Monthly Archives: December 2012

Another Fiscal Cliff

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From Fox News:

[A] potential strike by thousands of dock workers from Boston to Houston threatens to shock the economy as early as this weekend.  …it could cost billions, citing estimates that a 10-day port lockout in 2002 cost $1 billion a day—and caused a major backlog in shipments.

[The present] port strike would affect more than the East and Gulf coasts, where all these ports are located.  It could choke supply chains across the country.  Groups ranging from the automobile industry to the National Retail Federation to the US Chamber of Commerce to the Cheese Importers Association of America are warning of dire consequences.

The primary beef?  Management wants to cap the current container fee royalties, rather than letting them continue to rise according to International Longshoremen’s Association schedules.

It’s important to note that those royalty fees are little more than featherbedding on the docks.  As The United States Maritime Alliance, Ltd (USMX), notes,

[C]ontainer royalties were established in 1960 as a way to protect members of the International Longshoremen’s Association, AFL-CIO (ILA) in New York from job losses created by containerization and its introduction of automated cargo.

Because shippers are job welfare programs for the ILA, after all.  Keep those buggy whip workers employed, no matter the costs to Americans.  Never mind that there aren’t any buggy whip workers anymore, anyway.

[O]nly 136 of the 3,281 ILA workers at the Port of New York and New Jersey today were working at the port in 1968….

The Port of New York and New Jersey was the original and only port at which the ILA was active during the transition to container shipping.  The rest of the ports up and down the east and Gulf coasts through Florida began life with containerized cargo.

Moreover, containerization has been beneficial to labor.  ILA workers at ports like Savannah, Charleston, and the rest saw their job opportunities grow specifically because of containerization.

On top of this, the royalty payments don’t all make it into the pockets of the ones being featherbedded.  Ten per cent—which ran to $21 million in 2011—were raked off the top by the workers’ union management, as the union’s vig.

In the end, the union doesn’t care about the economic damage done by the strike they’re threatening, nor do they care that their strike has so little economic purpose.  This isn’t even about protecting a featherbedding perk—USMX is willing to keep paying the “royalty;” they just want an upper bound on a payment that has nothing to do with the work being done.

No, this is about union power and the unions’ decision to use extortionate-type actions to maintain/increase it.  It’s a legal version of the violence they threatened in Wisconsin and Michigan, and of the dishonesty shown by the Wisconsin Teachers’ Union a year ago.

Update: Michelle Malkin provides one:

A deal has been struck that for now averts a strike by 14,500 longshoremen at major ports on the East Coast and Gulf of Mexico, including PortMiami and Port Everglades.

A federal mediator announced Friday that an expired contract for workers in the International Association of Longshoremen would be extended for another 30 days while negotiations continue.

The Obama Fiscal Cliff

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Here is a table of the effects of the Obama tax increases that will follow from President Barack Obama’s drive to put us all over the fiscal cliff.  The data are compiled from a recent Wall Street Journal article.

Category

Income

Post-Cliff Tax Rate

Tax Rate Increase from Pre-Cliff

Tax Dollar Increase from Pre-Cliff

Remarks
Unemployed Person Under $10,000 8.4% 55% $159
College Student $10,000-$20,000 7.5% 38% $308
Lower-Income Working Couple $20,000 – $30,000 5.5% 9,809% $1,423 From $15 refund to $1,423 tax payment—loss of Bush tax cut 10% bracket
Retiree Household $30,000 – $40,000 5.1% 42% $540
Higher-Income Professional $150,000 25% 25% $6,662 This also represents just under 25% of the total increase from the Obama tax hike
High-Income Couple $350,000 29% 20% $13,847 Loss of the AMT and higher dividend and cap gains taxes
Very High Income Households $1,000,000+ 39.7% 24% $254,637 Total share income taxes paid by these earners actually goes down due to the disparate impact of the Obama tax increase on the lower incomes

Obama’s Plan B desire for going over the fiscal cliff is going to hurt the least among us—the antithesis of our country’s Judeo-Christian imperative—and it makes his Evil Rich relatively better off.

Mass Shootings

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In the aftermath of the Newtown, CT, school massacre, there’s been a push to reapply a ban on “assault” weapons—whatever those are; not even the military has any such.  The term is purely legalist, cooked up in the back halls of Congress, and subject to change with the winds of political convenience.

One of the excuses used for this foolishness is one that Peekskill Mayor Mary Foster repeats:

We have seen a proliferation of these tragedies after the ban on assault weapons expired in 2004.  We cannot allow this to continue.

Let’s look at some actual facts.  The Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel published some of those just last August.  The graph below is built from their data, which cover roughly 35 years—from 1976 through 2010.

Note:   Mass shooting defined by the FBI as the shooter killing four or more people in a single incident (not including the himself), and typically in a single location.  Data compiled from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program by James Alan Fox, criminology professor at Northeastern University; US Census Bureau; Journal Sentinel research

Hmm….  Pop quiz time, and no peeking below: who can identify from this graph the period of effectivity of the “assault” weapon ban?

I didn’t think so.

The ban ran from 1994-2004.  The incident rate during that period is the same as the rates both before and after.  The number of victims per incident varies wildly—but is unchanged, in average or variability, over the same three periods.

Maybe it would be better for concerned communities to put trained, armed guards on duty in locations where there are masses of people—like schools and shopping malls, maybe.

Maybe it would be better for folks sitting in leadership positions—like, say, Mayor Foster—to think with their brains, rather than their emotions, and to consult some actual data.

Good Faith Negotiations

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Here’s another example of good faith, Progressive style.  This occurred in the failed fiscal cliff “negotiations:”

At one point, according to notes taken by a participant, Mr Boehner told the president, “I put $800 billion [in tax revenue] on the table.  What do I get for that?”

“You get nothing,” the president said.  “I get that for free.”

It’s certainly true that a number of chuckleheads, as one Republican participant called them, let themselves be confused into thinking that voting to preserve the present tax rates for 99.8% of Americans was the same as voting for a tax increase—even though the Great Grover Norquist had given permission for such a vote.

But the fact is, that President Barack Obama has been discussing in bad faith all along: he wants the cliff.  With the cliff, he gets tax rate increases all across the board, he gets to gut Defense spending, and he gets to blame Republicans for the economic and security disaster that will result—all Progressive dreams.  And that blame is as important to Obama’s ego as are the tax increases and the Defense cuts.

It is unfortunate that the GOP has chosen to be complicit in this shameful affair, but there it is.  They’ve emasculated themselves with an idiotic civil war, and they’ve rendered themselves impotent for the next two years.  Look for the Progressives to retain control of the Senate and regain control of the House in 2014, and to retain the White House in 2016.

Had the Republicans been able to pass Plan B in the House, those chuckleheads would have achieved three things: they would have voted for the present tax rates for nearly all Americans, they would have put the onus on the Progressives—as Speaker of the House John Boehnor (R, OH) put it

[T]he president will have a decision to make.  He can call on the Senate Democrats to pass that bill, or he can be responsible for the largest tax increase in American history

—to come up with an honest counterproposal.  And put the failure of the negotiations squarely on the shoulders of the Progressives in the Senate and the White House.

Now, Republicans don’t have anything at all for the debt ceiling debate other than an understanding of how to fail.

Congratulations, guys.

Anthropogenic Climate Change

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…and dishonesty.  More is beginning to leak out, this time from of all places the UN.  That august body’s IPCC has had leaked a draft of its latest “study” on the man-caused disaster in climate, and it isn’t a pretty example of the outcome of climate “scientist” incestuousness.

High points on the leak are from Matt Ridley, in The Wall Street Journal, and they concern a “pollutant” that our present administration is going after, and damn the economy—and damn the

poor people whose lives are being ruined by high food and energy prices caused by the diversion of corn to biofuel and the subsidizing of renewable energy driven by carboncrats[.]

The question at hand:

How much warming will a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide actually produce?

Ridley’s information comes from Nic Lewis.

A semiretired successful financier from Bath, England, with a strong mathematics and physics background, Mr Lewis has made significant contributions to the subject of climate change.

Per Lewis [emphasis added]:

[T]he latest observational estimates of the effect of aerosols (such as sulfurous particles from coal smoke) find that they have much less cooling effect than thought when the last IPCC report was written.  The rate at which the ocean is absorbing greenhouse-gas-induced warming is also now known to be fairly modest.  In other words, the two excuses used to explain away the slow, mild warming we have actually experienced—culminating in a standstill in which global temperatures are no higher than they were 16 years ago—no longer work.

Thus [again, emphasis added],

We can now estimate, based on observations, how sensitive the temperature is to carbon dioxide.  We do not need to rely heavily on unproven models.  Comparing the trend in global temperature over the past 100-150 years with the change in “radiative forcing” (heating or cooling power) from carbon dioxide, aerosols and other sources, minus ocean heat uptake, can now give a good estimate of climate sensitivity.

The conclusion—taking the best observational estimates of the change in decadal-average global temperature between 1871-80 and 2002-11, and of the corresponding changes in forcing and ocean heat uptake—is this: A doubling of CO2 will lead to a warming of 1.6°-1.7°C (2.9°-3.1°F).

This is much lower than the IPCC’s current best estimate, 3°C (5.4°F).

In the end,

A cumulative change of less than 2°C by the end of this century will do no net harm.  It will actually do net good—that much the IPCC scientists have already agreed upon in the last IPCC report.  Rainfall will increase slightly, growing seasons will lengthen, Greenland’s ice cap will melt only very slowly, and so on.

There’s more to this climate pseudo-science failure, and it flows from the CO2 interactions via alleged feedback loops [emphasis added]:

A little warming (from whatever cause [including atmospheric CO2]) heats up the sea, which makes the air more humid—and water vapor itself is a greenhouse gas.  The resulting model-simulated changes in clouds generally increase warming further, so the warming is doubled, trebled or more.

[The problem is,] water vapor may not be increasing.   A recent paper from Colorado State University concluded that “we can neither prove nor disprove a robust trend in the global water vapor data.”  [On top of that], as one Nobel Prize-winning physicist with a senior role in combating climate change admitted to me the other day: “We don’t even know the sign” of water vapor’s effect—in other words, whether it speeds up or slows down a warming of the atmosphere.

One reason for the uncertainty of the sign is that atmospheric water vapor means more clouds, and clouds reflect inbound sunlight while trapping outbound heat.  Which has the greater effect—reducing the inbound inputs or holding onto the outbound outputs?  Only a climate pseudo-scientist claims to know at this point in the data collection and analysis.  Especially given the…quality…of their data and of their models.

There’s a whole lot more at the Watts Up With That? site, both on the present topic and on anthropogenic climate change, generally.