you can’t tax wealth that doesn’t exist.

You can, however, raise taxes to the point where the people who create jobs and wealth decide it’s not worth the risk or the effort anymore.  That’s what FDR learned to his great dismay when his sky-high taxes didn’t produce the additional revenues he thought they would.  Actions produce reactions.  Jack up taxes, and you discourage economic activity and suppress economic growth.  Since he was economic ignoramus, FDR was of course shocked and outraged by this reality.

Tom I think you’re generalizing.  Why assume that FORTUNE readers had no worries with regards to over-inflated housing prices?  And why assume the business press wrote ‘glowingly’ about the housing bubble years?  I’m sure if you went back you’d find a number of stories concerning sub-prime mortgages and consumer debt.  Those issues didn’t just spring to life after the Financial Crisis.

Yes, you might find a few warnings in the press.  But as you recall, when the 2008 meltdown occurred, we kept hearing how nobody saw this coming.  The reason the people profiled in “The Big Short” made billions by betting on a meltdown is that most financial analysts didn’t see it coming and were betting on housing prices to keep going up.

In fact, when Bush ran for re-election, back in 2004, several pundits noted his job creation record was actually pretty bad. Which indicated, way back then, that our economy was only prospering on paper (instead of actually growing).  And every reader of business news could guess that the collapse of Bear Sterns, in March 2008, was a harbinger of things to come. You didn’t need to study Hayek to realize something ominous was in the process of unraveling.

Yes, once there were clear signs the economy was falling apart, there were people who correctly predicted it would fall apart.  However, people like Peter Schiff were warning of the coming housing meltdown in 2005.  Hayek explained why artificial expansions of the money supply lead to booms followed by inevitable busts, he’s been proved correct over and over, so analysts who understand his work – like Peter Schiff – don’t have to witness a Bear Sterns collapse to know what’s coming.

I am sending you, separately, THE NY TIMES, year-end weather stats.  Which strongly suggest Global Warming is real.

I read the NY Times piece.  Yes, of course it “strongly suggests” global warming is real, because that’s the writer’s strong opinion.  There’s nothing resembling scientific proof in that article, just lots of speculation.

I looked up articles on hurricanes and found that we’ve had very busy hurricane seasons and very quiet hurricane seasons for as long as we’ve kept records on hurricanes.  In recent years, when we have a busy hurricane season, the global-warming hysterics offer that as proof of global warming.  But when the same hysterics predict that global warming will cause yet another busy hurricane season which instead turns out to be quiet – as in 2011 –  well, boy, we just got lucky, ya see.  Doesn’t disprove anything.  Keep those research grants coming, folks.

The NY Times writer blamed tornadoes on global warming as well.  Scroll down this page and look at the historical chart on the number of strong to violent tornadoes:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/severeweather/tornadoes.html#history

The pattern is clearly cyclical.  Furthermore, there were more busy tornado seasons before 1975 (during a period of declining temperatures) than after 1975 (a period of rising temperatures).  The busiest tornado season before this year, by a huge margin, was in 1974 – i.e., just before Newsweek published a breathless article describing how temperatures had been declining for the past 30 years and warning of a coming ice age.

So, putting together the statements I’ve read from global-warming hysterics over the years, here’s how it all apparently works:

High number of violent storms during warming periods:  caused by global warming.

High number of violent storms during cooling periods:  doesn’t prove anything.

Low number of violent storms during warming periods:  doesn’t prove anything.

Warmer-than-usual winters:  caused by global warming.

Record-cold winters for three straight years:  also caused by global warming.

Reduction in rainfall leading to droughts:  caused by global warming.

Heavy rains leading to flooding:  also caused by global warming.

This isn’t science.  It’s a political agenda attempting to wrap itself in science.  To demonstrate how weak the supposed science is, I’ll propose an alternate theory and support it with the same kind of logic:  I believe hot air emanating from the mouths of angry leftists causes a rise in worldwide temperatures, and that the rising temperatures lead to an increase in violent weather events.

So I do some initial research … Aha!  My research clearly shows that for the past 40 years, leftists have been producing more hot air than in previous eras, with an unusual spike in leftist-produced hot air appearing on the eastern seaboard over the past summer.  We’ve also had a rise in temperatures in previous decades, and (in the years I choose to study, at least) a rise in the number of violent storms — with a record number of violent weather events this year.

Well, there you have it.  My theory has been proven correct.  Can’t argue with the science … as any good scientist knows, if two variables are statistically linked, it’s proof positive that one of them is causing the other.  That’s how I figured out that Dan Rather appearing on my TV to read the news was causing the sun to set.

I noticed the takeaway message from the NY Times is that we may be facing a crisis of severe weather due to global warming, but we don’t know for sure (egads!) because those eeeevil Republicans (double egads!) won’t vote to go even further into debt to fund more research.  Yes, if only we could divert more of our children’s future earnings to studying this issue, we could … uh …

… ya see, we’d be able to … uh …

… stop the violent weather? No …

… but we could … uh …

… aah, I’ve got it!  We could put even more climate researchers in a position where their livelihoods depend on global-warming hysteria and thus further our political agenda!

Now why on earth won’t those stupid Republicans get on board?

In fact, just before Christmas, THE WASHINGTON POST carried a piece about some coastal city in Virginia where flooding has become increasingly serious.  But when the city attempted to hold hearings, on what to do about the problem, a bunch of Tea Party militants showed up to heckle and make sure than no constructive discussion could possibly take place.  And when asked why they were so obnoxious, the Tea Partiers explained that the hearing lent credence to Global Warming theories which they obviously disdained.  Sorry I didn’t send the article to you.  Because you should know the intellectual company you place yourself amongst.

Since you didn’t link to the article, I have no idea what solutions the city council was proposing.  I’m not a member of the Tea Party, but of course all large movements include some obnoxious people.  If you’re making a weak attempt at guilt by association because I share the Tea Party view that we need to reduce the size of government, well heck, two can play at that game.

Paul, the Nazi political platform called for universal health care, free education, a guaranteed livelihood for all, sharing the profits of rich corporations with the German people, and expanded government pensions for the elderly.  I mention this because you should know the intellectual company you place yourself amongst.

Tom

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