Today AOC released her New Green Deal Proposal.
It’s a wish list of socialist and green ideas, most of which are obviously absurd to all but the most economically clueless persons.
It has zero chance of passage and it’s nonbinding, but here are some of the key ideas.
- Upgrade all existing buildings in the US
- 100% clean power
- Support family farms
- Universal access to healthy food
- Zero-emission vehicle infrastructure
- Remove greenhouse gasses form the atmosphere
- Eliminate unfair competition
- Affordable access to electricity
- Create high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing wages
- Guaranteeing a job with a family sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States
Here are a couple of comments from Twitter.
Fyre Festival of Legislative Proposals
As Bad as Expected
No, it was far worse. Perhaps Heritage is more imaginative than I am.
Revenge of the Millennials
Bloomberg writer Karl W. Smith calls it Revenge of the Millennials
Almost every major new economic initiative proposed by Democrats — the Green New Deal, Medicare for all, debt-free college — has a common feature: Unlike most current social programs, it would benefit younger Americans at the expense of older Americans.
Now, finally, it seems that they have had enough. They want to use fiscal policy to help repair the damage wrought by monetary policy. This isn’t necessarily the way I would address the issue; I would argue for fixing monetary policy instead of spending vast additional sums to support a new suite of government entitlements. I am certainly sympathetic, however, to those who think otherwise.
Smith is mistaken. This proposal sounds just like the lofty socialist goals of Castro, Chavez, Maduro, and Mugabe (Cuba, Venezuela, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe).
Implementing AOC’s plan would do just what Stukey suggested to which I add:
If someone blows off your left arm with a shotgun, it’s best not to blow your right arm off as “revenge”.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
She’s moving the Overton window and getting the right wing to pee their pants. You’re getting played. Wise up.
The media are paying attention to something that will never happen. Pelosi staffed her environmental panel and guess who is not on it. Alexandria Cortez. Cortez is a freshman house democrat. She frankly has no power or chance at advancing any of this. The right is merely using her proposal for political purposes and conveniently ignoring the fact that it has zero chance at advancing.
I suspect the right is making Cortez a target because it serves some useful purpose having nothing to do with any legislation concerns.
The Democrats promote her to make corporatist Democrats look moderate and normal. The Reoublicans probably donated to her campaign…to make Democrats look stupid. She is not there, with so much media, on her own volition. The more she talks the more both parties can leverage anti-socialist voters
All Democrat presidential contenders have supported AOC’s insane “green dream” apart from Tulsi Gabbard…
Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Julian Castro, Spartacus-Booker etc. are all behind AOC’s insanity.
This means that only Tulsi Gabbard has a chance as a Democrat in the presidential election in 2020 or Joe “creepy” Biden or Hillary “Haiti” Clinton has to run.
Clinton has no chance after selling American Uranium to Russia and swindling Haiti donations through the Clinton foundation.
Joe Biden is a creepy gaffe-machine.
So Tulsi Gabbard is the most likely Democrat candidate in 2020…
Here is an archived page of FAQ’s from AOC that she was now DELETED from her website regarding the “green dream”:
This is the organization behind AOC: https://brandnewcongress.org/policy/
In case you’re wondering where her ideas come from.
“It’s stunningly absurd.”
We are living in an era of extremes. One extreme begets the opposite, as for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
26 people own as much wealth as something like half the people on the planet. AOC is going to the opposite extreme. Take it away from them.
The problem is that she is not. She may say she will. May perhaps even believe it. But, in practice, all she is asking for, is further empowerment of the very institution that robbed the rest to enrich those 26 to begin with.
Assuming her heart is in the right place and she’s not just the last in a long line of cute mascots hired to keep the dupes pliant, starry eyed and stupid; what she is doing, is called being played like a fool. Ditto her supporters.
She will achieve one of two outcomes — Stuki’s or she will destroy the wealth entirely.
On her point about “affordable access to electricity” I have a major bone to pick with the method electric companies use to charge us for power line maintenance. Maybe some readers have some answers.
In a perfect world, roads are maintained by the collection of fuel taxes at the pump. It’s a rare case of what I consider a fair tax since you pay for road upkeep according to how much your vehicle tears the roads up. A Mini Cooper driving 10,000 miles per year getting 40 MPG and weighing 1,500 lbs damages roads a lot less than a semi-truck driving 200K miles per year, weighing a gazillion pounds and getting 7 MPG. While they both pay the same percent tax on fuel, the Mini Cooper donates a lot less to road upkeep, as it should be, by buying less fuel.
So why aren’t power companies using that same model? Instead, they have a flat rate called a meter charge (among other names) and each customer pays the same rate for each meter. That’s as insane as if a Mini Cooper and a semi truck were paying the very same flat rate for road upkeep each year. If they were to do away with the meter charge, and instead add a percentage to each kilowatt, they could collect the same amount of money but those using the power lines the most would be paying the most for their upkeep. Currently, guys like me who are very frugal with electricity, pay 30¢ per kilowatt for line maintenance on a kilowatt that only costs 8¢ to begin with. That’s a 375% tax. Meanwhile, Walmart (and all other medium to large users) pays almost nothing. In my actual area, if the power company were to switch from a meter charge to a kWh tax, the tax would only be 2/10ths of a cent/kWh. (I downloaded all the financials from their website.) The power company would collect the exact same amount of money for line maintenance but it would be much more fair to homeowners, who are currently subsidizing business and large users.
Does anyone live in an area inside the US where they have a kilowatt tax instead of a meter charge? Does anyone understand why the power companies would choose to do it this way instead of a kilowatt tax like fuels have?
If Occasional Cortex wants affordable access to electricity for all, this would be a good place for her to start.
The cost to the electric company is per meter. It costs them the same to put a meter in your house, and to maintain it, as it does to put one in the house of a neighbor who uses twice the electricity.
One change you’re seeing in electric rates is a move towards time of day rates. The cost to the electric company varies greatly by time of day. They would much rather you ran your electric dryer and dishwasher at night, or in the early morning, rather than on a hot summer afternoon.
Thanks guys for the input. In my area, most of the maintenance cost is not meter related, but forest related, I’m guessing. It definitely bears looking into. I live in a very rural area, with a power co-op, and we have 5,000 miles of power lines that have to be maintained mostly by brush hogging underneath, chipping trees, etc. The meter charge is $360/year and it can’t cost that much per year for a meter that is going to last decades. I would guess the other costs per customer are minimal, meter reading is done by computer, my payment is done by computer, etc.
I got interested in the topic this week when I noticed on an Australian/New Zealand solar blog, most of the customers were not paying a meter charge, but apparently a tax per kilowatt instead.
The subject is doubly painful for me since I DO have solar panels, grid-tied. The co-op buys 70% of my production for 2¢, sells it to my neighbors for 8¢, and I still have to pay them $320/year. I’m working on getting off-grid completely. $320 buys a lot of fuel for my generator, which I need once a week to pump my 500-gallon water tank full.
Since it is a co-op in my area, and member owned, perhaps if enough members are in agreement, the meter charge can be switched to a kilowatt tax to pay for overhead and maintenance.
Given your description, the main meter cost was the installation cost to run your electric line, which would have been perhaps ten thousand of dollars, and that is being amortized over 20-30 years. One way or the other, they need to recover those costs.
The more juice you use the higher the price. My city charges .12 cents baseline / .20 cents Non-baseline. The city I’m in owns the power company. I see some areas are getting ripped. Solar is your option.
If she isnt a threat then why is she everywhere and continually being talked about? What if millenials support her in droves and elect more like her. I’ll be surprised if she isnt an eventual presidential candidate.
Watch this and tell me you aren’t on her side?
I watched it. She’s a person who specializes in Passive Aggressive shaming. All of which are corrosive to society.
Mish, instead of comparing what she’s proposing to what’s going on in Cuba or Venezuela, which owes much more to our intervention than failed policies, how about comparing it to successful policies in Canada, Germany or Norway? I’m sure that’s what she has in mind. Using sensational examples and in the wrong context does nothing for this site or those who take your positions at face value.
Like Marx did, she sees the problem. “The system is fundamentally broken.”
But, again like Marx, her “solution” is seemingly to make that fundamentally broken system even more powerful and invasive.
When something is fundamentally broken, you throw it in the trash. Or if it’s too big to fit in your trashcan, you fill it up with dynamite and blow it to smithereens. Then throw the pieces in the trash.
What you specifically do not do, is go about forcing others to become even more dependent on, and in thrall to, a system you already know is fundamentally broken.
You can do what the Somalis did to their similarly broken system. Or what the Afghans have always been doing to theirs: Shell the living crap out of all their institutions, all their people, and all their profiteers. Then forget they ever existed, and stop worrying about them. The only surefire, 100%, way to guarantee your system is not broken, is to not have a system at all. That is a solution to the fundamentally broken system problem. Something which making the fundamentally broken system even more powerful, is patently not.
Or, if you insist on being beholden to “systems” and the self serving scum inevitably running and breaking them, make sure you have multiple different ones to, cheaply and quickly, switch between, should one prove intolerably broken. This is how private enterprise manages to work, despite the people running large corporations being no more noble than the ones running governments: Simple external constraints imposed on them, by people’s ability to leave and/or route around them, in favor of less fundamentally broken competitors.
Copy that wrt governance, and at least you’re going somewhere in the right direction. Instead of insisting on digging yourself ever deeper into dependence on a system you are already aware is fundamentally broken. Or, worse yet, attempting to force others who aren’t so fundamentally clueless, into similar dependence as well.
She said things in that 5 minutes that many of us have been waiting a long time for someone to actually vocalize, in government, vs. on blogs. If anything, I respect her more. Go ahead and flame me.
“Vocalizing” something is cute and all. Isn’t particularly useful, though, when all her proposed “solutions,” boil down to nothing more, than making what she apparently is aware is “fundamentally broken” even bigger, more powerful and harder to simply throw by the wayside and route around.
That’s just more of there same platitudes about “helping the poor” by empowering the exact institution which has been robbing them ever more rapaciously for the past 150 years.
The policies in place in Venezuela are more similar to what she wants to do than what goes on in Norway, Canada or Germany. This stuff is dangerous. And insofar as Norway, Canada or Germany go, the whole west is teetering on financial collapse because of promises that governments can’t keep, among other reckless things. Economies are contracting in a long term, accelerating trend.
Venezuela can and will happen here if things are not turned around. AND NOT TO THE LEFT.
Venezuela and Cuba are responsible for their own crap. Don’t blame US policy.
Not to mention longer average life expectancy every decade and a near record low in weather related deaths.
She clearly is completely clueless about science. I suspect her knowledge is no better than many junior high students. And she’s the one deciding how to best combat climate change. Politicians who know nothing about global warming, reading articles written by journalists who know nothing about global warming, quoting whoever makes the most outlandish claims. How can this not be a good idea?
The whole purpose of financialization and progressivism, is to ensure that all spoils, and all power and influence, is awarded on the basis of closeness to the central authority, and adherence to it’s central dogmas. Rather than by any form of objective merit.
This is why you have illiterate “Private Equity” retards making decisions about US manufacturing. Ambulance chasers about medical priorities. TV and Twitter clowns about “trade.” And this thing about anything at all.
Free people would simply shrug their shoulders, and casually route around each and every one of that kind of less-than-zero backmarkers, on their way to doing something useful. Instead of wasting time wallowing in muck wrestling with that kind of trash.
So it is paramount for the trash, and the societal organizations that sustains and aggrandizes them, that people are as far from free as humanly possible. But are instead forced to pay attention to the idiots.
Well Donald Trump must be real happy today. This list of stupidity from Alexandria Obsessive-Compulsive is the greatest re election campaign for the sitting President..
Stupidity is what we have had in Washington for 30 years. This young woman is not stupid nor are her ideas. Radical? Absolutely! She is a revolutionary and I’ve got her back….for now.
It wouldn’t look any different than than the Republican socialism/crony capitalism we have now. The Green New Deal is a 10-yr plan. All easily funded with the tens of trillions we wasted the last 18-yrs on endless war.
The reason we aren’t Venezuela now is the world still believes in the USD. We can
Print dollars to keep afloat.
The reason we aren’t Venezuela is because no more powerful country applied crippling sanctions on us while trying to overthrow our democratically elected government.
We’re going to pay for it with money that we wasted on wars?
It wouldn’t look any different than what we have now. Nor what Venezuela has now. Nor any other totalitarian Dystopia. They all look the same. Which is exactly no reason at all, for cheering on dystopias.
I do agree with your point that both parties are equally bad, and neither wants to balance the books. That, sadly, is why the end of the US is in sight. Yes, the world still values the USD, and it will for awhile, but not forever. Once it stops, the house of cards will come tumbling down. All the “free stuff” that the government has promised will become impossible, and when interest rates spike up as a risk premium is added, all tax receipts will have to go to pay the interest on the debt.
Just because it will collapse “someday” doesn’t mean we should be in a hurry to make it happen sooner.
arl – would you agree that 30 yrs of government led by centrist Republicans and Democrats and a completely misguided Central Bank were major contributing factors to where we are as you clearly articulated? Would you then agree that now is the time for BIG, BOLD ideas? Her’s are big, bold progressive ideas. Lots of people won’t like them, it’s scary. But they are the only ones!! I see no one else on the world stage willing to put forward big ideas like this. Bernie talks about it, but it is all talk with him. He is not a “doer”. This young 27 year old woman has come to DC for blood. The Established politician Right or Left is in her crosshairs. She deserves our support.
Believe me I would love to see someone counter her ideas with other big, bold ideas, like eliminating the Fed, eliminating the income tax and move to a consumption tax or some other form of taxation. Where are they? Until that happens and my choice is status quo or these type of bold progressive ideas, give me the later.
Is the Green New Deal viable? Probably not in it’s entirety. Paying for this is certainly a challenge, but I’m all for creative ideas of how. My favorite is to cut defense spending by $500B a year. That is $5T over 10 years. Not out of the question. Ron Paul has always mentioned that. I’m also a big fan of the idea we can put people to work on alternative energy instead of huge boondoggles like the F-35 fighter plane. We need change! I hope AOC is the lightening rod to bring out lots of big new ideas.
Your alternative ideas are far superior. As a general theory of taxation, you tax what you want less of. Thus, an income tax discourages productive work, while a consumption tax discourages consumption. If the problem is that government is inefficient, making government bigger only makes the problem worse, and makes it exponentially worse, because the bigger it gets the less efficient it becomes.
The entire country ran just fine with the government shut down for a month, with only minor disruptions. Doesn’t that say a lot about how little the government actually does?
Her ideas are not new. Centralize, Centralize, Centralize. Bernie is a big Hugo Chavez fan. Bernie also thinks that breadlines are good, because then the rich people are not hoarding the bread. It’s on a Youtube video. You can’t make this $#!T up! Go find it.
Socialism: Economic collapse, famine, mass murder. How many times does it have to happen??
How many does this have to happen? The answer is, it has to happen once for each Republic/Democracy. Look at places around the world, for example South America, and you’ll see them end this same way again and again. Or, you can look at ancient history, and see Greece and Rome.
Republics are great to live in, while they last, but they never last. They never last because government grows and grows, and becomes more and more inefficient, eventually crushing the economy, and eventually ending in bankruptcy. The US will end the same way as all the others, which is no surprise. If you read the Federalist Papers, the founding fathers warned us about the way we would end, and we and proceeding on schedule. Their comments were amazingly prescient.
I would add that I agree that baby boomers didn’t manage the country well, nor did their parents. The sad thing is that young people looking at the situation seem to be thinking “debt and printing money doesn’t matter, we can just have everything we want”, rather than thinking “if we don’t do better, the freedom that we have won’t be around for our children to enjoy.”
Extremism is the new normal in politics but it is simply an inevitable consequence of the incompetence of the wealth and favor driven political system we call modern democracy. A country racking up 20Trillion in debt and spending 600billion a year on defense (aka the armed public services) exemplifies a broken political institution. Why is anyone surprised when the middle class demands some of that money back.
Notice how politicians always get their pics taken with a flag behind them, even if they are very UN-American.
Mish, it’s not very nice to pick on mentally retarded people like AOC.
That’s right, make yourself feel better by calling her retarded. I know she scares you with her revolutionary ideas. Build that insult wall You can feel safe behind. She is anything but. She is a bad ass
There will never be anything even remotely revolutionary about cheering on Leviathan to grow even bigger and more powerful than he already is. Doing that, is doing exactly nothing more than what he has been indoctrinating his captive dupes to do all along.
That the captives are now so thoroughly indoctrinated, that this is what they call a “revolution,” is why the more genuine, and consequential, revolutionaries coming out of Central Asia and Arabia, is having such an easy time walking all over the rotting carcass of the once-were-worth-bothering-with-preserving West.
Yet she’s in Congress, and you’re in here posting asinine comments.
That is a sitting duly elected congress shim tat you so insultingly compare to a mentally retarded person. You should be ashamed!
I demand that you apologize to all the mentally retarded people you so cavalierly slander, malign, and defame!
I think you’re wrong. If she was stupid, she wouldn’t have gotten as far as she has. I think she knows, or at least doesn’t care, that her ideas are ridiculous, but also knows that they will get her elected. Getting elected by promising “free stuff” to people has been going on in Republics dating back to Rome and Ancient Greece. That it eventually leads to the collapse of said government is irrelevant, when the goal is short term personal success.
What would our economy look like if the Democratic Socialists were able to pull off these super expensive programs and use Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to pay for it?
Down the path of Venezuela
The issue isn’t whether they can pull it off. It’s how much money will be wasted in vain trying to accomplish what in the end will do little to combat global warming. There’s no amount of money that can accomplish what’s proposed. Build train tracks across the Ocean? It takes a hundred million dollars and years to build an offshore oil platform. And it’s a single hole in ground. How are they going to build a bridge thousands of miles long over an ocean that’s 7,000 feet deep?
But Mish, money==wealth right? So if we all just get a lot of money we’ll all be wealthy!
Never mind that upgrading “all buildings” would be a massive subsidy to wealthy landholders at the expense of pretty much everyone else.
Crippling sanctions, attempts at regime change and economic war are what’s wrong with Venezuela, not programs designed to counter corruption and the rich stealing everything like they do here.
What crippling sanctions?
USA has been buying oil from Venezuela until a couple of days ago.
Google it and get back to me. Start with Obama, 2017…
the “socialism” bogeyman is so laughable. We have several large socialist policies in place now like welfare and social security. We have a tremendous amount of corporate welfare also. As for how to pay for it, do it the American way…debt, or have the Fed print it up. I’d much rather pay workers to rebuild buildings for a lower energy future than spend $1T on DOD boondoggles. I could go o and on.
AOC left out a small detail – how is she is going to fund her ideas.
She should read this till it is embedded in her brain…
Margaret Thatcher once said that “The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
Hummm, biosphere genocide?
From here.
I boil the Green New Deal down to one thing. A 27 yr old Millennial who is pissed off at the Baby Boomers for 50 yrs of biosphere genocide in the name of “wealth” and the economic inequality of where that wealth went. Who can blame her?
Who cares about blame. Her “problems” are easy enough to solve. The US founders, Ron Paul, Zapata, Spooner, Von Mises, Thoreau, Rothbard and a bunch of others, both nominally “left” and “right,” have had viable solutions available for eons. Every single one of them by going in the exact opposite direction of where she claims she wants to go.
It’s easy to blame her. Anyone can see that her plan is beyond ridiculous. That leaves only two possibilities. The first is that she is willfully ignorant. The second is that she knows her plan is ridiculous, but is using it to gain politically by gaining support from a large mass of people who have been left detached from reality by an educational system that has failed them.
Mish,
What would our economy look like if the Democratic Socialists were able to pull off these super expensive programs and use Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to pay for it?
Same as if ditto the Trumpists. Increased decay into a Venezuela like state. Only to be rescued by the Caliph.
Here is some supplimental info on how things are accounted for in in a Green agenda. About that CO2?
Mish, this is not primarily about the economy. That is simply a distraction. It is about supply and demand basics.
If you look at the linked info in my prior post, or even the new IEA data, there is no way the globe makes up 90+% of its global energy needs with what is often referred to as renewable energy. Keeping in mind, most of the referenced renewable energy comes from sources that produce more CO2 than burning coal.
Think about a landscape covered in black solar panels and wind farms that provide globally for us, a 1% or a couple of points more energy, than it currently does. It ain’t gonna happen unless we revert to the middle ages standard of living.
In fact a little know item is the impact of solar and wind on climate. You don’t see studies on that anymore.
Example.
That said, it still remains a point of contention if we actually are harming anything with fossel fuels. The data on problems doesn’t exist to date. It is only modeled, and not well statistically, verses observations to the tune of 2.5 x wrong.
This fellow did a good well sited report based upon the available data. Where are the trends touted? All publicly available information.
So, this is not about climate or weather, it is about trickle down control of our energy needs in the end.
All I can say is, I hope the documented, actual, facts come out with this visible initiative to reduce our global standard of living. Science is never done via concensus. Hence, why so many in the climate industial complex don’t share the data for verification of theory.
Now, back in your Cave man!
“So when there’s a fresh voice, who may need some experience but otherwise has idealistic goals, I am in favor of seeing what she can push through.”
Corto is in favor of proven economic stupidity – because it is “idealistic” just to get a “fresh voice”
I wasn’t there, but was Kennedy’s going to the moon speech responded to as idiotic at the time? Idealistic? Stupid? Wasteful?
How many amazing technological innovations came about because of the government pushing that, on the surface, crazy plan?
I would say, PLEASE let the Dems continue to implode, but they are taking us down with them. When you put AOC on the Finance Committee, and make Maxine Waters the Chair, two people with ZERO experience in the field, is there any doubt our govt is collapsing.
In financial terms, the Dems have been in a bear market since Roosevelt set us on the path of big govt, which AOC tried to blame on the private sector. Sorry, capitalism hasn’t been tried in over a 100 years. When you combine the seats of the House and Senate, they peaked in 1936. Since then, every rally resulted in lower highs, and every low was lower – the definition of a bear market.
AOC’s “green dream” is just further proof the Dem’s are crazier than Trump, and destined to continue their bear market until the waterfall decline. Even good goals, like supporting family farms, access to healthy foods, and eliminating unfair competition would be made worse by bigger govt involvement, as proven by the fact it was GOVT that made these items worse in the first place.
It was GOVT regulators that let the banksters abuse their power and break the law, giving us the financial crisis, without any top executives going to prison. One of the top reasons health care cost are so high is due to GOVT regulators not enforcing EXISTING anti-trust laws – destroying competition. It was GOVT that established the food pyramid that has lead to chronic obesity, and we should all know that it was GOVT that destroyed the family farm. I almost forgot, she wants affordable access to electricity, while wanting to kill all cheap sources of energy.
Only a clueless numbskull would NOT believe that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. With AOC even getting elected and Liz Warren having the hubris to run for President, it proves once again how inept GOVT is – it’s called the Dept of Education.
The fallacy of eliminating greenhouse gases is that plants would die without CO2. Then people would die without plants to produce oxygen. It’s a symbiotic relation that has no single point of stabiity.
No said said CO2 levels should be reduced to 0. In fact, I haven’t even seen anyone suggest that they should be reduced from current levels. The only thing I’ve seen is suggestions that the rate of increase needs to be slowed.
This site is messing with my paragraph numbers. They look fine in edit, but not as posted. I apologize for the formatting issues.
Addressing some of these:
Universal access to healthy food
-Again, I’m not sure what this means. If we have access to a grocery, we have access to healthy foods. The problem isn’t that we don’t have access to healthy foods, it is that we don’t choose healthy foods.
Zero-emission vehicle infrastructure
-Again, I’m not sure what is meant
Remove greenhouse gasses form the atmosphere
-Umm, how?
Eliminate unfair competition
-As discussed in another post, what does this mean? Does it mean eliminating competition, and replacing everything with a regulated monopoly? Or does it mean breaking up existing monopolies? In the past it was usually the latter, in which case companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon would be targets. Since those are all liberal, I kind of doubt she would target them.
Affordable access to electricity
Create high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing wages
-Unions work by restricting competition. They can force labor rates up so long as they can eliminate competition. The increase in globalization means that everyone is competing with everywhere else in the world, and that has severely cut into unionization. Globalization is not going away. That’s why the one place where unionization has been strong is in government jobs. For those there can be no competition (well, private schools can compete with public schools, but they start at a major disadvantage, since parents who send their kids to private school have to pay twice, once to public school, and once to the school of their choice). Thus, the only way to do #9 is to give more and more people government jobs. Since government jobs inherently are immune to competition, they are also inherently inefficient. The two go hand in hand – it is competition that drives efficiency. Therefore, if we create more government jobs as a way to create high-wage union jobs, we will cripple the economy by driving up inefficiency.
Guaranteeing a job with a family sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States
-Of course. But, what if the job doesn’t produce enough to pay such a wage? The answer, of course, is more welfare, and more government jobs. See #8 above. If the goal is to crush GDP, and destroy the economic wealth of the country, this would be the ideal approach.
People complain about how the young won’t be better off than their parents, and how workers aren’t getting ahead. The reason why they aren’t is simple enough. All wealth is created by private enterprise. The government takes a portion of that, and spreads it around. Over the last sixty years, the government has become a larger and larger portion of GDP, and private enterprise has become a smaller portion. That means that the number of those producing wealth keeps getting smaller, while the burden they are supporting keeps getting larger. What comes after economic stagnation? Economic shrinkage, of course.
One of the fundamental principles that applies here is that whenever government messes something up, the only possible solution is more government, until the entire system finally collapses. That’s what we are seeing here. Government has been slowly consuming the capability of the American economy to grow, and now we are reaching the tipping point. In order to stop that, the only answer is to dramatically expand government, which in turn will implode the economy.
The US is getting long of tooth anyway. All my life I have said that the end will come sometime between 2033 and 2050. I continue to believe that to be true. The fact that ideas like this have any popularity shows just how close we are.
Large part of why young won’t be better off than their parents is illegal immigration and the 29.5 million illegal immigrants in USA currently since they push down wages ( willing to work for low wages) and push up healthcare costs (when illegal uses a hospital for free the hospital has to add this cost in the prices they charge Americans) and push up real estate prices and rent prices (prices move on the margin and 29.5 million illegal immigrants increase both rents and real estate prices) and illegals also increase taxes (cities and counties have to increase taxes to pay for the education of illegals kids including 5+ million illegals kids who have been given birthright citizenship because of bureaucrats interpretation of a non-binding footnote by one leftist Supreme Court judge in 1982, Reagan allowed this crazy interpretation of birthright citizenship to be made law of the land by bureaucrats).
Also when illegals get free tuition or tuition at the same price as Americans resident in the state this causes college and university prices for Americans to be higher than the would otherwise be.
All costs in USA are higher because of illegal immigrants, the only thing being lower is wages and this mostly benefits the billionaire class.
This site is also apparently messing with the name of the poster. This was not my post.
I’ve been in the construction industry for 30 years, in that time, I have engineered 1000s of residences. This has allowed me to give you all a professional opinion on just electric vehicles alone.
The National Electrical Code Section 220 is what you use to perform calculations for how much electrical power you need for homes, this includes what factors you can use when multiple homes are in the same electrical system.
The problem is that the entire US electric grid is woefully under capacity to deal with all homes having battery chargers. Electric car batteries are the biggest overall load for the vast majority of residences, by far.
Your electric range is usually 8000 watts, while your charger would be 7200 watts. But you do not run your electric range full on (more than one burner) for hours per day, while you charger does.
It simply won’t work, and NIMBYs would fight tooth and nail about any extra capacity that would be required.
Fairy tales.
Quite a bunch of cynical old guys here it seems….wait, let’s spend trillions on wars and nation building instead. Oops, that didn’t work. Why not spend/waste trillions on thing that may actually produce some benefits? More power to her. At least there are new voices, however naive you might think they are.
So because AOC is an idiot means everyone here is for war and nation building? Pay attention.
Nobody here said spending $trillions on pointless, endless wars was a good idea.
However, that “money” is GONE, wasted – except for the MIC profiteers who benefitted. This government is hopelessly BANKRUPT – kept fiscally afloat by an “exorbitant privilege” (reserve currency status) literally enforced at gunpoint on the rest of the world. Sustainable? I think not.
These millenials, and the country at large, are going to have to re-learn many lessons of history – the hard way – in the next 10 years. It will not be pretty.
I’m not saying people here are in favor of wars, just that our government has been, since, a really long time, and it’s gotten us generally nothing except more hatred and wasted resources. No one in government usually complains too much except when it’s our kids that are dying.
So when there’s a fresh voice, who may need some experience but otherwise has idealistic goals, I am in favor of seeing what she can push through.
Her “idealistic” goals include even further increasing the size, scope and reach of government, from our already almost unfathomable levels. The same government which fights wars. Which sends people to Gitmo. Which enriches its lobbying friends and social circle by taxing, regulating and debasing everyone else, hence making most everyone poorer, except a small clique of useless and privileged welfare queens. The same government who ended family farms with farming and land use regulations. And which has rendered a decent wage unobtainable by most, simply by enacting laws that ensure wealth is distributed not according to who works to produce it, but rather according to who happens to own pointlessly pumped up “assets.”
Now matter how “idealistic” you claim to be, it doesn’t get you anywhere useful, when every single “solution” that forms in your mind is dead, 100%, wrong on absolutely every single count. And not just dead wrong in random directions. But indeed dead wrong in the specific direction that those benefiting from the current theft parade, will further benefit maximally from: By implicitly handing them even more power. Rather than doing the right thing, which is simply blowing the lot of them away, to be replaced by as close to nothing as at all possible.
Get rid of government, and most of her idealistic dreams are self fulfilling. Technology has marched forwards sufficiently since back when America last retained some trappings of a civilized society (1870-1900), that the occasional, naturally occurring problems of scarcity that still persisted back then, would now easily have been drowned out by increased productive efficiency.
Without the existence of an institution sufficiently powerful to, at arbitrary will, transfer most of the wealth created by productive workers, away from them; for the benefit of an ever smaller clique of useless nothings in Politburos and Hedge Funds; the wealth created by productive workers will not get transferred away from them. The theft doesn’t just happen by magic.
It’s not some natural law that the harder A works, the more of the money he makes gets debased away, in order to facilitate some idiot B in his belief his decaying roach shack in San Francisco is somehow “going up.” and getting more valuable as it decays in the sun, fog and wind. Instead, that transfer is the result, the sole result, of, tah-dah, policy. Enacted by government. Not Trump’s government. Not Obama’s. All government, including OACs. All possible government. As redistribution is what government does. To those closest to it. From the rest. Always. Everywhere. Without exception. Ever.
So again, get rid of the institution that steals and redistributes. And the problem of stolen wages, stolen farms, stolen anything, once again, goes away.
Mish is against never-ending wars.
Many commenters including me are also against never-ending wars.
I am also against never-ending waste of money that the Green Dream (Pelosi’s name for AOC’s insane plan) would be.
Do these Democrats think money grows on trees?
Every Democrat presidential candidate supporting this AOC plan has shown themselves to be totally incompetent including Kamala (did NOT prosecute bankers in California) Harris, Elizabeth (1/1024th indian and used her “indian” status to advance in her career) Warren and Julian (stole an university place from an African-American through abuse of Affirmative Action) Castro.
AOC es muy loco.
My favorite part was “eliminate unfair competition”. One should know by now that with this bunch of communists that unfair competition is any competition. Good maintaining any sort of coordination of goods/services/advancements without competition…
This is a curious question. Does she want to eliminate competition, and go with single providers, which the government controls though regulation (think utility companies), or does she want more competition, which would require breaking up monopolies?
AOC is a Democratic Socialist and socialists think the world becomes better when you eliminate competition…
Breaking up privelege , rackets, monopolies and corruption would be great, but you would normally refer to this as “introduce more real competition” instead of “eliminate unfair competition.”
“Remove greenhouse gasses form the atmosphere”
So, um, greenhouse gases are what store heat in the atmosphere. That’s why they’re called “greenhouse gases”. They are why you can stand in the shade and the temperature doesn’t drop by 80 degrees. The atmosphere still keeps you warm. Oxygen and Nitrogen can’t store heat. Even though greenhouse gases make up a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, even tiny changes can have dramatic impacts over the long term. Which is why climate change is an issue to start with. Remove them, and we all freeze to death.
That sentence right there shows you that this is intended to be a socialist jobs program first, and anything green coming out of it is pure luck.
Jon, where did you learn physics? Oxygen and Nitrogen cannot store heat? What is the heat content (btu) of nitrogen /cu.meter at 1000 degrees C. versus zero degrees C. ?
Greenhouse gas theory is a “Theory”. It’s a “Consensus” theory. In fact it flys in the face (contravenes) of the Laws of Thermodynamic physics.
The idea is not that greenhouse gases store more heat, which they don’t. The idea is that when energy is radiated from the earth back into space, they reflect a portion of it back.
BTW, biofuels and waste are effectively burned to produce energy and contribut similar amount of CO2
Hummm, considering that solar and wind power devices cannot be manufactured with wind or solar power, we have a problem Houston. Let alone the fact that wind and solar currently contribute maybe 1% of global energy needs. Energy, not just electricity.
I particularly chuckled on the transoceanic train idea.
Back to your caves people 😉
Supplimental item I remembered from a while back.
At least we are discussing something other than a stupid wall.
At least it is not a tax cut (“reform”, my ass} that benefits only very high income earners (aka, rich people).
Yes, it is naïve. But, it is about moving forward towards solutions for our problems.
Really?
Clinton taxed the ‘rich’, and when I asked our accountant about my smaller check, I found out how ‘rich’ I was making $30,000 per year back then.
If taxing the rich really worked, California would not have increased gas and sales tax throughout the state.
The only thing that works less well than taxing the rich, is taxing anyone other than the rich.
You have to relate and empathize if you’re going to get anywhere in national politics today. Pick a large group with real or imagined gripes and grievances and feel their pain.
AOC’s on it. She’s picked the millennial living in mom and dad’s basement, saddled with their portion of $1.4 Trillion in college debt, and suffering from TDS and Hillary withdrawal.
Her “plan” looks suspiciously like Huey Long’s February, 1934 “share the wealth” screech. In fact, if you inflate Huey’s $2,000 guaranteed income offering by 3.55% annual inflation for the 84 years, it’s now $37,466.
Said differently, our friendly politicians have destroyed 94.7% of the dollar’s purchasing power in only 84 years…because we’ve let them, while waiting for the socialist Godot to arrive. Here she is.
Everything’s a creepy carnival these days. AOC clears tables for a living but is turned into a superstar by a corporate media conspiracy to create the next BHO. Typical that AOC and BHO are both hollow empty shells to be filled with whatever excrement their owners desire. As for the G.N.D., it is cartoonish and clearly used to dupe the DNC’s own followers, much in the way the GOP duped their followers by endlessly chanting “reduce the size and scope of government” while expanding it. Dupes are dupes. Still, the G.N.D. will die a quick death because people don’t care about policy anymore, only personality. But honestly: who has more personality than DJT?