Romney Remarks About Voter Dependency

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Mitt Romney made the astonishing mistake of speaking freely at a private fund raising event. How could someone who has campaigned for so long have forgotten that everything is says in public will be recorded and analyzed for possible anti-Romney ads? Also, how could he have gotten his facts wrong?

I won’t bother to look for a link to add for the comments, because they are everywhere. I haven’t seen the Obama ads quoting their favorite parts, but I’m certain that’s because I haven’t watched much television in the past couple of days. He said, “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right? There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for the president no matter what. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of lower taxes doesn’t connect. So he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean, that’s what they sell every four years. And so mu job is to not worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

People who don’t pay taxes either are those who don’t make much money, have more deductions than income, or have good advisors who can see that income is sheltered from taxes (such as income from tax-free municipal bonds.) Many of those who don’t pay taxes are elderly and young people who can’t find jobs other than perhaps a low-paying part time job. I expect that some portion of those people will be more attracted to Romney than to Obama. I do see that Mr. Obama has a solid 47 percent of the vote, but a large part of that number are people who are loyal liberals/progressives/Democrats. Many of them are very well paid and pay significant amounts of taxes. I’ve seen data that well over fifty percent of lawyers voted for Mr. Obama.

I believe Mr. Romney was onto something. I do think it is true that Mr. Obama believes a primary role of government is to redistribute wealth to “make things fair.” I also believe that there are many voters who will vote for him for that very reason, and that his only challenge is to make certain that those who think he will look out for their “entitlements” will go to the polls.

What Mr. Romney should have done was to read or paraphrase a quote from Thomas Jefferson. “The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” Or he could have paraphrased the quote from Adrian Rogers, “You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the industrious out of it.  You don’t multiply wealth by dividing it.  Government cannot give anything to anybody that it doesn’t first take from somebody else.” He also could have mentioned that the top ten percent of earners pay 71 percent of income taxes. Mr. Obama says that isn’t enough to be “fair.”

Climatism!

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climatismThe subtitle of this excellent, well-researched book by Steve Goreham is “Science, Common Sense, and the Twenty First Century’s Hottest Topic.” The book is over 400 pages long including notes and references. It provides both practical and technical details disputing the insistence that “The Science is Settled, Man is Causing Global Warming.” The book presents ample evidence that the science is far from settled and that man has had little impact on climate. However, there is a dire warning that you will be labeled a “Denier” if you question the politically correct positions. Those who have worked diligently to develop the “global-warning-disaster created- by-man-scenario” have invested their reputations in that outcome. They will eagerly attack anyone who has the audacity to ask, “But is it supported by science?” Science at one time was dependant on freedom of thought and criticism that required explanation based on facts. On this subject, questioning the legitimacy of the predictions is equivalent to when people were accused of being witches and treated badly. (This is my comment, and is not in the book.)

The Author’s Note points out that people aren’t shocked when the five day weather forecast isn’t accurate, but are willing to accept that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations knows what the climate will be in 2100. The dominant public assumption is that the IPCC predictions are accurate, but the number of scientists who question the predictions has grown rapidly despite the attacks they know will be leveled at them for being “skeptics” or “deniers.”

The author proposes the title Climatism for the ideology that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate, “…an extreme form of environmentalism that is using the natural climatic changes of Earth to re-define our societies.” Those who advocate that ideology want to limit population growth and replace all hydrocarbon-energy production with solar and wind power. What they don’t mention is that those energy sources cannot provide even a fraction of the energy produced by hydrocarbons, which means that society will have to do without. There has been a slight warming, but evidence is presented that the cause is likely natural and has nothing to do with the activities of man. ”

If global warming is from natural causes, then all efforts to stop the Earth from warming are not only futile, but destructive to our way of life and economic prosperity of the developing nations.”

No book on climate change would be complete without an analysis of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” A judge in London ruled that the film could be used as part of school curriculum, but the teachers must point out there were nine scientific errors or assertions not supported by scientific evidence. The nine corrections did not include mention that the film does not point out that the carbon dioxide increases lag the temperature increases. Therefore, temperature increases are the cause of carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere (carbon dioxide is less soluble in warm ocean water). The basis of the climatism ideology that man’s generation of carbon dioxide is the cause of climate change is therefore false from the beginning. That didn’t stop Dr. James Hansen, an outspoken climatist from saying, “CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, those CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”

There is a summary of the eight disasters that climatists predict with descriptions of why the predictions are already known to be incorrect. The dominant disaster predictions are rising sea levels (the sea has had a steady rise of 6-7 inches per century), devastating hurricanes (frequency and strength have not increased) and increased famine and death from droughts and floods (droughts and floods have not increased). Of course there is the concern about polar bear drowning, although polar bear populations have doubled since 1950. One of my granddaughters read that increased carbon dioxide will lead to acidification of the oceans and coral bleaching, but the actual data indicates the increase in water temperature and is having a positive effect on coral growth.

It is true that the climate will change just as it has always changed. The Medieval Warm Period occurred from about 900 to 1,300 A.D., and Vikings were able to settle and prosper in Greenland. The climate then moved into the Little Ice Age, and the last written evidence of the settlement was in 1408. The year 1816 is known as the “Year Without a Summer,” and that is the only known instance of a missing oak tree ring.

Chapter 5 presents data that, not surprisingly, solar activity is the main driver of global temperatures. “The scientific results…indicate that the varying activity of the Sun is indeed the largest and most systematic contributor to natural climate variations.” “There is little doubt that solar-wind variability is the primary cause of climate change…Once the IPCC comes to terms with this finding, it will have to concede that solar variability provides a better explanation of…warming than greenhouse gases.” Conversely, solar activity has declined. By April 2009 the sun had hit a 100-year low in sunspot activity and a 50 year low in solar wind pressure.

The saddest bit of evidence offered by the book is the discussion of Dr. Michael Mann’s infamous “Hockey Stick Curve.” The actual record of temperatures from about 900 A.D. is shown along with the modified graph that became known as the “hockey stick” on page 149. The actual graph shows the Medieval warm period and Little Ice Age with a slight upward trend in the late 1900s. The “hockey stick” graph shows basically unchanging temperatures until a sudden spike upward to much higher than anything that had been measured in a thousand years. It is said the Mann data “…contains collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal components, and other quality control defects.” In other words, the graph was and is a fraud.

The climate research community was shaken when an unknown hacker downloaded and posted more than a thousand documents from the University of East Anglia, the “…world’s leading source of global temperature information.” The emails revealed “…a high level of bias toward man-made warming…” One email quoted Dr. Kevin Trenberth of UCAR lamenting a cooling trend didn’t match predictions and referred to it as “…a travesty…”

There are detailed discussions of the flaws with solar, wind, and biofuel energy production. I won’t detail them here to be consistent with my goal of keeping reviews to two pages or less. I will jump ahead to pages 393 -394 where the story of the P-38 “Glacier Girl” is told. A flight of planes being sent from the U.S. to Britain in WWII was forced to land on the ice of Greenland. An expedition set out in 1981 to retrieve the planes from the well-documented location. The planes were eventually found under 270 feet of solid ice.

Climate Change Continues

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I’ve written in previous blogs that I think Al Gore and the others who pound the drum of manmade global warming should change the title of their mantra to “climate change.” They would finally be right this if they predict climate change, because the climate has always changed and it always will. The warnings in the 1970s were that man was going to create a global cooling climate disaster. The climate did change, but there was a warming trend instead of the predicted cooling. Some researchers responded by developing computer models that correlated warming temperatures to carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. They never mention the oceans warm when the sun is more active and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases. Man has no control over the warming of oceans that causes higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A recent Denver Post editorial took both Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney to task for not proposing more aggressive actions to battle climate change. Much of the basis for the editorial is the low level of Arctic ice coverage. The Sea and Ice Data Center indeed does show that ice levels dropped below the average levels and the 2007 levels beginning around the first of August. I expect the Post was also influenced by the record number of over 90 degree days this summer. However, there are other indications that “catastrophic global warming” is not occurring. A web site that has numerous graphs of the average temperature of Gulf of Mexico waters shows 2011 had one of the largest drops in temperature in eighty years.

The book Climatism reviewed on that link of this web site is a good place to start if you want to read details of why man is not the cause of global warming and most if not all of the efforts to develop alternative energy sources are doomed to fail because of simple economics.

Carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. were at a twenty year low last year because significant amounts of power are being generated with recently inexpensive natural gas. Power generated with natural gas creates half the carbon dioxide compared to coal. One report says that it is expected there will be 175 coal burning plants will be replaced by natural gas plants over the next five years.

Michael Mann of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University seemed to be grumbling about the improvements created by the shift from dirtier-burning coal to natural gas. He commented that “ultimately people follow their wallets on global warming.” Roger Pielke, Jr., a climate expert at the University of Colorado had a bit different take. He said, “There is a very clear lesson here. What it shows is that if you make a cleaner energy source cheaper, you will displace dirtier sources.”

Some environmentalists aren’t happy about the good news. They don’t like the “fracking” that has resulted in production of huge amounts of natural gas and caused the price of the fuel to drop by more than half. They believe the practice will pollute underground water sources and cause leakage of methane to the atmosphere despite the belief by many government officials that the practice is safe if done properly. My suspicion is that those who are grumbling are mostly worried that there will be even less emphasis on development of expensive solar and wind generated energy. “Installation of new renewable energy facilities has now all but dried up, unable to compete on a grid now flooded with a low-cost, high-energy fuel.” The massively advertised “shift to renewable energy” has added scant amounts of power generation. “Wind supplied less than 3 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2011…and solar power was far less.”

I won’t be in the grumbling camp. I find it refreshing that ingenuity and economics have resulted in improved air quality.

The End of Money

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Reviewed by Kathy London

end-of-moneyThis book was written by David Wolman, who would like to dispense with physical money. As he puts it in his book “Physical currency is a bulky, germ-smeared, carbon-intensive, expensive medium of exchange. Let’s dump it” in favor of electronic money.

Money has always puzzled me. How can something so important be so abstract? As Wolman tells us, you may not have a god in your life, but you have faith: Faith in the dollar’s value, faith in each other and in our shared government. We are believers. I guess I have mostly dumped cash already. There is no wad of dollars in my mattress. My money mostly exists in accounts I access on the Internet. A lifetime of labor, distilled into 1s and 0s in some server out there. Talk about faith!

Interwoven with interviews and his personal experiment of living without cash for one year, Wolman offers a lot of fascinating information: the history of money, how issuing currency profits governments and establishes their power, how a shortage of currency helped fuel the American colonies’ revolution, why the U.S. keeps minting pennies and nickels at a cost above face value, how many countries have given up their own currency and use U.S. dollars, and why some people think the end of cash would be the beginning of the Apocalypse. Reading about counterfeiting is, alone, worth picking up the book. (North Korea runs on counterfeit U.S. dollars? That’s infuriating.)

The concept of money is world-changing because it allows for commerce beyond barter. Money lets people store and move value, not just within a village, but across the world. Gold makes excellent physical money. Gold is durable, safe to handle, easy to test for authenticity, and won’t decay or catch fire. And it shines – people love bling. But, until recent industrial uses, it’s been worthless in the sense you can’t eat it or heat with it. Gold has only the value we agree to give it. Bizarrely, a small group of men sitting around a table in the U.S. in 1944 decided an ounce of gold would be worth $35. Today gold trades in a free market and worth over $1600 and ounce. But gold is not perfect money. It can fuel inflation and deflation, and won’t stop revolutions and depressions. Wolman thinks gold is just an older and more comfortable abstraction.

Wolman explains the problems with cash. Cash must be printed, guarded, and lugged around. Cash can be stolen or lost or destroyed. Cash is contaminated with germs and traces of cocaine. Cash enables tax-cheats. If you are poor, all these costs and risks hit you the hardest. Without the ability to convert cash into electronic money, you are excluded from banking and denied a safe and reliable way to save.

Cash offers anonymity in transactions and therefore liberty. But because of this, cash is the choice of criminals worldwide. About 60% of the US currency in circulation is $100 bills. How many are in your wallet?

Wolman thinks technology can now cure the problems of cash. Person-to-person transfers via smart phones counter credit card fees. People accumulate more debt when using credit cards than cash, but if you pay with your smart phone, apps could flash vivid images to make the transaction more “real”. Reading how such transactions will work is a view into a future that is standing on our toes.

This was an interesting book and may help readers see the current move away from cash as a good trend. You can’t fight it anyway. Electronic money is taking over the world already, so the only battle left for Wolman is to convince governments to stop issuing cash. As long as that doesn’t bring on the Apocalypse.

Selecting a Presidential Candidate

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There were three articles in the Sunday, September 02, 2012 Denver Post that were pertinent to the choice for voters. The first was titled “Evaluating Obama’s grade on economy by Robert J. Samuelson of the Washington Post. People usually “vote their pocketbook,” so the state of the economy is crucial to both Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney. Mr. Samuelson leads his article with, “President Obama’s economic report card is at best mediocre. I’d give him a C-plus while acknowledging that presidents usually don’t much influence the economy…For the first six months I’d award him an A-minus; for the rest a C-minus or D.” The latter grade is based on the insistence of Mr. Obama at focusing on the health care law (for his legacy) despite the fact the complex law discouraged job creators from expanding their businesses. The battle over the health care law also created gridlock between the two political parties that dominates politics in Washington, D.C.  Mr. Samuelson writes that there is no way of knowing whether Mr. Obama’s missteps have weakened the economy. “My guess is that Obama’s errors have had a modest effect.”

The second article is by Dave Maney, and is titled “Third vision needed.” The article proposes that Republicans are good at clearing impediments to economic change while Democrats are good at identifying those needing help. The author writes that Democrats “…prescribe an attack on healthy parts of the body to somehow cleanse it and make the sick parts well again. It’s like stabbing yourself in the stomach because you’re having a heart attack—it brings zero relief but lots of additional pain” But then he turns to the Republicans and says “We just need to go back to the way things were in 1984, and we’d be in great shape.” That is characterized as being equivalent to telling an ailing patient in his 70s that they would feel better if they were still 40. I didn’t read an alternative between the two visions presented by the two parties except something to the effect that we need to do things differently in the different world.

My favorite article was titled “American optimism in eye of the beholder” by Ann Sanner and Calvin Woodward of The Associated Press. According to the article, young people continue to be optimistic while older people are pessimistic. There are examples of those in their 50s who have lost optimism for their retirement goals because of the layoffs and reduced value of investments. One fifty year old woman is quoted as saying that she firmly believes in the American Dream “…but in the sense of dreaming it, not grasping it. I’m not seeing anything to strive for; I guess….I’m settling.” “Nearly two thirds lack confident that life for today’s children will be better than it has been for today’s adults…”

There are several disturbing statistics about the pessimism of older voters and the continued optimism of younger people despite their college debts and the dismal employment situation. Mr. Obama has noticed younger people are happier with the current economic situation, and he has arranged many of his campaign appearances on college campuses. No one can accuse him of not being politically astute.