Tell Congress: STOP SOPA, STOP PIPA

Urgent appeal: SSP  (“Stop Stupid Politicians”) 

I am sure that somewhere, sometime, someone imagined that a “representative democracy” would be comprised of representatives who were the best and brightest, the most altruistic and incorruptible human beings in a society.  (Okay, when you stop laughing at the naivety  of that concept … keep reading this could be important to you and everyone’s future.)

Legislation has been introduced in the US Congress with the short titles SOPA and PIPA.   SOPA: “Stop Online Piracy Act” and PIPA: “Protect IP Act”.  (IP is short for “intellectual property”).  Since I am the “owner” of a great deal of “intellectual property” (and don’t just mean the real estate between my ears, much though I might value that as well), I care about this “issue” very much, but this legislation is BAD, BAD, BAD, BAD law.

As summarized by highly successful internet millionaire and marketing phenomenon Tellman Knudsen in a email I receive today, here is what SOPA and PIPA would do.

Here’s what SOPA will do to you:

1. It would allow anyone with money and power to immediatelyshut your website down without notice (and without trial). EVEN if you didn’t do anything wrong!

2. That means that ANYONE with enough money that finds you or your website (business) threatening could shut you down
overnight!

3. That means that your BUSINESS can get SHUT OFF like a light-switch without your say-so, by a bigger competitor, without warning or TRIAL!

 

Fact 1: Sites like YouTube, which publishes millions of user-uploaded
videos each week, are worried that they would be forced to more
closely police that content to avoid running afoul of the new rules.

Fact 2: “YouTube would just go dark immediately,” Google public
policy director Bob Boorstin said at a conference last month.
“It couldn’t function.”

Fact 3: Tech companies also object to SOPA’s “shoot first, ask
questions later” approach.

The bill requires every payment or advertising network
operator to set up a process through which outside parties
can notify the company that one of its customers is an “Internet
site is dedicated to theft of U.S. property.”

 

Once a network gets a notification, it is required to cut off services
to the target site within five days.

Fact 4: Filing false notifications is a crime, but the process would put the burden of proof — and the legal cost of fighting a false allegation — on the accused.

Fact 5: As the anti-SOPA trade group NetCoalition put it in their analysis
of the bill: “The legislation systematically favors a copyright owner’s
intellectual property rights and strips the owners of accused websites
of their rights.”

Back to my POV.

Is it unreasonable to call this “economic fascism”?  Only the big guys can survive the legal and bureaucratic nightmares that this can cause.

Jack Valenti, one of the most well funded lobbyists in Washington, who represents the Motion Picture Producers Association of America (you know the “ratings” [aka "censorship"] guys), who claims to be losing billions of dollars a year in foreign royalties because of piracy (the music recording industry claims the same problem, of course), but this legislation is like a “neutron bomb” the kind, in case you don’t remember the reference, the kind of  nuclear bomb that kills people but leaves buildings and other “real estate” standing and relatively unharmed.  In this case, it is small business, small website owners who will suffer unduly, although any “user supplied content” website including Youtube.com and most of the other video content websites, will have to be shut down from the moment the legislation passes because the burden of checking and filtering for copyright infringement will simply be impossible.

It is sad that politicians don’t “believe” in the science and technology of the things they are regulating, but it is true that in most cases, few if any of them understand those aspects or the effect laws will have as a consequence of them thinking they are doing some good (or a favor) for someone.

But even worse, the “bribetocracy” that is our political system now, means that to be elected next time, the politicians have to curry favor with wealthy supporters to fund their re-election campaigns, and to fund their (oops, “someone’s”) favorable SuperPAC’s.

This time, please be sure to let your Congressional representatives know about what you, “the people” feel about this issue, and don’t let them stifle economic growth of the internet.   (Just google “SOPA PIPA”, Google.com will cheerfully point you to sites that will facilitate you communicating with your representatives.)  as @ 2012 Jan. 19.

 

Sincerely,

 

Stafford “Doc” Williamson
http://www.youtube.com/user/daochienergy/videos

 

 

Green EXPORTS Development Bank (I proposed in Foreign Policy reply)

Foreign Policy Special Report

In Foreign Policy Magazine ’s website here is a “special report” written by World Bank chief economist and senior vice president for development economics, Justin Yefu Lin, he suggests that $1 Trillion needs to be invested in development of infrastructure around the world, and that the need is urgent. In fact he says, in his final paragraph (and I heartily agree):

It’s time for rich and poor countries alike to join hands to literally build the future. Infrastructure investments in developing countries will increase demand for capital goods such as the turbines and excavators that are often produced in the United States and Europe. Infrastructure investments in developing countries will boost exports, manufacturing employment, and growth in high-income countries, while reducing poverty and enhancing growth in the developing world. It’s a win-win solution. So what are we waiting for?

World Bank has made some grave errors in recent years, especially when they issue statements about biofuels creating famine, and causes rises in the costs of foods, which they do not.  Although the opposite is true.  High prices paid for edible oils make it nearly impossible to produce the environmentally far more benigh for of fuel called “biodiesel”, which, unlike petroleum diesel is biodegradable, and creates far less pollution when used in internal combustion engines (or even jet turbines for that matter).  But it would appear that at least Justin Yefu Lin has his head on straight.

Green Exports Development Bank
There is an “interesting” mathematical “coincidence” (maybe not so coincidental) that the first Obama administration “stimulus” package (I know, “bad” word, change that to “economic investment program”) amounted to approximately $700 Billion, which happens to also be roughly 5% of the USA GDP (approx. $14 Trillion). Getting a similar package through congress may have to wait until after the 2011 election (or, gosh, maybe never), but there are mechanisms the administration could use to create a “domestic manufacturing investment program” that would not only stimulate domestic manufacturing, as such, but also as Justin Yifu Lin says here, create vast numbers of domestic jobs, while rescuing the underdeveloped portions of the world from their collision course with “cheap fossil carbon” energy sources (and even then, it will take a great deal to get those impoverished regions economic engines going).

I don’t want to argue the relative merits of using the Defense Production Act, or the fact that the T.A.R.P. funds had almost no restrictions on how they could be used, but TARP funds are already a program funding which Congress has approved (and the moneys are spent, but not “gone” since they were primarily loans in the first place). But what I do suggest is that for 5% of GDP, to be used as “loan guarantee fees”. It is time the commercial and investment banks did something to deserve the bailouts that turned failing companies and imbalanced risk strategies into a public funds charity bazaar.

We need an economic policy (established by Administration and by Presidential fiat, if necessary) that creates a special class of Fed discounted funds for green export projects conditioned on domestic manufacturing and jobs creation. Therefore, assuming there must be some mechanism, or combination of mechanisms that can assemble $700 Billion for this purpose that could amount to a 1% loan guarantee for each of the first 5 years of the life of the loan(s). Principal amounts would be bought up by the Federal Reserve. The Fed receives the loan guarantee premiums, while the borrower (the company or foreign division of a domestic corporation) which is supplying the infrastructure to those underdeveloped regions then receives a guaranteed loan to purchase domestically manufactured goods and services, or similarly domestic manufacturers could access this same extremely low interest pool of funds to finance the production of the goods to be exported.

This is very similar to what the People’s Republic of China has been doing in support of their solar industry. Some may raise WTO objections. Others may point to inflationary possibilities, especially if the Green Exports Development Bank creates trillions of new capital for the banking system. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (of which the USA is a member) itself may raise objections too, but with the economic strength of Europe (i.e. Germany) devoted mainly to their own economic crises, the US is the only one with the wherewithal to create the foundation for green energy economics worldwide. At the same time to quote language used about future technologies from the International Energy Agency (IEA) website, this is also exactly the type of program that will help, “to identify and resolve barriers for advancement of economical, efficient, and environmentally preferable [biofuels] processes.”

It is definitely not a coincidence that this is exactly the kind of program the Administration needs to get rolling this (election) year, if it hopes to have four more years in office to accomplish some of these monumentally ambitious goals.

Sincerely,
Stafford “Doc” Williamson

http://lifestyle.psyrk.us

http://www.youtube.com/user/daochienergy/videos

Occupy Needs 2 Organize, BECOME a GENIUS

#OWS

The basic problem with the “Occupy” movement is that they represent a wide variety of “complaints” but not a common goal. This is much like the “anti-Obama” sentiments that drove the election of the current Republican dominated House of Representatives. Lots of people had reasons to be “against” the current government, so they elected a bunch of yahoos whose idea of “governing” was to block everything rather than to effect positive change. “Occupy” needs positive goals that all (most) can get behind or they will never be effective at anything but being a negative and disruptive influence.

BECOME a GENIUS (no, I’m not kidding)

One of my best “features” is also one of my worst “traits”. I’m a genius. No, actually I’m a “super genius” as measured by my IQ, as practically all of my friends, and even people who only know me slightly will be happy to tell you. Now, of course, it is annoying to many of those friends and acquaintances that I am also quite proud of this fact, and insecure enough (and perhaps sufficiently lacking in personal social skills) that I feel I have to “show off” how smart I am. That can get really annoying if, like my wife, or closest friends, I am constantly trotting out what, in fact, is more a “trick” of memory, or a pedantic history of how something came to be the way it is.

What has me worried, though, is the fact that I recently stumbled upon (“stumbling upon” is my usual mode of travel via the internet) a program that improves practically any normal person’s IQ by at least 20 or 30 points, and sometimes as much as 50 points. Do you realize what that means? That means that folks who struggled all their lives to barely pass classes in school can breeze through a teaching certification course, or a real estate licensing exam, or even an executive Master of Business Administration degree. Being smarter, and being able to show that you are smarter than average is like having a “golden ticket” to a better quality of life.

Get a better job. Get a promotion at work, or enter a whole new field of work that you’ve always wanted to because learning the skills, passing the tests and getting the certificates, licenses or academic credentials are no longer intimidating, dread-filled slogs through dangerous jungles of the unknown. Those experiences that looked so daunting before, now feel like a casual cross-country jog (as if you were already a star of your schools cross-country running team). Having been a super genius all my life, let me tell you how that feels. It feels a lot like starting out with a lucky drawing to be among the first group to start the Boston Marathon, you pass a few people as you keep running, and people cheer as you go by, they offer you drinks of water, just because you might be thirsty along the way, and you cross the finish line to the sound of cheers only then to realize that no one passed YOU along the way, and you have just won. First place, in a race against thousands of others.

Now I admit, winning the Boston Marathon includes a hefty cash prize, and not everything you do when you are a genius is going to make you rich and famous, but that’s also a possibility that gets closer to being within reach too. I have met (as in shaken hands with, or shared a drink with) a couple of billionaires. I am acquainted with (as in they actually know me from friendly softball games or business discussions) a couple of other billionaires, and while I don’t consider myself rich (most “rich people” don’t think of themselves as rich, partly because many of their friends are richer) but even one of my closest friends has more than a million dollars (US$) in the bank and is taking his wife on a cruise (3rd time this year) through the Panama Canal in a few weeks, just for fun. But no one can honestly promise that being smart will make you rich. On the other hand, being smart makes it a lot easier to avoid being poor.

Roadmap to Genius is the website that offers this kind of training. They also provide a money back guarantee, and for that matter, what you can learn is certainly well worth the money whether you follow through and boost your IQ or not.

I don’t want to over-sell this. I have not tried it myself. I mean, I’m a super genius already, so how would I know if it actually improved IQ’s for anyone? But I can tell you it is pretty cheap to try it out (less than I spent on movies and popcorn last weekend) and it has a money back guarantee of satisfaction. Try the Roadmap to Genius and tell me what you think.

Sincerely,

Stafford “Doc” Williamson

http://lifestyle.psyrk.us

http://www.youtube.com/user/daochienergy/videos

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International Development Banks: $8.3 BILLION did what?

On a website devoted to the “news” in International “Development” (mainly “Aid” and economic development) an article appeared recently at:

http://www.devex.com/en/blogs/the-development-newswire/multilateral-banks-seek-to-strengthen-climate-change-support-for-cities

The article states: “Five multilateral development banks have agreed to work more closely to help cities around the world adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change.

The overall aim of the new partnership between the African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank,European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank is to better coordinate and strengthen multilateral support for cities facing climate change challenges.

Generally the “article” contained nothing beyond the normal and tried platitudes of “we’re going to work together better than we have in the past”. Reportedly they have been spending an average of US$8.4 billion per year for some time now. Results, however, are not really very obvious.

My opinion, posted to this same page in reply was as follows.

Climate “action” is too often merely academic “study of the problem” that these development banks are willing to fund. In most cases some action is better than no action and a more detailed (abstract) understanding of the “problem” is not what is needed nearly so much as a more streamlined process of implementing sensible and reasonable solutions that are available today to most of the climate change and adaptation problems.

For example, storm surge protection, massive and expensive as it is for the Thames River is not going to get “cheaper” by a lot of foot dragging from lack of the political will to take on the expenses now.

These banks need to learn two related lessons, and they need to learn them fast, because the point of no return in climate change is approaching faster than “popular” opinion is willing to admit.

First lesson is that small businesses are more adaptive and agile in facing and fixing challenges, and that especially alliances of small businesses can be a tremendously effective means of effecting rapid change in many places in a short amount of time once a viable model of change is established. Petroleum distribution tends to be a centralized enterprise over large areas, and controlled by major multinational corporations. Distributed energy generation, including the local production of both electricity and biofuels from biological sources needs a different model, but could well learn lessons from the petroleum retailing model in which franchisees are partnered with the distributors and producers of these products.

The second lesson that international development banks need to learn is that small businesses will “starve” on the time scales it takes to implement policies from the international development banks. The banks themselves need a far more streamlined and efficient method of finding projects and contractors, supporting local legislative initiative and political motivations, and funding and implementing the changes needed.

The expression “speed kills” is still valid for most highway traffic situations, but in development, it is bureaucracy and administrative delay that kills.

Sincerely,

Stafford “Doc” Williamson
http://doachienergy.com
.
http://lifestyle.psyrk.us

Future Fuels, Thumper Rule, Dragon “Inheritance”, Future INTERNET Predictions

iPhone 4, Sport Wristband 2011

(See “pat on the back” below)(remarkable prediction comes true)

Thumper Said it Best

In American politics there is an ever growing tradition that in the event you find your opponents have left you nothing to criticize about their positions and policies, (often because you have no real differences) your last, your only resort is to LIE! Lie blatantly and often. If they hear your lie often enough maybe some percentage of the gullible public will come to believe that what you say is the truth based on no shred of fact or evidence at all.
It is bad enough when such practices gain a foothold in the accepted realm of standard procedures for political candidates. When it reaches leading worldwide humanitarian organizations, it has gone too far.

Here is a video report that appears on the BBC website about increasing use of biofuels for the airline industry in Mexico, and the admirable policy decision that country has made about reducing fossil fuel carbon emissions.

Oxfam needs to take a lesson from “Thumper” (the rabbit character from Walt Disney’s Bambi ) who quoted his own mother as saying, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”  Yet again, as biofuels receive another validation, indeed a rousing endorsement from the federal government of Mexico by making a commitment that they intend to brighten our skies (and theirs) by blending fossil carbon (petroleum) jet fuel with bio-jet fuel, Oxfam’s spokesperson is there blowing her horn to trumpet the false rumor that biofuels will displace food and force higher food prices leading to additional starvation.  Whining and whimpering (truthful or not) sounds remarkably similar in Spanish to what it does in English, just by the way.  But that doesn’t give credence to the “someday” that biofuel crops “might” displace food crops or “might make food more expensive”.

There was a valid complaint in there, too, that at least one state in Mexico encouraged farmers to plant Jatropha with an expectation that cultivation would be easy and the harvest would be rich.  It isn’t that easy, and as the farmer said in the included interview (on video) you do have to take care of the plants.  The euphoria over Jatropha was exaggerated for promoters and planters alike, and it was not justified based on any long term cultivation efforts on a large commercial basis.  But I have seen millions of plants growing (or at least picture of the nurseries) healthy and happy under closer supervision.

But Oxfam really does themselves a disservice (no matter how friendly the petroleum companies are to them in the short term) clinging to lies and disinformation about the relationship between biofuel crops (whether or not they are edible or non-edible crops) and any changes in food prices.  The food price changes we have seen are known to be almost exclusively from variations in the price of petroleum products (used in the food production and delivery processes) and commodity market speculation.  Some, if not most, of that commodity market speculations is fueled in part by the same kind of mis-information that Oxfam is spreading that food prices will rise because biofuels are being supported by legislation and markets as well.
Hitting the Books
Okay, depending on where you might be in whatever stage of your education, you may recognize the beginning of December as the start of “finals” for the quarter, or the semester, or mid-terms and essays for other courses, but here’s a book I am really looking forward to having a few holiday days to dive into, it is Inheritance – Book IV of the Paolini “Inheritance” Series
The three prior offerings that started this mini-industry (not quite JK Rowling size, but certainly respectable considering that the author was 17 years old when his first book got a major publishing deal after his family promoted it into a self-publishing cult hit themselves) were Eragon (which, need I point out, is a clever “misspelling” of Dragon by substituting the E for the D, and a major hint as to what the genre will be), Eldest, sibling rivalry at a whole new level (for us non-magical folks at least), and the third was Brisingr, the title is also the magical word for casting a spell of “fire”, but comes to mean more in this episode as well.   It is unfortunate that the movie rights did not end up in the hands of so careful a class of filmmakers as those of the Rowling series, but be assured that despite the less than perfect translation to the screen (and it wasn’t all that bad either) the books are, in my opinion, some of the finest fiction, and certainly some of the finest genre fiction of the last century.

 

The Internet TOMORROW and TOMORROW and TOMORROW

This is a BIG pat on the back from me to me. If I can find the links, I’ll include them, showing the exact pictures that prove the point.
There have been a rather large number of times that I have strongly agreed with the conclusion that “nobody knows anything” (and the number of subjects to which that logic applies are too numerous to mention). Certainly it is true about “future results” of stock market predictions, it is the classic case of monkey throwing darts at a stock chart are as likely to pick winners as the most meticulous of analysts. So I try to take this with a “grain of salt” in trumpeting my own accomplishments, but then too, if you don’t blow your own horn, who is going to blow it for you, right?

Well, it happens that not so long ago as to be part of my “foolish youth” nor so recently as to have only a small time lag to justify congratulations on the prediction, but in 1994 I was invited to speak at an international gathering of engineers in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in a series of meetings sponsored by the IEEE (the international engineering society) and IBM. Somehow they accepted my proposed topic of “The Future of the Internet” as appropriate to this gathering of software development engineers. “The Internet” had only been known as such for a few years at that time (prior to that it was called ARPAnet or DARPAnet, for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency who has been the original sponsors of the “experiments” between a few universities, trying to find a flexible, redundant and adaptable way to connect computers over great distances). Since at the time I was involved with a company developing software based on early versions of HTML (the HyperText Markup Language that forms one of the key technical specifications of how one describes the appearance of information on “web pages”) I knew about as much as most of the leading engineers in the field. So I took a look at the trends, added some calculations of my own on social development and psychological factors and took as stab at defining some of the features one would likely see in a “future internet”.

Specifically I predicted a couple of things. One that did not come true was that VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language, that described how to visually represent 3 dimensional objects, places and even people in the 2 dimensional space of video screens) would become a major component of how “worlds” were going to be depicted on our computer screens. Indeed some not necessarily closely related systems are still evolving in the gaming area of online communications, but real-time 3D zooming through virtual shopping malls has not yet become a significant part of our normal online experience. But I was extremely accurate in at least a couple of other vectors of change that I was predicting back in that time.

Here are a couple of the images I used to illustrate my points during that lecture (no, it was NOT a PowerPoint presentation, but it was shown on a large screen using HTML, in true internet fashion). First was my idea that we would have a significant portion of our interactions focused on verbal communications, which is to say, speech. I did not imagine the path or the mechanism of how this in fact came about, but I suggested that one of the early predictive paradigms was a “Dick Tracy” wrist radio, expanded (as it was in the comic strip) to include a tiny television screen, something that might look something like this.

And combining the ideal that you might actually want a screen of a size large enough to read some things (not all just moving pictures of live images), it might be a little closer to this tiny Citizen brand television (4 cm. screen) that I owned at the time.

Now, let’s look at images from this week’s “Cyber Monday” sales online catalogues.  Here we go:

iPhone 4, Sport Wristband 2011

Ipod Nano Watch 2011

OKAY, ready for my newest internet prediction(s)??

Taxes Trivial, Africa Critical, Green Energy Remedial

LinkedIn.com Sparing

My sometimes sparing partner in discussion groups on the business networking website, LinkedIn.com, the very capable and intelligent Mr. Alan Falk, pointed readers of the Economy discussion group (sponsored and monitored by the White House, by the way) to an article on the Fisher Investments “Marketminder” website written by Amanda Williams. His quote consists of the final two paragraphs of her article which say this:
“But consider the fact that since the government began deducting taxes from paychecks in the mid-1940s, tax rates have been all over the map, but tax receipts have consistently averaged roughly 18% of GDP—sometimes a bit more, sometimes less, but generally right around there. And most changes in that percentage lag economic cycles some—meaning they’re not much tied to tax-rate changes. So overall, tax-rate changes don’t hugely impact overall federal tax revenue—positively or negatively.

Similarly, history shows markets are little impacted one way or the other by tax-rate changes in the near or long term. Meaning it would likely be a mistake to become overly bullish because of tax cuts (see 2001) or overly bearish because of tax hikes (see 1993). Sure, they’re a variable in a larger equation, so they can have some impact—but it’s likely fairly small, and one more global factors can swamp. Widely known political footballs like the tax code likely lose most of their market impact because they’re just that—widely known. At the end of the day, politicians dithering and debating taxes from endless angles is nothing new—nor is the fact markets typically yawn when politicians yap.”

 
My response was this:

As I said recently, it is more “fun” to disagree with you, but I am also delighted to agree with your always well considered and well researched posts.
This one is particularly valid. In this case I agree with you completely. Like “the markets” I wish more people would learn to, “yawn when politicians yap.”

Only truly momentous actions by politicians make any more than the slightest difference. Going to war … a trillion dollars and ten years later, the military and their suppliers remain healthy, and roughly 5000 of our military (and who knows how many of “theirs”) remain dead, but even that number, spread over 10 years is barely equal to the number of deaths by gunshots in just the Washington, DC metro area in the same period.

In the US alone, tens of thousands of people die in motor vehicle accidents EVERY YEAR, as do hundreds of thousands from our leading killer diseases, and these numbers too are nearly trivial compared to the millions who die of starvation and malnutrition in Africa every year. Traditional forms of government and NGO sponsored “aid” have been a disgraceful failure at alleviating this wholesale scale death. For that matter, many African nations have been no help. They are so often in a state of “war” themselves over what are hardly any different than the tribal skirmishes of prior centuries, typically over perceived “ethnic” differences among “armies” of kidnapped child soldiers or machete wielding vigilantes seeking personal gain under the guise of ethnic cleansing. Not that the countries of the Balkans have done much better, except that between eruptions a climate of rule of law enjoys an upper hand in those Balkan state that allows peaceful progress some of the time.

The colonialists had “imported” that aspect of their societies at one time, but it seems that in throwing off their “colonial masters” African majorities seem to have shrugged off the shallow roots of colonial civilization in favor of the “old ways” of tribal strongmen and ruthless brutal enforcers who kill at the drop of a hat, for mere political advantage. Stuffing ballot boxes and falsifying election results has descended to the level of sneaking a cigarette in the girls bathroom in high school in the distorted amoral view of African government. And yet, Dambisa Moyo claims (in her much acclaimed book, “Dead Aid”) that good governance is not a prerequisite of viable economic growth. She contends, and I support the course, that “aid” should be replaced by creating economic opportunity on a local level with assistance to local groups and individuals to establish business enterprises that permit the kind of middle class prosperity which can, as a grass roots based societal change, evolve Africa beyond these tribal fiefdoms that exist today.

It could be that Moyo’s African origins blur her perspective from seeing clearly that, in much the same way that we tend to equate the distorted social/moral vision of the Taliban with “stone age” society, that Africa is often a reflection of medieval Western society. African leaders in many countries are not unlike the warlord barons of agrarian European society from the 7th or 8th centuries, ruling through local thugs landholders, all the peasantry whose very existence depended on the success of the field crops and the mildness of the winter weather to survive. That is, assuming Norse raiders, Mongol hordes or another pandemic disease didn’t get them first.

Western mythology makes much of Robin Hood’s valiant attempts to save English peasants from excessive taxes (with an under emphasis that the justification was to fund an religiously motivated, bloody assault on the Middle East) but in reality compared to those threats from Mother Nature and foreign invaders, taxes were just about the least of their problems. Kings, dictators and self-important senators can be annoying, but taxes are rarely more than trivial when compared to the need for renewable energy or the economic inequities both here and even more so in Africa.

Love and warm wishes,

Sincerely,

Stafford “Doc” Williamson

http://lifestyle.psyrk.us
..
http://youtube.com/daochienergy/

p.s. As regular readers already know, I believe algae, because of its rapid reproduction rate will be critical to future “renewable energy” (biofuels) strategies, and I strongly advocate development of the various algae technologies. APRA-E in particular should be concentrating a significant portion of their research budget to find ways to produce vast quantities of algae economically.

XL Pipe vs. Biofuels a Very Long Race, Can’t Spell – Can’t Talk, “But I kin rite good.”

Alberta’s Got a Brand New Prime Minister

Alberta, Canada’s oil rich province, just got a new Premier (another name for the province’s Prime Minister of Provincial Government). Her name is Alison Redford, and one of her most controversial acts so far was to say that the government would be dumping the very unmemorable slogan that was introduced (with CDN$25 million fanfare) by the prior administration. You can hardly blame her. The slogan was “Freedom to Create, Spirit to Achieve” A nice thought, but not exactly an “I like Ike”, or “Yes, We Can” political touchstone, or country and western song title with a hook. So, being that sort of former Albertan who has the freedom to create and the spirit to achieve, I wrote the Prime Minister the following note (on October 29th, 2011):

“Looking for a new slogan for Alberta? As a big fan, and alumnus, I would like to offer my suggestion.
Alberta: Beauty, Environment, Energy, Prosperity

The “publicity” mnemonic is:
AB B.E.E.P.
It does really matter if the public remembers whether energy or environment comes first, what matters is that despite the [external/international] controversy of the XL pipeline and tar sands generally, that environment and natural beauty are treasured assets too. Alberta will not forget tourists flocked to Banff (and Calgary) before oil was ever discovered, and that appropriate measures to preserve the environment will be a priority from the prosperity that energy assets provide.

Sincerely,”
etc.

Okay, so my phrase didn’t set any house ablaze either, but the old “Alberta: Wild Rose Country” that used to grace their automobile license plates isn’t coming back any time soon. The wild rose images is a symbol of a rival political party. I actually believe in Alberta’s ability to balance these issues, and I am one of the few people I know who is actually a strong supporter of the tar sands pipeline, both for Canada’s prosperity, and for the USA’s national security. I know that with sufficient support I could convert the entire country (if not the whole world) to driving and flying on biofuels from algae in 6 months or less, but I am sorry to say that I realize that the predictions that the transition process with take 10 to 20 years is something of a self-fulfilling prophesy because it sets the tone and the pace of the race. We are going to go at tortoise speed, but at least we know from the old fable that the tortoise wins the race eventually.

It’s Appling Appalling !

What is so Appling Appalling !?? Well, it is a very sad sight (not site) that so many writers who have self-designated as “screenwriters” in the ubiquitous “Twitter” that now is the heart of the internet graffiti world, and yet just today, I encountered one “Twit” (and yes, I use the deprecating term instead of the more politically correct, “tweeter”) who was trying to make a serious point but completely undercut her own credibility when she typed (and did not correct) the term “are country”, meaning of course, “our country”. That is NOT a typographical error, folks. That is a plain and simple sign of ignorance, and although I have encountered the “spell and grammar checker” changing words on me, because it decided I meant something other than what I had typed, that is not the kind of mistake a grammar checker makes unless you are talking about C&W song titles. In that case it might have a rule that tried to correct something like “Shania and Dixie Chicks are country, but Madonna and Lady Gaga are not.” (of course it would freak out and change the verb if I had said “Madonna are not,” since Madonna and Lady Gaga separately are sufficiently schizophrenic to be pluralized). But lest you think a person, such as I, rants too much in light of the number of typos I include every day in everything I write, allow me to double the instances cited, remembering this was just in a less than 24 hour snapshot, indeed it was not much more than one hour on Tweetdeck that I saw the former and the following.

Another “twit” was complaining that something was not as it “should have been” and while I will allow that the internet spelling of “should” as “shud” is an acceptable “tweet” spelling, it was clearly out of ignorance, born of lack of a decent education that the writer strayed from the strait straight and narrow with a phrase that displayed the depth of inadequacy of proper vocabulary by saying “it shud of been better …” (meaning it “should have been”).

Now, I know that getting the “sound” of the language in one’s head goes a long way to speaking it (reasonably) correctly, but it is not enough to teach the “sounds” of a language if you expect to have a genuinely literate population. I know, at least in part, because I watch a class of English Language Learners just a couple of days ago. The “instructional aide” led the class through several pages of a workbook exercise in using the past progressive tense for both questions and assertions. I complemented the aide on his teaching ability as I left the classroom (after the regular teacher had returned from test proctoring) because I recognized that the immediate feedback of walking and talking the entire class through the written workbook exercise was far more effective than asking them to sit silently and write their answers to the questions posed. The immediacy of the feedback allowed them to connect the sounds of the correct tense being rendered, so that they should have (not “shud of”) been able to recognize the correctness of the “music” of the language associated with the meaning. The folks at Children’s Television Workshop (creators of “Sesame Street” and other great educational children’s programming for the last 30 years or more) are no dummies. They also created “Schoolhouse Rock” that created catchy little songs (not exactly “rock”, but at least “pop” in style) to teach more complex grammatical concepts like, “Conjunction Junction, What’s Your Function”, because the tunes make the facts easier to retain, and the choice of a train of railroad cars hooking up to form a train very nicely parallels the function of conjunctions in the language. Eventually, however, you have to go beyond the mere “music” of the language to attain a real understanding that “should’ve” is not “should of” despite the similarity. In fact, part of the problem is in the very sloppy way we (especially Americans) fail to correctly pronounce our words in the first place. “Are” is NOT the same sound as “hour” and strictly speaking “hour” is very, very close, but not exactly the same pronunciation as “our”. The difference is subtle, but it is one of the reasons that a British “public school” (their “upper class”) accent is so appealing to us in North America (yes, in Canada too, we are prone to swooning a little to hear the language treated with such care). Perhaps the best example I can demonstrate with phonetic spellings is the difference between “whales” and “Wales” (the country). “Wales” the country name is pronounced exactly like “wails”, the act of emitting loud exclamations of grief, often with varying and sliding changes in pitch, except that the country and the word “wails” do not themselves waiver in any way. “Whales” on the other hand is pronounced correctly as if it were spelled with the first two letters in inverted positions. That is to say, to pronounce “whales” correctly you say it more like “hw ales”. That means you are putting extra breath in front of the sound of the “w” (known as an aspirated “h” sound).

So, what can be done about all of this “ignorance”, fundamental failures of the education system to instill an understanding of the language, speech and writing? There are some innovative and useful programs that help. IBM’s “Writing to Read” is one that has received a lot of praise, but has also encountered a lot of resistance. I am going to propose a different tack. I suggest we need to get over our fear or aversion or whatever it is/was for “rote learning”, that is, learning through repetitive performance whether that might be speaking aloud, reading or writing. We do seem to understand, still, that teaching children to write letters is a learned skill that takes practice. Addition and subtraction are still taught (sometimes, if at all) by repeating the addition, subtraction, multiplication and division tables. But that isn’t always true either. I have noticed a lot of classrooms over the past decade that don’t bother to insist that students learn multiplication tables. They have them posted on the classroom walls, and have a “cheat sheet” of the multiplication tables in their notebooks or on their desks so that in the event that the batteries in their calculators are growing weak, they can simply look up the necessary “fact”. Calculators may be cheap and plentiful, but I certainly hope that actually understanding number concepts is never displaced by the “but I have a calculator for that”. I have seen graduating projects from Masters Degree students that were mistaken by two orders of magnitude in thier calculations because they relied upon their computer to do the calculations, and trusted the result without ever realizing that they input contained errors so the computer could not possibly give them the correct answers. These were not stupid people. On the contrary, they were among the brightest, but they were missing the fundamental understanding that you test a mathematical conclusion by a process of inverse operations to prove that the initial result is correct.

I would love to get hold of a karaoke machine with a “speed control” (in effect a tempo control) (most of these machines actually do have a “speed control” that changes the pitch, without changing the pace), that allowed me to learn the Tom Lehrer adaptation of a Gilbert and Sullivan tune to become “The Elements Song”. I’m a bright guy, but I have never sat down and learn every element name, and it serves me ill in everyday life as I try to understand chemical formulae for exotic catalysts used to tranform one substance into another. That may sound like “magic” and it truly is the same kind of magic that the “Alchemists” of old were seeking when they attempted to tune other substances into gold. At that time they did not realize that “gold” was an “element” and therefore could neither be transformed into another elemental substance, nor could other pure elemental substances be transformed into gold. And yet, every day organic chemicals become plastics, waxes become fuels, and carbon combines with oxygen to become carbon dioxide as part of our biological processes. The organic chemicals to plastics, however is one of those that typically needs some exotic chemical element as a reaction enabling substance (known as a catalyst) for the various elements to organize into long resilient strings of molecules that make up the malleable plastic substances. Take a moment and try to imagine how rapidly we humans might find solutions to problems if every 8th grader knew every element’s name, and found it fun to learn because of the silly song that taught them? Well, guess how many kids would be able to sing the “Conjunction Junction” song if it hadn’t been broadcast to their ears about a hundred times a year from the ages of 4 to 7. Of course, to know the value of this fundamental programming of children, teachers would have to learn the lyrics too, and that may be where we go astray. Teachers don’t believe in rote learning any more. It doesn’t fit with “modern” educational theory, and it’s “childish” for them to go around learning from “nursery rhymes”, especially ones their students already know better than they do. Well, I suggest we “get over it”, and take advantage of this natural gift we have of being able to retain information better when it has music and requires specific pitches and cadences to learn it. It just works. This is definitely a baby that should never have been thrown out with the bathwater.

Love and warm wishes,
Sincerely,

Stafford “Doc” Williamson
President
DaoChi Energy of Arizona
DaoChiEnergy.com
Lifestyle.psyrk.us

An International Perspective – One More Time, Please

I live in the US now, although I was born in another country, which also causes me to appreciate that because of his “foreign” upbringing, President Obama is also tempering his view of the world with a more global perspective. It cannot be ignored, however that the influence of the “military industrial complex” (as former President Eisenhower identified it) and now the “money is speech” decision of the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) means that the US political direction has been fairly closely bound to petroleum company interests. A recognition that we may be on the verge of a climate crisis has finally begun to affect political action here, and “green jobs” is a resounding cry that fills the air much of the time. However the general population. or apparently the majority of them, are not fully “on board” with the whole concept. Since it is true that all politics are “local” that means we’ll get more to happen with they masses see that it is affecting them directly.

In the meantime, however, the “jobs crisis” (and the smoke screen/distraction of the budget/deficit discussions) clouds thinking in many quarters of our country into thinking that globalization is a “bad thing”. Clearly it is not. And I have been trying to persuade almost anyone who will listen that exports are the key to resolving the stalled growth in the economy that will solve the jobs problem.

This is generally true for virtually any country, and I recently urged members of the EU (at least I published a comment addressing them) to take a similar strategy to the one that has been so successful for the People’s Republic of China, which is to lend the money (in their case by purchasing US Treasury instruments) to their export customers to stimulate job growth back home in China. It has worked so well, that they seem to recognize that they cannot sustain this indefinitely, they are now trying to grow internal demand for products and services to be more like the somewhat self-sufficient USA, that has traditionally built their economy on domestic spending demands.

But if the US (with the help of the Federal Reserve system of banks) were to finance deployment of the new green technologies that have been invented or developed here, providing a “green welcome mat” to underdeveloped nations into the community of the modern global economy, the domestic manufacturing and overall cash flow situation at home would be greatly improved. EU countries could do the same with help from Germany, France and the ECB.

Whether from development of energy from biomass, wind, solar, geothermal or tides it all still means renewable resources. That also means sources of electricity, fuels and chemicals in places where subsistence level living was the most that people there could expect in the past. Of course, in order to bring these benefits of modern technology and independent locally produced sources of energy, a good deal of the Millennium Development Goals of the UN need to be part of the development plans, but that is not as daunting a financial issue as it may sound. After all, any mining company that discovers, say, just for example, copper in the mountains of some remote region will cheerfully plan and build roads, power delivery systems for electricity and liquid fuels, and whatever is necessary to extract the mineral resource. The whole Canadian diamond mining industry is a great example of that.

It should not take Buddha-like enlightenment for companies to realize that the “people resource” in underdeveloped areas are far more valuable than mere minerals. They not only reproduce themselves, (go ahead, ask your diamonds to do that trick), they provide markets for the goods produced in that location, with near zero transportation costs and therefore minimal carbon footprint for transportation of the fuels. They are already there, at the source of whatever fuels, electricity, manufactured goods or intellectual property that might be produced there.

Exporting green technology is good for everyone, and for the earth too.

Sincerely,
Stafford “Doc” Williamson
http://daochienergy.com
http://attractattractivewomen.psyrk.us/attractionsecrets/

G-20 Needs Broader View to Solve Euro Crisis, Jim Lane of Biodigest Makes Similar Suggestions

I made a COMMENT on BUSINESSWEEK.COM

The article in question was related to speculation about actions that might be taken by the upcoming (next week) G-20 conference, with respect to the Euro, and the financial crises engulfing (at minimum) Greece and Spain. Being that it was to be the G-20, and not just some “Euro-centric” body, I attempted to broaden the horizons of their perspective a little.

There are two key concepts from the above report that suggest to me that a synthesis of proposed moves may result in a solution which benefits all. Reporter Rastello says that, “The Financial Times reported earlier that emerging-market nations were considering ways to boost the IMF’s lending resources.” Also reporting that, “One solution being considered is the creation of an IMF-run special purpose vehicle, two of them said.” and “Officials from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — the so-called BRICS — said in a Sept. 22 statement they are ‘open’ to contributing to global financial stability through the IMF or other international financial institutions.”

This suggests to me that if not all, at least most nations should be amenable to creating an “extraordinary circumstances export development bank” mechanism, the design of which would be to stimulate exports from the beleaguered EU nations (and any nation in economic downturn as a result of the worldwide recession, including the US) to enable purchases by the emerging economies of the underdeveloped world of both goods and services that provide “green solutions” for their current energy needs and enabling modernization and industrializations of their economies. Presumably it is in everyone’s best interests to expand export markets, and to attempt to (at minimum) meet and exceed the UN Millennium Development Goals for reduction of extreme poverty by half, and to make improved sanitation and safe drinking water available to those that do not have such clean water resources now.

Government efforts to prop up financial institutions has engendered resentment if not a revolutionary spirit in some places (i.e. London riots, and #OccupyWallStreet) based on past (i.e. TARP) and future (“French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel promised on Oct. 9 to recapitalize banks to resolve the debt crisis. debt crisis doesn’t spill over into the rest of the world.”) efforts.

Is it not only reasonable but fair to require those financial institutions which received government support or assistance now be facilitators of international development loans, not in the traditional “we give/loan, they ‘forget’, we forgive” tradition of international “aid”, but with genuine risk distribution among borrowing nations (guarantees only up to actual losses incurred, never the full amount), exporting nations (guarantees up to but not exceeding the economic benefit to the nation’s government financial benefits), and genuine asset based values (and/or future revenue streams if the entity is a public or privately held “utility”).

There are those who will rapidly reply that this is not possible, or that it would be impracticably complex and take too long to implement. My reply to those naysayers is that it was only the political will to take on the massive industrial re-tooling of a mobilization for WWII that stamped out the depression of 1929 in America. It is likely that only the realization and recognition that this economic threat to the survival of the world; not from the cost of combating climate change, but the price of inaction; will be sufficient, if met with global mobilization of economic resources, to propel us into a prosperous and peaceful future we all desire.

For further depth of discussion you might also want to visit:

http://www.focus.com/questions/qe3-and-european-debt-crisis-how-do-you-expect-china-react/

or

http://lifestyle.psyrk.us/free-algae-john-stewart-meets-dick-durbin-dirty-stats-qe3-exports

or

http://www.focus.com/questions/why-does-core-inflation-exclude-food-and-energy-prices/

where I say, in part:
We do not, as Republican politicians would have us believe (translation, distracted by a hugely theoretical set of numbers) a National Debt crisis, nor do we have a budget deficit “crisis” either.
We have an exports and jobs crisis, and by expanding the one we have an economic expansion that cures the second. An “Infrastructure Bank” is a marvelous idea suggested by Fareed Zakaria, but I contend that an Export Development Bank should be created with a special “class” of loans and interest specifically to create demand for exports of our “green” technologies. This kind of integrated action provides solutions to jobs, climate change and raises tax revenues even if none of the politicians have the courage to raise tax rates to the shocking and “horrendous” levels they were when Ronald Reagan was President (which is the blantantly obvious solution to the nonsensical debt/deficit problem, too).

I genuinely hope that is a constructive contribution pointing in a direction of a “solution”.

Jim Lane (of Biofuels Digest) is a VERY SMART GUY

In his publication, Biofuels Digest Jim says (and I agree, of course):

Clean energy risk insurance, vs. Green Banks, Fannie Mae
Unlike green banks – which essentially are vehicles for directive state investment – these technology risk funds would, after appropriate due diligence, insure projects in order to reduce the cost of financing. Since not all projects fail, insurance (like loan guarantees) foster more projects per dollar than direct investment.
Unlike loan guarantees, such a system would be based in public-private partnership – that is, potentially sovereign governments could help to capitalize the privately-held, privately managed funds.
How is this different from troubled institutions like Fannie Mae? First, by ensuring that government ownership does not man government control. This isn’t Private Money + Government Management, but rather Government Money + Private Money + Private Management. In other words, government sweetens the technology risk insurance pot to the extent that it wants to accelerate development. Sweeten very little, some projects get through. Sweeten more, more projects get through.
Key to that system is reform in due diligence. It has to be both better and faster. Everyone understands that some projects will fail – just as, sadly, some houses burn down, that’s the nature of insurance and why it exists. Striking the right balance between too much risk and too little risk, that’s the key, and strong due diligence is a key to that.
Given that, generally, about 10-20 percent of advanced biofuel project cost represents the core, innovative technology (the rest includes land, pipes, rail lines, power lines, out buildings, and other forms of standard equipment) – it is taking too long to review projects, or projects are not being able to get in the queue early enough in their development so that the due diligence can be carried out in parallel with other development activities.
Numerous other proposals are floating through the halls of the Moltke Palae in Copenhagen – and there is certainly no guarantee that these financing trial ballons will be incorporated into the final documents from the conference.
But they are ideas that have the merit of freshness, and deserve reflection, review, and improvement, in reforming a financing regime that has long gone stale.


See what I mean? Jim’s proposal dovetails nicely with my proposals for an Export Development Bank focused on green energy technologies.

Sincerely,

Stafford “Doc” Williamson

http://daochienergy.com

http://youtube.com/daochienergy

The Government and “The One Percent”

Jeffrey Sachs doesn’t lie, does he?

Jeff Sachs, the famous economist and university professor (Columbia U.) appeared recently (Oct. 2011) on a Charlie Rose on PBS program discussing, what else, the economy. Specifically, the depression or at least recession (at this point the “recession” has been the longest and slowest recovery in the history of the USA, which pretty much makes it discretionary as to whether it is called one term or the other, IMNSHO.) and how to climb out of it. He was adamant that he did not regret having voted for President Barack Obama, but he was not reluctant to criticize President Obama’s shortcomings, disappointments, and downright failures.

In particular, Professor Sachs made a very interesting comparison that I had not thought about. It is commonly said, and rarely said with any reference to the source of such statistics, that the upper 50% of Americans pay 90% of the taxes, and occasionally people mention that the top earning 1% (who make most of their income from their money [i.e. investments] not their labors) pay 50% of the total tax revenue collected by the USA. What Jeffrey Sachs brought to light was that the federal government takes in as taxes, about 17% of the national GDP (Gross Domestic Product) which is general estimated at about US$14.5 TRILLION at this point (remarkable close to the figure for the National Debt even though the two are not directly connected i.e. GDP and Govt. Debt have to do with productivity of the work force in the case of GDP, while national debt has to do with over-spending of the revenue received by the IRS on the expenses approved by Congress). The individual states (even though some states charge no personal income tax) collect about 10% of the GDP in taxes, so that approximately 27% of the GDP goes into the various governments to pay for the things that governments provide. Everything from social services like health care (e.g. Medicare and MedicAid), to free postage for congressmen, to the Army, Air Force, Marines salaries and weapons, to roads and bridges (remember we are talking about both federal and state governments here), police and education.

The point that was new information to me, and as usual I don’t know the source of Mr. Sachs’ information, but according to him, the top earning 1% of the population has annual income of … are you ready … that top 1% of the people earn 25% of the GDP as income in any given year. That seems about right because another source reported, back in 2009 that the people who had more than US$398,000 income took in 23.5% of GDP, after a minor step toward recovery from the financial crisis of September 2008 (during which the number of persons with net worth of US$1,000,000, excluding the value of their principal residence, dropped from 9.2 million in 2007 to just 7.8 million in 2009 according to this Huffington Post item by Grace Kiser and Ryan McCarthy (posted in September of 2010).

Considering the ever-widening gulf between the very rich and the middle class, it seems reasonable that over the last couple of years the upper crust may have gained a point and a half against the total of GDP. That may be obvious to most people who see the sizes of bonuses on Wall Street, and although they have not coalesced around a single theme or issue, may be a spark for the protesters occupying a portion of Wall Street at this time. But that is not what struck me about the figures Jeffrey Sacks mentioned. It was something else.

What took me by surprise was the fact that the government operates the whole country (and interest, including a couple of wars, overseas) on what just 1% of the population takes home as income. Now, admittedly, it is the most affluent 1% of the country, but still, the private income of some 2.2 million people (because there are reportedly approximately 217,000,000 taxpayers in the country) is equal to the entire revenue of the US Government and the 50 state governments combined. Think about that for a moment.

There are no shortage of voices bemoaning the awful, terrible, disastrous potential of the Buffet Rule, increasing the marginal tax rate on those earning more than US$1 million per year. Remember, however, that during the era of President Eisenhower the highest marginal tax rate was 95% (that was after stepping up the various rates that applied to sums of income less than the threshold of the 95% bracket, so the 95% rate only applied to “the next dollar” of income above that minimum limit). Okay, raising anyone’s taxes to 95% for any income bracket would be political suicide today, so let’s not even suggest that we could afford to go there. But consider a more modest proposal.

What if we made the first million dollars of income exempt from income taxes (not for everyone, just for those earning more than US$1 million per year) but then imposed an “honest-to-goodness,” every-penny-counts, tax rate of 50% on everything else above that first million. Are there people out there who would suffer from only taking home US$1 million in a year? It would be hard to maintain both the yacht in France and the other one just for cruising the Caribbean, admittedly, but you could hardly call giving up one of your yachts a “hardship” could you? How much would that help?

We have to go back and calculate some base numbers. Governments (plural, state and federal) take in about 27% of GDP, or which 10% goes to states directly. Ultra high earners take in 25%, but we are exempting the first million for each of them, so that subtracts 2,200,000 times US$1,000,000 which comes to US$2.2 TRILLION of person income set aside from taxable amounts. However that leaves about (remember all these figures are “rounded” and only approximations in the first place) US$1.45 TRILLION to be taxed at 50% which would be increased income tax revenue of US$725,000,000,000.
The Obama Administration’s budget for 2012 looks to be roughly the same as for 2011, with a total budget deficit of US$1.3 TRILLION. In light of that shortfall, even US$725 BILLION isn’t going to solve the problem, nor is a 1.5% reduction in an overall budget of something North of US$3 TRILLION. Here is a table from Wikipedia outlining the not yet passed Obama Administration’s budget of 2012.

The President’s budget for 2012 totals $3.729 trillion. Percentages in parentheses indicate percentage change compared to 2011. This budget request is broken down by the following expenditures:
Mandatory spending: $2.109 trillion (-3.2%)
$761 billion (+4.6%) – Social Security
$468 billion (-4.1%) – Medicare
$269 billion (-2.5%) – Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)
$598 billion (-16.2%) – Unemployment/Welfare/Other mandatory spending
$240 billion (+17.1%) – Interest on National Debt
Discretionary spending: $1.344 trillion (-3.1%)
$553.0 billion (+0.7%) – Department of Defense
$126.3 billion (-23.3%) – Overseas Contingency Operations
$79.9 billion (-1.8%) – Department of Health and Human Services
$77.4 billion (+6.2%) – Department of Education
$58.8 billion (+3.1%) – Department of Veterans Affairs
$49.8 billion (+0.5%) – Department of Housing and Urban Development
$50.1 billion (-0.9%) – Department of State and Other International Programs
$43.2 billion (-0.9%) – Department of Homeland Security
$29.6 billion (+4.2%) – Department of Energy
$28.2 billion (-7.2%) – Department of Justice
$23.8 billion (-7.1%) – Department of Agriculture
$18.2 billion (-6.7%) – National Aeronautics and Space Administration
$13.4 billion (-4.1%) – Department of Transportation
$14.0 billion (+0.8%) – Department of the Treasury
$12.1 billion (+0.3%) – Department of the Interior
$12.8 billion (-8.3%) – Department of Labor
$13.0 billion (-53.6%) – Troubled Asset Relief Program
$6.0 billion (+200%) – Disaster costs
$44.9 billion (-3.9%) – Other On-budget Discretionary Spending
The Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan are not included in the Department of Defense regular budget, but are included in Overseas Contingency Operations.

The WHOLE BUDGET ABOVE is “Clickable” to take you to the Wikipedia article.

It is enough to give a tax accountant a headache. And it often does.

Sincerely,

Stafford “Doc” Williamson

http://lifestyle.psryk.us

http://weightloss.psyrk.us
Getting LUCKY?
P.S. Oh, yes, and interesting coincidence came up in my calculator as I was crunching the numbers for this article. I said US$2.2 TRILLION tax exempt income for the 2.2 million millionaires so they won’t feel pinched, so out of the US$3.65 TRILLION they take home in income one way or another, that leaves US$1.45 TRILLION to be “taxable” at the highest marginal rate (according to my suggestion of a “real” 50% tax above US$1 MILLION income). But the budget deficit is way above that US$725 BILLION which even a 50% marginal tax rate would generate. That amount is in the lofty heights of US$1.3 TRILLION budget deficit. However, I discovered, that by the strangest of coincidences (???) a 95% tax rate on US$1.45 TRILLION comes out to be exactly US$1,353,750,000,000 (which is, of course, US$1.3 TRILLION) in additional tax revenue. Now isn’t that interesting?

P.P.S. Professor Sachs is, like me, a strong advocate for economic development in Africa. He calls attention to the fact that most of rural Africa does not even have access to electric power. See his comments here.

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