Sunday, November 2, 2008
I don't like your industry, so I can wave my hand and make it disappear in the name of the common good:
Obama Wants 'Price Signals' to 'Change Behavior'
Obama Told SF Chronicle He Would 'Bankrupt' the Coal Industry
But not a socialist. What's become of America that we now have politicians that can actually go around talking like this and not be written off as dangerously intoxicated with the powers of government?
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: The Power to Tax is the Power to Destroy.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.solomonia.com/cgi-bin/mt4/mt-renamedtb.cgi/15685
6 Comments
Leave a comment to: The Power to Tax is the Power to Destroy
Comment Info and Policy:
1) You must have Javascript enabled in your browser in order to comment (blame the spammers). If you don't know what that is, you're probably fine.
2) HTML is on, so basic html should work. Raw links will be made auto-clickable, too, so even if you don't know html you can just paste in the link and it should work fine. Keep the "http://" in it.
3) Comments are generally unmoderated, which means I don't necessarily agree with the tone and tenor of everything posted. In fact, sometimes people post things they don't really mean just to make other people look bad. The internet is an anonymous place for the most part. That said...
4) I welcome you to post here. I'd love to have your input, agree, disagree or just offer a different data point, really. If I didn't want any participation, I'd turn off comments. Be aware, however, that this blog and the comments section exist for my entertainment. Therefore, I reserve ALL RIGHTS here, including the right to remove any or all comments on nothing more than a whim. Please don't even bother complaining. I'm the one providing the space and the free news and thought buffet. I don't owe anyone anything.
Anyone who posts here will be treated as my guest. That means I'm happy to be polite as a default, but if anyone is rude to the host they'll be unceremoniously shown the door.
It may pay to recall a famous line from the Tom Selleck magnum opus, Mr. Baseball: "Jack-san, you want Yoji's advice about the babes, you come to Yoji with respect."
5) Enjoy your stay!







Scary isn't it.
Don't we all know someone who is more impressed with their own intellect and abilities than anyone else is???
To bad we're about to get a President like that.
He's looking and sounding less socialist and more Totalitarian by the hour.
Tax cuts don't matter if you don't have a job. And with Reid, Pelosi and 30 million newly amnestied voters, this might not be something we can back.
Bye Bye Miss American Pie....
Drove my Hundai to the levy but the levy was...
dynamited by Bush/Cheney/neocons per screwy louie farraKLAN/Jerry Wright/Jim Cone.
Hey please enlighten me - what the f is a price signal and what/why is it used?
A price signal is just a term applied to the idea that people respond to prices. When prices rise they consume less and when prices fall they consume more.
What Obama is saying is that by raising costs through taxes and fees and regulatory costs, companies and then consumers will be trained to consume less of those products he deems harmful, and companies will then invest in the technologies that will get them around the regulations.
It can work, but with a number of caveats.
1) it's a regressive tax.
2) it'll only work as long as those costs are held artificially high, which may not be long enough for the new technologies to fully mature.
If those new technologies are developed under a regime of false prices, their development could (likely would) be fundamentally harmed in ways that will cripple them when reality does return to the energy market.
This is actually a form of moral hazard. And, as we've seen, reality always comes back into markets at some point, one way or another, at which point we'll be left with a damaged economy and fragile technology that can't stand the rigors of a real marketplace.
So it's his way of giving alternative energies a shot? or is he going to punish corporations that ship jobs overseas? Europe has a huge tax on gasoline and much of our price at the pump is made up of gov't and state taxes.
guess so.