Unhinged Behavior of the Leftists

Posted on 18-Aug-2012 by Highvoltage

Unhinged – That is the only word I can use to describe the insane behavior exhibited by Leftists over the past couple of months. 

It seems to have started when Obama appeared to go off teleprompter and revealed a bit of his true Leftist beliefs when he said Business owners didn’t build their businesses by themselves.   The quote from the White House transcript is below (emphasis mine):

“There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)”

“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”

Personally, I don’t think this comment was a gaffe but more a revelation of the true Leftist nature of Obama and this comment combined with similar comments from Elizabeth Warren reveal what this year’s election is all about. 

The Left was having a hard enough time just competing with Romney but after he announced his VP candidate would be Paul Ryan, the Liberals zoomed off the rails.

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the DNC chairwoman and chief liar for the Democratic Party, was pwned by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.  Debbie Downer kept repeating the same lies about Rep. Ryan’s budget plan and Blitzer would not tolerate that blatant misrepresentation of the truth.

From the Breitbart story:

“Of course Blitzer was correct. When Paul Ryan introduced his budget reform plan, the Roadmap For America’s Future, he did suggest that reforms for Medicare would kick in for those 55 and under. But the fact is, and it is a fact, that Blitzer kept trying to pound into Wasserman Schultz’ head, that Every American over 55 would not see any changes at all in the entitlements that they always thought they’d get.”

Vice President Joe Biden, aka Crazy Joe, recently made a racially charged statement when he told the crowd that if the US elected Romney/Ryan, they’d bring back slavery.

“We got a real clear picture of what they all value,” Biden said. “Every Republican’s voted for it. Look at what they value and look at their budget and what they’re proposing. Romney wants to let the — he said in the first hundred days he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules, ‘unchain Wall Street.’ They’re going to put y’all back in chains.”

 Of course, it’s hard to take Joe Biden seriously since he has a history of ignorant comments but I’m glad that Team Obama hasn’t put Biden in chains and kept him locked in a closet until November 7th.   I’d be happy if Biden made a speech every day from now until the election. 

One of CNN’s irrelevant pundits, Touré, doubled down on the Biden race baiting by calling the Republican presidential nominee racist because Romney described Obama’s campaign strategy as angry and desperate.  Here is a Touré quote from Mediate:

“That really bothered me,” he said. “You notice he said anger twice. He’s really trying to use racial coding and access some really deep stereotypes about the angry black man. This is part of the playbook against Obama, the ‘otherization,’ he’s not like us.”

“I know it’s a heavy thing, I don’t say it lightly, but this is ‘niggerization,’” Touré said to the apparent shock of his co-panelists. “You are not one of us, you are like the scary black man who we’ve been trained to fear.”

So calling a person of color ‘angry’ is equivalent to racism?  Touré has since issued a faux apology but I for one don’t accept it because it’s the typical Leftist apology where they are saying – “I’m sorry you took my comments out of context” or something.

Team Obama doesn’t want to debate his record over the past 3+ years or his ‘accomplishments’ because they’d lose that debate every day and twice on Sunday so they are fixated on other straw man arguments like Romney’s tax returns for the past 5 years.  On Friday, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina resorted to school yard taunting when he sent an email to Romney campaign chairman Matt Rhoades promising to stop harping on Romney’s tax returns if he’d release the last 5 years.  From National Review, here is an excerpt of that email:

“I am writing to ask again that the Governor release multiple years of tax returns, but also to make an offer that should address his concerns about the additional disclosures. Governor Romney apparently fears that the more he offers, the more our campaign will demand that he provide. So I am prepared to provide assurances on just that point: if the Governor will release five years of returns, I commit in turn that we will not criticize him for not releasing more–neither in ads nor in other public communications or commentary for the rest of the campaign.”

And here was Mr. Rhoades’ response:

“Thanks for the note.

“It is clear that President Obama wants nothing more than to talk about Governor Romney’s tax returns instead of the issues that matter to voters, like putting Americans back to work, fixing the economy and reining in spending.”

“If Governor Romney’s tax returns are the core message of your campaign, there will be ample time for President Obama to discuss them over the next 81 days.”

“In the meantime, Governor Romney will continue to lay out his plans for a stronger middle class, to save Medicare, to put work back into welfare, and help the 23 million Americans struggling to find work in the Obama economy.”

“See you in Denver.”

Bravo Team Romney!  That is how you treat an elementary school yard bully!

So that is the recent rhetoric from the Left and let’s contrasts that with two recent speeches by Romney and Ryan.  I have included many quotes and while they are longer reads for a typical blog post, I feel they are very important to show the difference in campaign strategies between Obama and Romney.  Read them and come to your own conclusions.

From Romney’s speech in Ohio earlier this week (emphasis mine):

“After four years, it’s clear that President Obama’s policies aren’t fixing these problems, they’re making them worse. That is why Ohio will lead the way by electing a new President on November 6th.”

“For the first time, most Americans believe that our best days are behind us. This is an election in which we should be talking about the path ahead, but you don’t hear any answers coming from President Obama’s re-election campaign. That’s because he’s intellectually exhausted, out of ideas, and out of energy. And so his campaign has resorted to diversions and distractions, to demagoguing and defaming others. This is an old game in politics; what’s different this year is that the president is taking things to a new low.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

“In 2008, Candidate Obama said, “If you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters.” He said, “If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.” And that, he told us, is how, “You make a big election about small things.”

“That was Candidate Obama describing the strategy that is the now the heart of his campaign.”

“His campaign and his surrogates have made wild and reckless accusations that disgrace the office of the Presidency. Another outrageous charge came a few hours ago in Virginia. And the White House sinks a little bit lower.”

“This is what an angry and desperate Presidency looks like.”

“President Obama knows better, promised better and America deserves better.”

“Over the last four years, this President has pushed Republicans and Democrats as far apart as they can go. And now he and his allies are pushing us all even further apart by dividing us into groups. He demonizes some. He panders to others. His campaign strategy is to smash America apart and then cobble together 51 percent of the pieces.”

From Paul Ryan’s speech today in Virginia (emphasis mine):

“Let me say a word about the man Mitt Romney will replace. No one disputes President Obama inherited a difficult situation. And, in his first 2 years, with his party in complete control of Washington, he passed nearly every item on his agenda. But that didn’t make things better.”

“In fact, we find ourselves in a nation facing debt, doubt and despair.”

“This is the worst economic recovery in 70 years.”

“Unemployment has been above 8 percent for more than three years, the longest run since the Great Depression. Families are hurting.”

“We have the largest deficits and the biggest federal government since WW II.”

“Nearly 1 out of 6 Americans are in poverty–the worst rate in a generation. Moms and dads are struggling to make ends meet.”

“Household incomes have dropped by more than $4,000 over the past four years.”

“Whatever the explanations, whatever the excuses, this is a record of failure.”

“At Bain Capital, he launched new businesses and he turned around failing ones – companies like Staples, Bright Horizons and Sports Authority, just to name a few. Mitt Romney created jobs and showed he knows how a free economy works.”

“At the Olympics, he took a failing enterprise and made it the pride of our entire nation.”

“As governor of Massachusetts, he worked with Democrats and Republicans to balance budgets with no tax increases, lower unemployment, increase income and improve people’s lives.”

“In all of these things, Mitt Romney has shown himself to be a man of achievement, excellence and integrity.”

“We Americans look at one another’s success with pride, not resentment, because we know, as more Americans work hard, take risks, and succeed, more people will prosper, our communities will benefit, and individual lives will be improved and uplifted.”

“The commitment Mitt Romney and I make to you is this:”

“We won’t duck the tough issues…we will lead!”

“We won’t blame others…we will take responsibility!”

“We won’t replace our founding principles…we will reapply them!”

“We will honor you, our fellow citizens, by giving you the right and opportunity to make the choice:”

“What kind of country do we want to have?”

“What kind of people do we want to be?”

“We can turn this thing around. Real solutions can be delivered. But, it will take leadership. And the courage to tell you the truth.”

There is an ancient quote that states “Adversity doesn’t build character, it reveals it” and this is exactly what we are seeing with the 2012 elections.  Leftists realize that their policies for almost 4 years have been a total failure and they can’t run on their record so their ‘character’ directs them to attack their opponents on issues that don’t matter to the country.  The Leftists are waging a campaign of misdirection and the Conservatives are waging a campaign based on solutions using adult conversations and realistic problem solving techniques.  The differences between the two sides could not be starker.

Posted in politics | 4 Comments

Why Soaking The Rich Won’t Work

Posted on 14-Aug-2012 by Highvoltage

Obama and the Leftists are hitting the class warfare meme hard and trying to convince voters that the solution to our budget problems is making the wealthy pay their fair share. 

I’ve shown before how the wealthy are already paying more than their fair share when you consider that their share of the income tax revenue is roughly twice their share of the total income in the US.  Iowahawk has also shown how increasing taxes will not bridge the budget deficit and I suggest you read his post now if you haven’t already done so.

In this post I’ll provide another simple way to see the lunacy of the Left’s claim that we don’t have a spending problem but instead have a tax revenue problem.

I’ll use the latest IRS data from 2009 and the US Government Spending site which shows the estimated 2012 federal government spending to generate the following graphs (feel free to check my math).  I’ll admit that using tax revenues from 2009 to compare with federal spending in 2012 isn’t exactly an apples to apples comparison but it’s not my fault the IRS hasn’t released data from later years and as you’ll see from the graphs, that even increasing these revenues with inflation doesn’t come close to matching our budget deficits.

You can see from the graph above that the amount of tax revenue from those making over $200,000 per year was approximately equal to the tax revenue from those making less than $200,000 per year.  Leftists reading this post will snap to a hasty conclusion that this proves the wealthy aren’t paying their fair share!  Math is hard and before you jump to that claim you need to realize that the income from those making over $200,000 per year only accounts for roughly 25% of the total adjusted gross income less deficits of the US but they pay approximately 50% of the income tax revenue.  That means those making over $200,000 per year are paying TWICE their fair share and this fact alone causes this favorite Leftist talking point to fail on simple math terms. 

You can see from the graph above that even if we DOUBLE the income tax rate of those making over $200,000 per year, we still don’t make up the $1.3 trillion deficit our government will run in 2012.  We’d have to take 100% of the income from those making over $200,000 per year to balance the budget and actually run a surplus.  So even if Leftists controlled the House, Senate and White House and they chose to enact this radical agenda, ask yourself why these individuals would continue to work if all their money went to the federal government?  This would only work for 1 year and then we’d be faced with another budget deficit that would be far more than $1.3 trillion because those who make over $200,000 would chose to not work and then the federal government would lose out on half of their income tax revenue.

The class warfare meme is crazy and fails upon a simple math test so the next time you hear a Leftist saying the wealthy need to pay more, ask them to prove it with math.  They can’t!

Posted in economics, politics | 11 Comments

A South Carolina Vacation

Posted on 13-Aug-2012 by Highvoltage

Sorry for the lack of posts on this blog but my family just got back from a week at Edisto Beach and before I get back to my normal topics of Politics and Science, I’d like to take this opportunity to share with you what it is like to vacation in the lovely Palmetto State.  Full Disclosure – While I’m not a native of this beautiful state, I have lived here for 13 years, my children are natives and I plan to stay here until I die so I have adopted this state as my ‘home state’ and I have the right to brag about it for a while.

South Carolinians are blessed to live in a state that has wonderful beaches and great golf courses and there are well known locations that are visited by those outside of South Carolina – Myrtle Beach, Charleston and Hilton Head, just to name a few.  But when my family really wants to get away and enjoy the raw natural beauty of the coast, we head to Edisto Island.

If you are looking for putt-putt parks, go-kart tracks and massive bars for your beach trip then go to the those more popular places mentioned above but if you are looking for a secluded island getaway with family fun and adventure as nature intended, then Edisto is your place.

I’ll give you a flavor of what our week consisted of in pictures and you can decide for yourself if this is the vacation that your family desires.

First off, there are no high rise hotels on this island so your options are limited to renting a house or a condo but when you look at the prices of these rentals (especially if they are not on the beach), you’ll find that they are just as affordable as a hotel on other typical beach resorts.  There is one grocery store, a couple of pizza places, a kick-ass breakfast place and a few sea food shops but outside of that, you’ll need to plan on cooking most of your food for the week.  Ok, now for my week in pictures. 

Here was a link to the house we rented and here is the view we had from our front porch.

Because of the secluded nature of the island, the night sky is amazing and if you’ve never had the privilege of seeing the Milky Way in the night sky, this is a place that you can definitely do that.  Houses facing the beach have to keep their lights off to not interfere with the baby loggerhead turtles getting confused when they hatch and the beach at night offers a spectacular view of the night sky and during the summer you can see the Milky Way stretch from Sagittarius, thru Cygnus and ending in Cassiopeia.  It is truly amazing and it’s a shame everyone can’t see this from their home due to light pollution.

Most days we spent on the beach with the kids and you can get a flavor of the beach from the following pictures.  The beaches are not very populated and in many cases you’ll feel that you have the whole beach to yourself! 

When South Carolinians go to the Edisto, they frequent the local fish shops to get fresh sea food for their dinners and there is nothing better than a Low Country Boil which consists of corn, sausage, potatoes, onions and shrimp.  Here is a picture of the spread we feasted on one evening.

We love our golf in South Carolina and there is a great course on the island which has a challenging 5,782 yards from the White tees and 6,130 yards from the Blue tees.  The course has lots of water and if you have trouble hitting it straight, bring a couple sleeves of balls!  Below is a pic I took from the course we played last week.

We picked last week because the PGA championship was being held at neighboring Kiawah Island and I took the kids to the tournament on Thursday and Friday.  That course was amazing and here is a pic of the challenging 17th hole which, on Friday, played 223 yards over water with a stiff 30 mph wind from the Southeast.  Standing behind this tee box and watching several pros grimace at their tee shots made a amateur duffer like myself feel better!

You can’t go to the coast without partaking in a chartered fishing trip off the coast and I took my kids with me on this trip. Below is a picture of the 20 lb shark I caught on this trip (I’m the guy on the left) and although we through this guy back, the fish we did keep made for a great dinner that night!

So there you have it.  In the span of a week we played on the beach, ate fresh seafood, played golf, saw a PGA tournament, caught fish in the ocean and (most importantly) made tons of great family memories.  There might be other places you can do that but for my money, there is no better place than South Carolina and especially Edisto Beach.

Posted in South Carolina | 1 Comment

Chick-Fil-A and the 2012 Elections

Posted on 03-Aug-2012 by Highvoltage

In close elections, you never know what might be the tipping point to get that extra razor thin margin of Independent voters to push a swing state into your column.  I will not be surprised if we are standing around the water cooler at work on Wednesday, 07-Nov-12, reflecting on the election results and someone might give Chick-Fil-A credit for Romney’s victory.

Think I’m crazy?  Let’s reflect on the events of the past few weeks.

16-JUL-12

The President and COO of Chick-Fil-A, Dan Cathy, gave an interview with the Baptist Press in which he said the following:

“Some have opposed the company’s support of the traditional family.

“Well, guilty as charged,” said Cathy when asked about the company’s position.” “We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.”

“We operate as a family business … our restaurants are typically led by families; some are single. We want to do anything we possibly can to strengthen families. We are very much committed to that,” Cathy emphasized.”

“We intend to stay the course,” he said. “We know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles.”

19-JUL-12

Actors, Liberal Blog sites, Universities and Civil Rights groups supported boycotts of Chick-Fil-A restaurants.

20-JUL-12

Jim Henson’s Muppets announce on their Facebook page that they will sever ties with Chick-Fil-A.

22-JUL-12

Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee calls for a national Chick-Fil-A appreciation day and creates a Facebook page announcing the event.

25-JUL-12

Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel, says that Chick-Fil-A’s values are not Chicago values and actively lobbies to block opening of new Chick-Fil-A stores. 

Not to be outdone, Boston mayor Thomas Menino sent a letter to Chick-Fil-A suggesting they refrain from opening more stores in his city.  It should be noted that Menino walked back those comments a day later saying he didn’t have the right to block Chick-Fil-A stores from opening in Boston.  

01-AUG-12

The national Chick-Fil-A appreciation day was huge with just about every restaurant having long lines and the restaurant set an all-time one day sales record. 

I can attest to this first hand because the Chick-Fil-A restaurant I drive past on my daily commute was packed as can be seen from this picture I snapped while I drove past.

Then there was this person who decided to use this special day to video tape his intolerance and post it to his YouTube channel but unfortunately for him, he was apparently fired from his job because of this act.  

Unfortunately, my alma mater has decided to get into this fight and is looking into ways to shut down the Chick-Fil-A restaurant on its campus. 

02-AUG-12

Gay activists are planning a ‘national same sex kiss day’ for Friday, 03-AUG-12.

What It All Means

Even though it appears that this situation is far from being relegated to the dustbin of current events, there are some immediate take-aways that will have implications for the upcoming elections in November.

The Chick-Fil-A events over the past month highlight the differences between the way Conservatives protest and the way Liberals protest.  Conservatives use their money to voice their opinion and they spent a large sum this week at Chick-Fil-A which operates over 1,600 stores in 39 states.  Forget Cash-For-Clunkers, this economic stimulus was generated entirely by the Free Market without a penny of government aid and can’t be characterized as ‘Astroturf’ as Nancy Pelosi is prone to do.  It should also be noted that even with the huge assemblies at over 1,600 locations across America there wasn’t a single incidence of violence, vandalism or other criminal activities and this can’t be said of the Leftist protests that have occurred at the Occupy Wall Street sites.  Conservative protests benefit the economy and don’t call for riot police or Hazmat teams to come in to clean up after they leave.

The comments of the mayors of Boston and Chicago reveal the true nature of Leftists.  They are not in favor of diversity or freedom of speech unless those espousing those ideas are in total agreement with the Leftist dogma.   It must be emphasized that Mr. Cathy’s comments were personal in nature and came from his religious beliefs.  There is ZERO evidence that Chick-Fil-A discriminates against homosexuals with regard to hiring, promoting and service so the ‘homophobic’ labels are unjustified and just a smokescreen to promote a Leftists faux rage argument. 

We are now living in an America where government officials exert their influence to shut down businesses because the owners of those businesses have religious beliefs that are different from the ruling regime.  Did you ever think this would happen in America?  I am a Conservative Christian but I  would be equally outraged if a mayor refused a business license simply based on the fact that the business owner was an admitted atheist. 

And no, this is not the same as a city banning the operation of a strip club or Wal-Mart in a local community.   When these types of businesses have been denied licenses to operate that has come about from town hall style meetings to hear from the citizens and those types of businesses have been denied entry only when it is apparent that there will be a detrimental economic impact to the community. 

If people are upset with the beliefs of Chick-Fil-A management, then they have every right to boycott that business and I’ll fight for their right to do that.  I don’t eat at Arby’s anymore once they caved to Leftist pressure to boycott Rush Limbaugh but I don’t write letters to my mayor asking that he shut down all Arby’s restaurants or block them from opening new ones.  A local government should never be in the business of banning businesses based purely on religious or political beliefs.  Let the Free Market pick the winners and loser, not the government.

I supported the national Chick-Fil-A appreciation day, not because of religious grounds, but because of First Amendment grounds.  I don’t believe a government has the right to deny a business the right to operate simply because the business owner has different religious/political views than the government leaders.  It’s that simple.

The Chick-Fil-A events over the past month have revealed the true character of Leftists and independent voters will not be pleased by their hissy fit.  Conservatives accept that other people have different views and either engage them in conversations or ignore them but Leftists get upset when they see others with different political views and seek to punish them.  Conservatives utilize the Free Market and look for other options when faced with a business whose political views are in opposition to theirs but Leftists seek to shut down the business that doesn’t subscribe to their view.   This subtle, but all important, difference between Conservative and Liberal worldviews is now front and center in the election debate.

Adversity doesn’t build character, it reveals it.  Liberals will be their own worst enemy as they will reach a point where they can no longer hide their true character and will resort to fascist tactics.  The Independent voters are watching these events and they will vote accordingly in November.  We will look back on the events of July/August 2012 as a significant tipping point in the Conservative movement and the election of Mitt Romney.

Posted in politics | 5 Comments

Team AGW Big Lie Exposed

Posted on 30-Jul-2012 by Highvoltage

Anthony Watts has just pre-released a game changing paper that he co-authored and it can be found here.  This paper has the potential to rock the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory and the Al Gore approved hockey stick graph to their foundations and prove that Team AGW is guilty of statistical chicanery.  But before I get to that, I need to review some basics first for those who don’t follow the Climate Science news closely.

Measuring Land Temperatures in the US

Meteorological monitoring stations are installed at over 1,200 locations in the 48 contiguous United States (CONUS) and they are used to monitor various weather variables (temperature, humidity, etc.).  The data from these weather stations are called the United States Historical Climatology network (USHCN) and below is a short description.

“The United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) is a high-quality data set of daily and monthly records of basic meteorological variables from 1218 observing stations across the 48 contiguous United States. Daily data include observations of maximum and minimum temperature, precipitation amount, snowfall amount, and snow depth; monthly data consist of monthly-averaged maximum, minimum, and mean temperature and total monthly precipitation.”

AGW skeptics have long contended that many of these weather stations, while located in urban areas and some even on airports, would suffer from what is called Urban Heat Island (UHI) effects.  Anybody who lives in or near a large metropolitan area knows that the temperatures in the city are usually higher than the rural areas because the concrete, asphalt and other manmade, heat trapping structures cause the land temperatures to be higher when compared to rural areas. 

In 2011, Professor Richard Muller led the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project (BEST) which sought to analyze the USHCN and determine if UHI altered the results.  They separated the weather stations into different classifications based on whether they were sited well (in rural areas) or sited poorly (in urban areas where UHI could affect the measurements).  To the dismay of AGW skeptics, including myself, the BEST report stated that UHI didn’t have an appreciable effect on the land temperatures across the US and you can find the results in this link which states:

“The BEST analyses closely match existing land temperature records produced by NASA, NOAA, and the United Kingdom’s Hadley Centre, despite using differing techniques for station data analysis. They present additional evidence indicating that neither urbanization nor poor station siting has much of an influence on temperature records.”

So maybe this UHI effect was just a crazy theory of AGW skeptics and we should all just move on.

But the story doesn’t end there……

The BEST report included the effects of UHI by using station classification methods developed in a 1999 paper written by Michel Leroy but in 2010 Leroy authored another paper which modified this method and the importance of the new method is stated below from the Watts 2012 paper summary located on WUWT website :

“Watts et al 2012 has employed a new methodology for station siting, pioneered by Michel Leroy of METEO France in 2010, in the paper Leroy 2010, and endorsed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Commission for Instruments and Methods of Observation (CIMO-XV, 2010) Fifteenth session, in September 2010 as a WMO-ISO standard, making it suitable for reevaluating previous studies on the issue of station siting.”

“Previous papers all used a distance only rating system from Leroy 1999, to gauge the impact of heat sinks and sources near thermometers. Leroy 2010 shows that method to be effective for siting new stations, such as was done by NCDC adopting Leroy 1999 methods with their Climate Reference Network (CRN) in 2002 but ineffective at retroactive siting evaluation.”

“Leroy 2010 adds one simple but effective physical metric; surface area of the heat sinks/sources within the thermometer viewshed to quantify the total heat dissipation effect.”

“Using the new Leroy 2010 classification system on the older siting metadata used by Fall et al. (2011), Menne et al. (2010), and Muller et al. (2012), yields dramatically different results.”

Summarizing the above quote – There were three prior studies performed to investigate the UHI impacts of the USHCN – Fall et al. (2011), Menne et al. (2010) and Muller et al (2012) and while they all found minimal to no impact on the temperature records, these three studies all used an older method (from Leroy 1999) to rate the temperature stations that would suffer from UHI instead of the more accurate modeling method (Leroy 2010).  Stations that would be classified as ‘good’ using the older Leroy 1999 method will now be classified as ‘poor’ using the peer reviewed Leroy 2010 paper and the new paper by Watts uses the new modeling method that accounts for the surface area of the heat sink/sources.

Leroy 2010 broke down the weather stations into classes (numbered 1 through 5) with 1 being an ideal station that is not impacted by external objects/structures (i.e. must be greater than 100 meters from a parking lot, among other criteria) and 5 being the worst possible site for a weather station which would cause the temperature data to be skewed by as much as 5°C. 

The Results of the Watts et. al 2012 Paper

I don’t want to understate the fact that the results of the Watts 2012 paper are huge! 

When Watts and his team went back through the data and used the Leroy 2010 modeling method to account for UHI on weather stations, here is what they found (emphasis mine):

“A reanalysis of U.S. surface station temperatures has been performed using the recently WMO-approved Siting Classification System devised by METEO-France’s Michel Leroy. The new siting classification more accurately characterizes the quality of the location in terms of monitoring long-term spatially representative surface temperature trends. The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward. The paper is the first to use the updated siting system which addresses USHCN siting issues and data adjustments.”

“The new improved assessment, for the years 1979 to 2008, yields a trend of +0.155°C per decade from the high quality sites, a +0.248° C per decade trend for poorly sited locations, and a trend of +0.309° C per decade after NOAA adjusts the data. This issue of station siting quality is expected to be an issue with respect to the monitoring of land surface temperature throughout the Global Historical Climate Network and in the BEST network.”

Watts 2012 found that, from the years 1979 to 2008, Class 1 and 2 stations have lower warming trends than Class 3, 4 and 5 stations (0.155°C and 0.248°C respectively) which makes sense even to those individuals who don’t have degrees in Climate Science.  A thermometer sitting in the middle of a parking lot will measure a higher temperature than a thermometer a mile away in a grass field.  From the graph below, you can see the vast majority of monitoring stations are characterized as Class 3, 4 or 5 and that fact alone would skew our land temperatures to the high side. 

By the way, if you are wondering what a poorly sited weather station looks like, the Watts 2012 paper has a picture of one.

So important point #1 is -> Team AGW stacks the deck by using a higher proportion of weather stations that skew their temperature data to the high side.  80% of the weather stations are classified as ‘poorly sited’ by Leroy 2010 and therefore skew their temperature measurements higher than a well sited instrument (sometimes by as much as 5°C).

But this is only half of Team AGW’s errors and the other half is the real bombshell. 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) adjusted the database to account for poorly sited weather instruments and you’d think that they would have adjusted the temperature measurements DOWN to offset the UHI but no, NOAA adjusted the temperatures UP! 

Yes, you read that right.  NOAA adjustments to the data (over that same period of time 1979 – 2008) showed a warming trend of 0.305°C which indicates twice as much warming as what well sited monitoring stations showed (0.155°C).  Below are a couple of graphs from the Watts 2012 paper that show this unbelievable breach of scientific integrity.  The graphs show the average temperature increase per decade by region with the light blue bar representing data from weather stations rated Class 1 or 2, the yellow bar representing data from weather stations rated 3, 4 or 5 and the red bar representing the value NOAA assigned to those weather stations to ‘adjust’ for poorly sited weather stations.   You will see in every case, except region 9-W, NOAA raised the overall temperatures ABOVE the average temperature increase for the worst sited weather stations (class 3, 4 and 5).  It makes no sense!  Unless, of course, you are trying to willing deceive….

What is a more reliable source of data?  Raw temperature data from well sited monitoring stations that are unaffected by manmade and natural obstructions or data that has been manually biased (manipulated) by humans where the bias makes no sense based on the data?

I’ll leave you with 2 more images from Watts 2012 that summarize the conclusions of the paper.

The map above shows the average temperature increase per decade using three data sets – the upper right map shows only the data from well sited monitoring stations, the lower right map shows only the data from poorly sited monitoring stations and the left map shows the NOAA biased data for all weather stations.

The graph on the left shows the temperature trend for well sited stations from Rural, Suburban and Urban locations and you can see the trend up as you move the stations from a Rural area to an Urban area.  Note the green triangle that shows the NOAA temperature trend after they biased the data.   The graph on the right shows the temperature trend for poorly sited stations from Rural, Suburban and Urban locations and again you see the trend up as we move from Rural to Urban but there is another key take away from this graph.  The delta between minimum, mean and maximum temperature measurements is larger and this artifact of the data shows a clear indication that the poorly sited stations suffer from higher variability (which should also raise a red flag that the data from these stations are unreliable).

It wasn’t enough for Team AGW to stack the deck and have 80% of their weather stations be classified as poorly sited (giving a temperature bias due to UHI); they doubled down and threw a ‘fudge factor’ on top of the data which further increased the temperature trend per decade.  This is not only bad science, it’s criminal.

Further Reading – Joanne Nova also has a great summary of the Watts 2012 paper and you can find it here.

Posted in Climate Change | 3 Comments

The Left’s Big Hate on Big Oil is a Big Farce

Posted on 27-Jul-2012 by Highvoltage

Think Progress had a recent blog post railing against the Left’s favorite target – Big Oil.

“The top two corporations on the Fortune 500 Global ranking, Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil, announced their 2012 second-quarter earnings today, bringing the profits for the three Big Oil companies to $44 billion for 2012 or $250,000 every day this year.  Exxon profited by $16 billion this quarter, bringing its earnings for 2012 to $25 billion.”

Wow, $16 billion in profits for just one quarter is a lot of money but the Left seems to only look at the bottom line of a Profit and Loss Statement because those huge profits by the evil 1% tug at the heart strings and play into the faux class warfare meme Team Obama wants Americans to embrace.

But alas, the math on a P&L statement is more complex than one line so let me break it down for you.  I have reproduced ExxonMobil’s 2nd quarter results in a spreadsheet below and I’ll use the rest of this post to dive deeper into the numbers.

Net Profit Margin

Yes, ExxonMobil had net earnings of $15.9 billion but when you take that as a percentage of total revenues, the company made a profit of 12.5%.  If you were to start a company that engaged in a risky, competitive and regulated industry that involved extracting oil from the Earth, refining it to various grades of fuel, selling it and transporting it all over the world then what percentage of profit would you be willing to accept for those efforts?  Net profit margins of 12.5% seem not only reasonable but at the lower end for a corporation taking such a huge risk in a highly competitive industry.  When we focus only on the dollars and ignore the percentages, we play to our emotions and forget about the complexities that are involved in running a major corporation.

Cost of Doing Business

Leftists also forget to look at how much money a corporation spends to produce their product and this is comprised of research and development, sales, manufacturing, equipment purchases and general administration.  For ExxonMobil, this spending number for the 2nd quarter amounted to $101.1 billion and equates to $770,000 every minute.

Wait, let that sink in.  During the 2nd quarter of 2012, ExxonMobil spent over three-quarters of a million dollars EVERY MINUTE on people’s salaries, manufacturing, transportation, vendors who supply goods/services to them and other line items that translate into JOBS.

Income Tax Rate

Now let’s look at the income tax rate that ExxonMobil paid during the 2nd quarter of 2012 but before we do that, let’s see what the average corporate tax rate is for US corporations.  It is well known that the US has the highest corporate tax rates in the world at 39.2% but large corporations use various accounting tricks to get that lowered as this link shows.

“However, no major company really pays the nominal rate – just as no one walks into a car dealership expecting to pay sticker price.  Big companies enjoy a huge buffet of credits, shelters, deductions, and other preferences that reduce their rate to an average of 13 percent.”

So the average ‘real’ corporate tax rate for US corporations is 13% but as we see from ExxonMobil’s 2nd quarter results, they paid 32.6% which is 2.5 times the national average.  They paid over $8.5 billion to the US government for just one quarter and if we extrapolate ExxonMobil’s income tax payments over the whole year that would amount to $34 billion in federal tax revenue.

Using the following link, we see that the US federal government is on pace to spend $3.795 trillion in 2012 so ExxonMobil’s projected annual tax revenue funds our government operation for 3.3 days.  But suppose we let the Leftists have their way and we soak the evil Big Oil ExxonMobil even more by taking ALL of their net earnings ($15.9 billion per quarter times 4 quarters = $63.6 billion).  If we did that, the extra tax revenue from ExxonMobil’s net profits would fund our US government for only an additional 6.1 days.

Leftists still believe we have a tax revenue problem (not a spending problem )and they think soaking the evil corporations will solve the problem.  They are either bad at math or evil.  Or both.

Posted in economics, politics | Leave a comment

Welfare and the War on Poverty

Posted on 25-Jul-2012 by Highvoltage

I recently read a blog post from Director Blue about a couple in Brooklyn who scammed the Federal Government out of over $100,000 in Food Stamps and Medicaid while owning luxury automobiles.

“Rivka Baror, 51, and her husband Avraham Baror, 64, have been living pretty high on the hog — aside from owning not one but three BMWs, the couple also owns a Lexus, a comfortable two-bedroom home in Brooklyn, and drops a lot of cash at places like Victoria’s Secret and Home Depot. Oh, yeah — they also collect a welfare check and have bilked taxpayers out of more than $100,000 in government assistance money over the last six years.”

And unless you think this is an isolated instance, you can check out this link which shows the GAO coming to the realization that improper payments are made from Medicare/Medicaid to the tune of almost $50 billion annually.

“That’s the conclusion of a Government Accountability Office report released Wednesday. The report, issued at the request of a House subcommittee investigating Medicare and Medicaid fraud, estimates that the federal government is losing $48 billion on the improper payments – a significant amount for a program that “is fiscally unsustainable in the long term” unless action is taken.”

Just imagine the amount of money that will be wasted once Obamacare kicks in and these same agencies will be dolling out payments at a much higher rate. 

This recent discovery of fraudulent Welfare payments got me to thinking if Welfare is attacking the root problem that it was designed to fix – Poverty Rate.   Let’s see how the government’s Welfare program is doing against the War on Poverty.

The best way to grade Welfare’s job on fighting the War on Poverty is to compare Welfare spending with poverty rates in the US.  To do this, I obtained annual Welfare spending data from this site and annual poverty rate from this site.  The graph is shown below (Poverty Rate is on the left Y-axis and Welfare Spending as a percent of GDP is on the right Y-axis).

In addition to the graph above, let’s also look at a complete history of Welfare spending as a percent of GDP and this graph is shown below.

So what do these two graphs tell us? 

For the past 30 years Welfare spending as a percent of GDP has tracked with poverty rates.  As poverty rates go up, Welfare spending goes up.  When poverty rates go down, Welfare spending goes down.  But during these 30 years, the average poverty rate has remained around 11% so we haven’t decreased the percentage of American families living in poverty.  Is the goal of Welfare to keep 11% of American families in poverty?  It appears so because that is exactly what we’ve done!

And look at the Welfare spending as a percent of GDP during the Obama years (the last few dots on each graph).  It’s the highest we’ve seen in the past 90 years (which includes the Great Depression)!   

It is clear from these two graphs that Welfare is not only LOSING the War on Poverty but it has caused the war to devolve into trench warfare – nothing is gained and nothing is lost.  In scientific terms, if an input to a system is not causing a change in the output then it is discarded and the engineer must choose another lever to turn in an attempt to change the system output.  When an input is proven to be inconsequential in the output of the system then that relationship is not causal.

Imagine that you are a doctor and you have a patient that has a bleeding problem.  When the patient experiences major hemorrhaging you employ a large amount of bandages but when the patient has only minor bleeding you still use bandages but don’t use as much.  For months and years, the amount of bandages you use goes up and down with the amount of bleeding.  Does the doctor continue to think that the solution to the problem is related to more bandages or does he look at the underlying problem and attack that instead of focusing on the bandages?

If Leftists continue to push for Welfare spending to remain unchanged then they are either guilty of not understanding this basic causality relationship or they are content on keeping 11% of Americans in poverty and dependent on government assistance.   

Addendum and Further Reading – Leftists will continue to ignore the root problems and avoid the difficult decisions but for a history of Welfare and my suggestions to improve it, you can go to a previous post.

Posted in Entitlement Programs, politics | 5 Comments

Concealed Weapon Permit Basics

Posted on 23-Jul-2012 by Highvoltage

Last Friday morning most citizens in the US were awakened to the news of a mass murder perpetrated by an evil human being in Aurora, Colorado (and I call him a human by the strictest scientific interpretation of his genus and species).  This cowardly and evil person opened fire on theater full of unarmed and defenseless people that resulted in at least 12 deaths and 58 injuries.

After I had time to digest this latest act of evil, there was one question that kept running through my mind – Did the theater allow concealed firearms to be brought in by those individuals that had obtained the legal permits?  The answer is no.

“The Century 16 Movie Theater where Holmes allegedly opened fire does not allow anyone to carry firearms on the premises even if they have a concealed handgun permits, said Dudley Brown, the executive director of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, which lobbies against gun control laws.”

This is not a surprise to me because the movie theaters where I live have signs posted on their entrance doors similar to the image below.

I have a Concealed Weapons Permit (CWP) and by my state’s law (South Carolina), I am not allowed to carry my concealed weapon into a building that has a sign on the entrance that meets the legal requirements (which pertain to its verbiage, symbols and dimensions).  It appears that the Aurora, CO theater had a similar policy and therefore, the law abiding citizens were not allowed to defend themselves from this evil person. 

I’ll concede that this evil person was protected with a vast array of body armor that would have made it difficult to get a quality shot at the murderer but if a couple people in the theater would have sent a few rounds into the guy’s chest I wonder if he would’ve been so bold as to keep firing his weapons or run out like these criminals did in Florida.

The purpose of this post is not to play ‘what ifs’ regarding the Aurora tragedy, but instead to give those who are interested in obtaining a CWP advice from one who has gone through the process.  If you are like me, I wanted to obtained my CWP in order to protect my family against the evil people of the world who choose to willingly disobey the law and I want to use my 2nd amendment rights to do all I can to protect my family.

Here is my advice to those who want to go down this path.

Know the Laws

First and most importantly, know the laws in your state.  Go to your state’s website and understand what you are legally allowed to do with regard to arming yourself in public.  Every state is different and you can get a flavor for how states differ with regard to their gun laws by going to this site.   Some states make it more difficult for you to obtain a CWP but unless you live in Illinois, you do have a legal option to obtain a CWP.   

As a sidebar, I find it interesting that the only state that refuses to issue CWP’s is also the one whose largest city, Chicago, has a worse homicide rate than Kabul Afghanistan. 

In South Carolina, I used the following link to find the state laws and also purchased this book that amplified the laws for the average citizen because it was written by two attorneys and a police sergeant.  There should be similar links and books for your states and read them first before you start this process.

Understand the Restrictions of the CWP

A CWP is not a license to act like a Dirty Harry style vigilante. 

You can’t carry your weapon anywhere you choose so become familiar with your state laws.  For example, even with a CWP in South Carolina, you can’t carry your weapon into the following locations – churches, government building, private residences, bars, restaurants that serve alcohol, schools or establishments that post CWP restrictions (just to name a few). 

Just because you have a CWP doesn’t give you the right to play judge and jury like in the old West.  If you are walking down the street and see an altercation, your best advice is to move along and call 911.  Once you get involved and pull your weapon, you are liable for anything that happens from that point forward and unless you have the full history of the altercation, you have no way of knowing 100% who the ‘bad guy’ is and who the ‘good guy’ is.  The only time you should pull your weapon out is to fire it in self defense, period. 

The CWP does not give you the right to choose your firearm as your first line of defense.  You still must use common sense and employ all other methods to diffuse the situation (even running) before you resort to pulling your firearm out.  In a court of law, you must prove that you used all means necessary to escape the confrontation and that you only pulled your weapon out when all other means had been exhausted and you still felt your life was in danger. 

Even pulling the gun out in public to show someone will result in certain jail time so remember that the CWP only gives you the right to use your firearm when all other methods have been exhausted and it is apparent to you that your life is in danger. 

The only situation where this restriction is relaxed is in states that have a ‘castle doctrine’ which stipulates that in your home, you don’t have to retreat but can repel those who enter your residence without your permission with any force you choose (including a firearm).    So if someone enters your home without your permission, you can shoot to kill as your first line of defense.

Certified CWP Instructor

Find a qualified instructor in your area that provides a comprehensive class for your CWP.  This will involve, at a minimum, a full day class where you not only go over the legal aspects of having a CWP but covers basic conflict avoidance, public safety fundamentals and significant time on the shooting range where you can prove that you can hit a target at reasonable distances with your firearm (or one similar).

Depending on what state you live in, I would also suggest you find an instructor that can give you a CWP in an additional state that has better reciprocity than your home state.  For example, South Carolina only has reciprocity with 18 other states – meaning that these states recognize my CWP but if I were in one of the other 32 states (or 39 other states if I were talking to Obama), then I would not be allowed to legally conceal carry.  Georgia, which is a neighboring state, doesn’t have reciprocity with South Carolina so I chose a CWP instructor that had a license in Florida and this allowed me to get a Florida CWP (Florida has reciprocity with 35 states, including Georgia).   

Respect the Weapon

 If you are not experienced with guns then I suggest going above and beyond the standard CWP class and taking a class from a qualified instructor that educates you on how to fire and maintain a firearm.  Guns are not toys and if you’ve never fired one, then you need to spend hours doing just that before you purchase one for yourself and carry it out in public.

Local gun stores are a great resource to start this process as they are well connected with shooting ranges and instructors and I suggest that as a starting point for those who are inexperienced with the guns.

Final Thoughts

We live in an evil world with evil people and that will always be the case.  Gun laws are broken every day by criminals and the evil person in Aurora, CO broke the law by bringing guns into the theater so more laws will not prevent evil people from doing evil things to innocent people.  Our only hope is to do what we can to protect ourselves and our families from the rare instance when this happens and obtaining a CWP is a great way to do just that. 

Colorado had some of the most aggressive gun control laws on the books but that didn’t stop this evil act.  From the ABS News story:

“The Brady Campaign, which pushes for strict gun control laws, ranked Colorado’s gun laws in the top third of all states, commending Colorado for closing the “gun show loophole” and requiring background checks for every gun purchase.”

I hope that I never have to pull my weapon out to defend my family but if that situation ever arises, I am confident that I’ve done all I can to give my family the best chance of surviving that altercation.

Posted in CWP, guns and ammo, politics | 7 Comments

Krugman and the Luddites

Posted on 20-Jul-2012 by Highvoltage

The Nobel Prize winning economist and former Enron consultant Paul Krugman recently produced another hack job that shows he’s not interested in getting to the heart of problems but more interested in promoting the class warfare straw man that Obama is hoping will win him a 2nd term.

Krugman’s article is based on a report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) that has a graph showing the divergence between productivity and hourly wages and Krugman includes this graph in his short commentary. 

“I see from some of the comments that there’s a widespread belief that the wage stagnation we’ve experienced under “modern capitalism” is some kind of illusion, that it would go away if we took benefits into account.”

Nope:

In conclusion, Krugman offers this braggadocios warning to those who dare question his authority on the subject:

“Meta: if you think I’ve overlooked some crushingly obvious point, you might be right — but the odds are that you aren’t. I do know my way around these numbers.”

The main thesis of the EPI report was that greedy business owners were keeping their companies’ profits and not giving it to the hard working hourly employees and you can see that this quote from their report (emphasis mine).

“The hourly compensation of a typical worker grew in tandem with productivity from 1948–1973. That can be seen in Figure A, which presents both the cumulative growth in productivity per hour worked of the total economy (inclusive of the private sector, government, and nonprofit sector) since 1948 and the cumulative growth in inflation-adjusted hourly compensation for private-sector production/nonsupervisory workers (a group comprising over 80 percent of payroll employment). After 1973, productivity grew strongly, especially after 1995, while the typical worker’s compensation was relatively stagnant. This divergence of pay and productivity has meant that many workers were not benefitting from productivity growth—the economy could afford higher pay but it was not providing it.”

There are many problems with this conclusion and it should be evident to anyone who has followed business and manufacturing trends in the US over the past few decades but since Krugman is either ignorant of those trends or chooses to ignore them, let me explain this graph from the vantage point of someone who has been in the real world, and specifically manufacturing, for the past 20 years.  I addressed this topic in a previous post and I’ll reference many of those topics below so you might want to go read that that post here after you’ve read this one.

Manufacturing, Unions and the Knowledge Based Economy

Part of the explanation of this chart can be attributed to the fact that during the 1970’s, when the divergence in productivity and hourly wages started, the US manufacturing as a percent of GDP started its decline.

It was during this time that Mexico, China and India became advanced enough for companies to choose those locations for manufacturing and with the high labor/benefit rates that Unions demanded, it was an easy call for many US manufacturing companies to choose low cost labor sites to make their products.  This is not something that is ‘evil’ as most Leftists will claim but a simple outcome from a global Free Market which will lead to a natural progression to a Knowledge Based Economy in the US.  A portion of my previous post explains it below:

“I am a proponent of the Knowledge Based Economy and I’d rather have the US involved in the higher paying manufacturing jobs such as product development, engineering, purchasing, finance and management.  It makes smart business sense to let Mexico, China and India be involved in the labor intensive (and sometimes dangerous) work of manufacturing products that lend themselves to mass production.  I’m also a proponent of the Free Market and since the Information Age has shrunk the size of the world as it relates to supply chains, it makes better business sense to have the high tech, high paying jobs in the US and the low tech, low paying jobs in countries that need them and price their labor accordingly.”

The US has the highest corporate tax rate in the world so this doesn’t help with regard to the jobs situation in the US.  Our government is forcing companies to move labor to other countries to maximize profit and this also contributes to lower hourly rates of workers as there are fewer jobs for them to fill.

Paying People Not To Work

As I showed here, the Welfare spending as a percent of GDP has continued to rise but this metric increased dramatically starting in the 1970’s.

If we pay people to not work then there is no incentive for them to go find work and this causes employers to struggle to fill labor needs in the US.  This shortage labor causes companies to move more jobs outside the US or look for more ways to increase productivity that will allow them to produce their goods/services with fewer employees.  With less competition in the labor pool, this also allows companies to pay a lower rate for that labor and this is another example of how Liberal policies actually hurt the lower class instead of helping them. 

Automation and Six Sigma

During the late 1970’s there was an invention that revolutionized the manufacturing environment and it was called the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC).  PLC’s were industrial grade computers that could be programmed via ladder logic that mimicked the syntax used in legacy hard wired control systems and it was a language that was easily understood by both engineers and technicians.  This new invention accelerated automation in the manufacturing environment and allowed companies to automate processes that had previously required scores of highly skilled (and highly paid) human operators.  In the modern manufacturing facilities in the US, much of the work is done by automated machines which generates productivity improvements and increased profits due to lower labor costs but these increased profits are passed on to engineers/technicians (who design and maintain the machines) that are not included in the hourly work force.  Fewer hourly workers were required to produce the same amount of product so with the demand for manual labor decreasing, economics tells us that their labor rate would decrease or remain flat.

Another paradigm shift that occurred in the late 1970’s and 1980’s was the advent of Six Sigma which stressed continuous improvement, higher quality and leaner manufacturing processes that led to additional productivity improvements and reduced the demand for hourly production operators.

Conclusions

The divergence in productivity and hourly wages is not a result of greedy business owners but a result of the Free Market, the Knowledge Based Economy, Liberal policies, technology improvements and a multitude of efficiency improvement programs such as Six Sigma.

Economists like Krugman don’t understand this because they are too busy looking at Keynesian theory and hanging out with their academic buddies.  The real world has ignored their bloviating and instead focused on running a business, improving productivity and maximizing profit.  Like it or not, we live in a global Free Market and a Knowledge Based Economy that rewards those with higher education and the US needs to get with the program because, for the most part, labor intensive processes are a thing of the past and are not coming back to the US. 

In 19th century England there was a group of people called Luddites, who protested technological improvements of the day (specifically looms) that replaced their positions with lower skilled (and lower paid) workers.  They rioted and even destroyed the machines in hopes that they could retain the ‘good ole days’ but they failed in their attempt to halt the march of productivity improvements.  Leftists like Krugman and Obama would love to roll the clock back 30 years to a time when companies were inefficient, Unions demanded unrealistic wages and companies were reliant on manual labor to make their products but the Free Market has caused companies to make improvements that are to the benefit of not only the companies but the world.  It is time we call these Leftists what they really are – Luddites.

Posted in economics, Entitlement Programs, politics | Leave a comment

The Crux of the Election

Posted on 17-Jul-2012 by Highvoltage

The National, State and Local elections this November can be distilled down to a choice between one of two philosophies:

1 – You believe that individual Liberty, as manifested in entrepreneurship and innovation, drives wealth creation and provides the best means for a society to prosper and provide tax revenue for the Government.

2 – You believe Government stimulates businesses that will eventually create jobs and wealth and the people are indebted to the government for this benevolent role.

In case you have been living under a rock the past 3+ years and are still confused about which philosophy Obama subscribes to, he told us at a recent campaign rally in Roanoke, Virginia.

“There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me – because they want to give something back,’ he said. ‘They know they didn’t – look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.”’ 

“You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.”

“There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.”

Obama doesn’t seem content with the current class warfare rhetoric so he is joining with Elizabeth Warren and doubling down on her idiotic comments she made last year:

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare’, this is whatever. No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.”

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.”

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

What total douchebaggery!  So the roads were paid by “the rest of us” but she conveniently left out the fact that businesses paid taxes for those roads too!  She also omitted that the people who were employed by those businesses also paid taxes to help fund those roads.

For a man like Obama, who has never held a job in the private sector, let alone start a business, it would be foreign to him how a person could start a business and make it successful based on hard work and innovation.  A person who prefers a Socialistic economy would embrace the fact that individual contributions are impossible without the entire collective of the nation helping him out. 

The Daily Mail had a great article rebuking Obama’s ignorant comments and here are a few quotes.

“In a hard-hitting statement to Mail Online, the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) president Dan Danne said: ‘What a disappointment to hear President Obama’s revealing comments challenging the significance of America’s entrepreneurs.”

“Mr Danne added: ‘His unfortunate remarks over the weekend show an utter lack of understanding and appreciation for the people who take a huge personal risk and work endless hours to start a business and create jobs.”

“Andrea Saul, spokeswoman for Romney, told Fox News that the remarks ‘reflect just how unqualified he is to lead us to a real economic recovery’ and were ‘ insulting to the hardworking entrepreneurs, small-business owners, and job creators who are the backbone of our economy.”

“An NFIB spokesman added: ‘I’m sure every small-business owner who took a second mortgage on their home, maxed out their credit cards or borrowed money from their own retirement savings to start their business disagrees strongly with President Obama’s claim. They know that hard work does matter.”

“Every small business is not indebted to the government or some other benefactor. If anything, small businesses are historically an economic and job-creating powerhouse in spite of the government.”

“He added: ‘Every day millions of people put their lives, savings, houses and families on the line and work 20 hours a day just to grab their small slice of the American dream. Where is the collective when all of this is going on? And if the collective is really responsible for success, how come everyone isn’t successful?”

A central piece to the class warfare meme is the straw man argument that Leftists attempt to build which states Conservatives are against all taxes.  Not True!  Conservatives see it as their duty as a citizen to pay their fair share of taxes which will allow the Government to carry out its constitutional duties and that includes building roads/bridges, providing for the common defense and paying Government employees to carry out those duties.  As I’ve shown before, over 90% of our federal income tax dollars goes to fund Social Security, Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid and Unemployment benefits so is this really how we want to run a country?  Conservatives don’t agree with the way the Government is using our tax dollars and we must realize that the United States doesn’t have a revenue problem but instead has a spending problem. 

The election in November comes down to a classic chicken and egg scenario.  Which came first?  The Government or the Free Market?  Obama and the Leftists believe that Government is supreme and is the driving force in this economy but Conservatives believe that the Free Market creates both a climate and motivation for individuals to take a risk and then get rewarded based on their hard work and innovation.  Once a company is successful and turns a profit, they then pay taxes and create jobs (which create more tax revenue) that not only grows the national economy but provides funds for the Government to fulfill its constitutional duties.

Obama, Warren and the rest of the Leftists are dead wrong about economics and they should be sent packing in November.

Posted in economics, politics | 12 Comments

The Real Impact of the Medical Device Tax

Posted on 15-Jul-2012 by Highvoltage

Medical Device companies didn’t “play ball” with Leftists when Obamacare was being rammed through Congress and for that reason, they were punished with a 2.3% device tax on any product they sell in the US. 

This Forbes article makes the point that the Medical Device Industry was cautious in playing politics (as opposed to the pharmaceutical industry) and it hurt them.

“The research-based drug makers were revealed early on to have been key players in passing the despised legislation. As late as last week, Republican legislators were digging out e-mails detailing the deal-making between them and the White House. It’s not surprising that those legislators are not investing seriously in executing the industry’s post-Obamacare agenda. (The Prescription Drug User Fee Act, PDUFA, which is sailing through Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support, has nothing to do with Obamacare, but renews a twenty-year old law).”

“The medical-device industry, on the other hand, acted more carefully during the debate over Obamacare. It did the best it could to protect its members’ interests, but avoided the temptation to jump on the bandwagon and commit to promoting the terribly one-sided, partisan, uncompromising bill.”

“With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I suspect it’s an approach that leaders in other health-care sectors wish that they had taken.”

Many articles have been written how this Medical Device tax will not only kill jobs, innovation but also patients.  From the Pacific Research Institute (emphasis mine):

“Because incentives to invest in the research and development of new medical technologies are driven by perceived returns, the excise tax on durable medical equipment and medical supplies can be predicted to reduce such investment. The finding here is that such investment would be reduced by about 10 percent annually, or about $2 billion during 2013 through 2020. By analogy with the estimates available in the literature for pharmaceutical investment, this investment loss would cause, conservatively, a loss of about 1 million expected life-years each year, the economic cost of which would be about $100 billion per year, a figure substantially greater than the entire U.S. market for medical devices and equipment. The sheer magnitude of this adverse economic effect suggests strongly that the excise tax on medical equipment and supplies should be repealed.”

This is tragic enough to drive our government to repeal, at a minimum, this section of Obamacare but I’d like to show you how this new device tax would impact the Profit and Loss statements of medical device companies and show that the impact is much larger than a simple 2.3% reduction in net profits.

Remember that the 2.3% tax applies to SALES and not profits so the reductions in sales is part of the top line of a P and L statement so we must then deduct for Cost of Goods Sold (COGS), R&D, Selling, General and Administrative (SG&A) and other special charges (such as purchasing other companies) to arrive at a final Net Profit.  I will start this simulation with a fictitious company that has just over $5 billion in sales and the following P and L statement (items marked in yellow are assumptions and the other numbers are calculated from those assumptions).

This fictitious company takes in a net profit of $500 million in one year (based on my assumptions for COGS, SG&A, R&D, etc.) and I’m assuming that 50% of their sales occur in the US.  $500 million is a lot of money but let’s take a look at what that company would choose to do with that profit.  It might buy new growth businesses, pay out dividends to stock holders, pay profit sharing to its employees, increase research and development or save that money for future economic calamities.  Remember that Apple has over $100 billion cash on hand and one of the metrics used to evaluate a company’s health is cash on hand so $500 million yearly profits in a highly risky and regulated market such as medical devices is not uncommon. 

Now let’s see what happens when the Medical Device Tax kicks in and we assume all other variables remain equal.

Although the Medical Device tax is 2.3%, this reduces this company’s Net Profit by 7.6% ($38 million)!  Will Wall Street investors keep their money in this company under this scenario or will they leave the company and cause the company’s market capitalization to drop like a rock?  It’s anyone’s guess but my money is on the latter versus the former and I expect investors to leave Medical Device companies in mass after earnings are severely reduced from this Medical Device tax.

One way this company could offset the Medical Device tax effects on its bottom line is to increase sales but how much will they have to increase sales to offset this 2.3% tax?

This company would have to increase their sales by over 7% in one year to offset the Medical Device tax and anyone in business knows that this kind of sales increase is difficult, if not impossible, under the current economic climate which has been made worse by Obamanomics.

Increasing sales is difficult so most companies will, most likely, choose to reduce their manufacturing costs (COGS) so let’s see how much this company would have to cut to offset the Medical Device tax.

The company would have to cut over 7% of its manufacturing costs and this would also be difficult in the current economic climate which has already forced manufactures to do more with less.  Some companies might move manufacturing offshore to reduce costs but this would adversely affect US jobs numbers and is a fact that many Leftists don’t seem to realize.

Since manufacturing has already been cut to the bone, maybe a company would choose to sacrifice long term gains by cutting Research and Development costs to offset the Medical Device tax.

Research and Development would have to be cut by over 12% to recoup the Medical Device tax and companies that are in this industry rely on R&D to provide products that are the future growth drivers of so cutting this vital department would not only increase unemployment in the US but jeopardize the long term viability of this company.

This simulation was done on the assumption that a company only has 50% of its sales in the US but let’s take a look at what would happen if a company had 100% of its sales in the US (meaning that a higher percentage of its sales would be affected by the new Medical Device tax).

In this scenario, a company would see its Net Profits drop by over 15% or, to offset the impact of this tax, the company would have to increase its sales by over 15% or reduce its COGS or R&D expenses by 11% and 20% respectively.  How long will Wall Street continue to invest in a company that delivers 15% Net Profit reductions year over year or cuts to their long term viability (R&D) by 20%?  A company who has a majority of its sales in the US would be devastated by the Medical Device tax and it would not be a surprise to see many companies go out of business as a result of this punitive tax. 

No matter how you look at it, the Medical Device tax from Obamacare is a killer for business, jobs and innovation.  Repeal it now!

ADDENDUM – The full spreadsheet calculations can be found here -> p and l study.

Posted in economics, healthcare, politics | 12 Comments

The Future of Occupy

Posted on 08-Jul-2012 by Highvoltage

Did a Corporation  produce all that Peanut Butter for these Anti-Capitalist kids? Photo Credit – IBTimes New York – Link-> http://newyork.ibtimes.com/articles/216365/20110919/occupy-wall-street-protest-photo-manhattan-new-york.htm

What exactly is going on with the Occupy movement now and what do they hope to accomplish?  I ask this question not because I’m hoping Occupy continues to grow (I don’t) but because I want to know what Occupy’s end-game looks like so I can call them out on their BS in case they try to disguise their true intentions. 

We saw the temper tantrum of Occupy last year when they decided (from what I could gather) that someone needed to give them money because their liberal arts degrees weren’t allowing them 6 figure salaries right out of college (although they could afford iPhones, iPads and other high dollar electronics).  The crimes that were committed at these ‘peaceful’ protests were documented , the Occupy organization had shady financial practices,  Democrats came out and supported them and we know that Union thugs supported them as well. 

Once cold weather set in, they disbanded and the net results of the Occupy movement was exactly nothing but that won’t deter a group of people set on the destruction of Capitalism.  The Occupy movement has recently been rebranded “National Gathering” (or #NatGat in Twitter) and @soopermexican blog has a couple of great posts showing the lunacy of their protests here and here. 

From my viewing of tweets from #NatGat, I discovered a website that focuses on the future of the Occupy movement and I’d like to use this blog post to reveal what this group’s intentions are.

From the website focusing on their point of view, we see the following list (emphasis mine):

“The list of criteria presented below grew out from our recent conversations with others who are active in the movement, and it is subject to ongoing interpretation, questioning, and dialogue. It will serve our work as shared reference until its next update, based on the input from all users/contributors of this site.”

“Occupy-related materials that we currently include in the content published or re-published here should meet one or more of the following content criteria.”

1.       Pertinent to the evolution of the movement and its capacity to meet challenges and opportunities of increasing scale. That criteria especially includes content related to enhancing our capacity to deal with the complexity of larger issues.

2.       Presenting new solutions to pressing problems facing humanity.

3.       References to the commons, reclaiming the commons, commons-based peer-production, commons-based society, which we consider a key element of a sustainable, people-powered future.

4.       Raising public awareness about the significance and strategic options of the structural changes that society is going through, with fresh perspectives.

5.       Reflecting the movement’s potential to advance the building of new institutions capable to overcome the democracy deficit of the current establishment.

Most of this crap is high level double speak with no real meaning but #3 was the first statement that got me curious so I checked out their “commons-based society” page. 

First of all, let’s look at what is meant by a “commons-based society” and we see a definition from this link and it is pasted below with emphasis mine.

“A commons-based society refers to a shift in values and policies away from the market-based system that dominates modern society, especially over the past 30 years. The foundation of the market is narrowly focused on private wealth, while the commons is built upon what we all share—air, water, public spaces, public health, public services, the Internet, cultural endowments and much more.”

“One of the most compelling ideas being raised today is the possibility of evolving from a market-based society to a commons-based society. The commons has always been an element of human civilization. But its central role in sustaining all societies has recently been rediscovered, inspiring new lines of thinking in fields ranging from high technology to public health to business.”

“A commons-based society is one that values and protects commons assets, managing them for the benefit of everyone. Market-based solutions would be valuable tools in a commons-based society, as long as they do not undermine the workings of the commons itself.”

This sounds a lot like Socialism to me, what do you think?  Abandoning a Free Market system and moving to a socio-economic system that removes private wealth (i.e. ownership) and replaces it with public ownership is the definition of Socialism.

The Future of Occupy website also has a link to a page touting Marx as a leading thinker in the commons-based society but criticizes Marx for not going far enough in his Socialistic thinking.

“While Marx’s great insight was that labor is embedded in the commons, his awareness of the biosphere was limited to material and social resources. In deriving his major ideas on the production process directly from the capitalist system instead of from the broader commons, Marx’s focus was primarily on the ownership of production, rather than the trusteeship of co-production and co-governance in a commons-based society. Today, we are recognizing that the commons is much broader than just labor, which is why the co-production of the commons has been emerging as such a vibrant phenomenon beyond the clutches of the Market State. And that’s really my basic point in mentioning Marx in this passage.”

So Occupy believes that Marx didn’t go far enough in his Socialism beliefs and that he only focused on the workers and forgot about all the Earth’s natural resources.  I’ll say it again; Occupy believes that Marx didn’t go far enough Left.  

From the economics section of this Future of Occupy website we see another call to abandon Capitalism and move to another economic system.

“Together we can build a New Economy that Works for All, enabling each of us to meet our material, relational, and spiritual needs in ways that affirm and embody our basic values. Far from being some utopian dream, it is in fact part of the basic inheritance of being human. For as long as we have been social beings we have been sharing our gifts. Right now, around the planet, people are modeling both new and traditional networks of exchange that have justice and generosity at their core. New Economies are already emerging through the hearts, minds, and hands of millions of people across this Earth.”

If you scan back to the 5 bullet points that Occupy claims to represent their core points of view, you’ll see where #5 is also hinting that we need a new political system to back up this new economic system.  Using their own words, they support the:

“Building of new institutions capable to overcome the democracy deficit of the current establishment.”

This statement sounds like Occupy doesn’t like our Republic form of government and wants to move away from that.  I wonder what they have in mind?  What form of government would complement the economic system of Socialism?  I guess we’ll have to wait for the Occupy kids to drop that bombshell on us.

From the evidence given above, it should be clear to anyone that Occupy’s main goal is to replace Capitalism with Socialism.  Occupy will not publically come out and make this claim but make no mistake about it, this is their goal.  For this reason alone, it is the duty of every American to publically humiliate any Occupy supporter because their ideology is in direct opposition to American principles.  Do not let them sugar coat their message and lie about Occupy’s true intentions.  They are a cancer to America and they must be destroyed. 

Posted in economics, politics | 2 Comments

OK Conservatives, Now What?

Posted on 06-Jul-2012 by Highvoltage

As I stated earlier this week, the SCOTUS decision on Obamacare should have awoken all Conservatives for the 2nd time but what are we going to do now that we’re awake?  Yes, I know, we need to fight the Left but that could mean many things.  The failures of Leftist policies are legion and Team Obama is counting on us getting confused and overwhelmed with their all out assault on our Freedoms.  We will never be successful with the shotgun approach (fight them on all fronts) so we must pick and choose the battles where we have the good ground and as fate would have it, those battles are the ones that really matter the most for the future of the United States. 

I’ve compiled a list here that I use as guideposts to keep me focused and fight the Left on what really matters. 

The Economy

Contrary to what Obama said last month, the Private sector is not doing fine.  See the following graph showing how this recession differs from the prior three in relations to jobs recoveries.  Keynesian economic principles aren’t working and anyone who defends them shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Obama will try to make Americans forget that he has been President for almost 4 years and had super majorities in the House and Senate for part of that time.  He had power to enact any bill/law he saw fit to get us out of this recession and now all his plans have played out it is obvious they were a miserable failure.  His policies were failures by not just my standards but by Obama’s economic team’s standards as well.

At the beginning of 2009, Obama was trying to build support for his massive $787 billion stimulus program and he touted the report from his own economic advisers that we needed this ‘shovel ready’ stimulus bill to keep unemployment below 8%.  Here is a plot of that graph from the original report with real unemployment numbers added in red by Jim Pethokoukis.

That is an epic failure on two fronts: 1) not recognizing the severity of the recession and 2) not recognizing what policies need to be enacted to fix the problem.  Both of these are inexcusable for a person who occupies the leadership of the Executive branch of our government.  On the job training is fine for many professions in America but the job description for Leader of the Free World doesn’t allow for an internship.

Another fact to keep in your arsenal to fight Leftists lies is the one in early February where Obama’s chief economic advisor came out and admitted that they now owned the economy.  No more of this ‘Blame Bush’ nonsense.

Obamacare

Socialized medicine doesn’t work and we have cautionary tales from other countries who have instituted programs similar to Obamacare – wealthy citizens bribe doctors to move to the front of the line, long wait times, people are seeking surgical care outside of their own country,  20% of the hospitals are failing financially and healthcare is rationed in favor of those who can pay privately. 

Even before Obamacare has been fully implemented, we see that cost estimates for the program have almost doubled, jobs are being lost and regulations are causing citizens to die due to delayed or denied treatment.

We need healthcare reform in the US but Obamacare makes the situation worse and the law must be repealed and replaced but that will only happen if Obama is defeated and Harry Reid loses control of the Senate.

Out of Control Entitlement Spending

Social Security is on a destructive path and left unchanged will escalate to a point that is catastrophic.

Welfare is on a similar trajectory and must also be dealt with before it is too late.

These programs are the elephant in the room that is ignored by Leftists and this is not only irresponsible but borders on criminal when we think of the future we are leaving for our children.

Class Warfare

Instead of bringing the country together, Obama chose to divide us and generate a fictitious income inequality meme that tells us that the wealthy aren’t paying their fair share.

Here is a comprehensive collection of links debunking that lie from Obama and other Leftists.

Here is a graph showing what percent of Federal Income taxes that are paid by each economic demographic group in the US and it’s clearly evident that the wealthy are paying more than their fair share.

Leftists like to rail on fat cat corporations but aside from the fact that the US has the highest corporate tax rate in the world, the evidence is clear that large corporations pay more than their fair share in Federal taxes.  From a Forbes article in 2011:

“To see if GE was an aberration, we took a look at the 2010 annual reports of the 20 most profitable U.S. companies. Some of the results may surprise you. The average income tax rate within the group was 25.4%. America’s three biggest oil companies, ExxonMobil ( XOM – news – people ), Chevron ( CVX – news – people ) and ConocoPhillips ( COP – news – people ), all endure income tax burdens of more than 40%–higher than the statutory U.S. rate of 35%. Exxon, with a 45% rate, tallied $21.6 billion in worldwide income taxes for 2010. Wal-Mart Stores ( WMT – news – people ) paid $7.1 billion (at a rate of 32.4%) in income taxes.”

Here is another link showing where Exxon paid more than their fair share in taxes during 2011: 

“In effect, Exxon Mobil paid 71.2% of its pretax profits, or $104.5 billion, in sales based taxes, other taxes and duties, and income taxes, before it was able to take home 28.8%, or $42.2 billion. If 71.2% isn’t enough for left-wing radicals, then how much is enough? Is profit a dirty word? Exxon Mobil is a producer, and the more leeway granted to the productive, the more wealth is created. If the government takes even more capital away from producers like Exxon, who would radical left-wingers propose it be given to? Is there another entity around that can turn higher profits than Exxon Mobil? Left-wingers have it all backwards.”

Ballooning Debt

Under the first term of Obama, our national debt has increased by $5 trillion (more than all 8 years under Bush 43).  Our Debt to GDP ratio is now over 100% for the first time since WWII and we have Leftists to blame for this and specifically Obama. 

The Left tries to play tricks with the data but there is no getting around the fact that Obama is a big spender.

No matter how the Left will try and divert the American voters from these 5 key topics, I will stay on topic and hammer them on the failures of not only Obama but the entire Liberal philosophy that has gripped our nation over the past few decades.  It ends here and we start turning the corner in November.  Stay focused and hit the Left on the issues that really matter.

Posted in economics, Entitlement Programs, healthcare, politics | 3 Comments

What If We All Drove Chevy Volts?

Posted on 03-Jul-2012 by Highvoltage

I wrote a previous post showing how purchasing a Chevy Volt to offset gasoline prices doesn’t make financial sense based on the current Volt purchase price and gas prices less than $7.00 per gallon.  I also stated that I am opposed to purchasing a Chevy Volt on principle because the US tax payers are on the hook to the tune of a $7,500 rebate for every purchase and I still stand by that assertion.

There is no need to rehash those arguments here but there was a recent comment by JustAddValue to my blog post that raised an interesting question that I’d like to explore in this blog post.

“One other issue I see is that America does not have the electrical capacity infrastructure to support tens of thousands (let alone millions) of EVs currently. Our Transmission and distribution systems are in deplorable shape and would need a significant upgrade to allow for future capacity. That’s a fact.”

The reader posed an interesting question.  What would be the impact to the US power generation industry if every American drove a Chevy Volt (or similar electric vehicle-EV) for their primary vehicle (commuting to work, driving to vacations, running errands, etc.)?

Before we can answer this question we first need to understand the difference between kilowatts (KW) and kilowatt-hours (KWh) and there is a great website you can use here but if you don’t have 20 minutes to read this article, let me give you the condensed version.  Power is expressed in KW and this is the capacity to produce power that can be converted into energy which is expressed in KWh.  The amount of energy used is based on the power (KW) times the time (Hour), hence KWh.  Power plants are usually rated in the amount of power they can produce but we are charged for the amount of energy we use so that is why your commercial and residential energy bills are expressed in KWh.

ASSUMPTIONS

In the previous post I showed where the Chevy Volt requires 12.9 KWh to recharge its battery so we’ll use that figure in our calculations.  From this website, we see that in 2010 the US had a total installed electrical generation capacity of 1,120 GW (1 Giga watt is equal to 1,000 Mega Watts or 1,000,000 Kilowatts).  From this website, we see that in 2010 the US consumed 4,125,060,899 MWh (or 4,125,061 GWh).

From this website, we learn that there were over 250 million registered vehicles in the US in 2010 but just using small and large cars for our analysis (“light duty vehicle, short wheel base” and “light duty vehicle, long wheel base” as defined in the table) we see that there are 230,444,440 cars that meet that criteria.  Let’s assume that 75% of these cars are actually used as primary vehicles (the rest are either idle or rarely driven) so that gives us a total of 172,833,330 cars that will theoretically be replaced with Chevy Volts or a similar EV.

RESULTS

Now I can perform the calculations and they are shown below:

We see that if every American drove a Chevy Volt for their primary transportation vehicle we’d use an extra 8.3% of the total installed electrical power generation capacity and we’d increase our yearly electrical energy consumption by 19.7% (round it up to 20%).

Using these theoretical calculations, we can conclude that we probably would not have to install new electrical generating facilities because we only use 42% of our installed capacity right now (4,125,060 divided by 9,811,200) but, using my engineering background as a guide, you never operate a plant at 100% of capacity due to inefficiencies so the electrical power generation industry is probably operating much closer to full capacity than the theoretical 42%.  Power plants don’t continuously operate at peak power so taking the installed power capacity and multiplying it by the total number of hours in a year (as I did on the spreadsheet) is also not realistic.  For these reasons, I won’t use the “% of installed energy capacity” metric but instead use the “% increase in US energy usage” metric since that is the amount of extra energy that the power plants would need to produce to satisfy all the new Volt owners.

I want to restate the results of my calculations again for effect and I’m just going to just focus on the % increased US energy usage metric.

If 75% of all passenger cars were magically converted to Chevy Volts then the annual US energy usage would increase by 20%.

You don’t have to be an engineer to realize that increasing all US electrical power generation plants by 20% would not be a trivial exercise!   Attempting to raise US energy output by 20% raises many issues/questions that I’ll get to shortly but first a quick side bar for the Al Gore cult.

Here’s an interesting little wrinkle for the Green crowd – Increasing our electrical energy consumption by 20% would result in approximately 15% more Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions from power generation plants because around 72% of our fuels we use to produce electricity are comprised of coal, oil and natural gas as is shown on this website.

Does this increased amount of GHG from increased electrical power production offset the GHG emissions from burning gasoline in cars?  I don’t know the answer to this question but I really don’t care either because the whole Anthropogenic Global Warming argument can be thoroughly debunked here.   I only mention this because much of the demand for EV’s is generated from the environmentally conscience crowd who wishes to reduce their carbon footprint.  Have they performed this calculation which proves that driving an electric vehicle reduces their carbon footprint when considering that they are using GHG producing fuel to recharge their vehicle?

What I’m more concerned with are the consequences from having our electrical power generation grid production increased by 20%.

What impact will this have on US power generation plants?

How much more will each KWh cost as a result of this increased demand?

Will this new energy demand help increase the number of nuclear power plants in the US?

Is the Green cult comfortable using nuclear power plants to recharge their electrical vehicles?

What strain will this put on the coal mining industry?

Can our current power distribution network handle this increased load (transformers, substations, distribution lines, etc.)?

I would love it if we could kick OPEC to the curb and eliminate our dependence on foreign oil for our transportation needs but have we thought through the ramifications on the electrical power generation sector if we continue down this path of EV adoption?  I know this transition won’t happen overnight (and if the Federal Government is in the business of leading this initiative then it’ll never happen!) but a thorough analysis needs to be performed before we move further down this path.

Are we prepared to absorb an increase in electrical energy productionof 20% or more once we switch over to EV’s?

 

Addendum – You can double check my calculations using my spreadsheet – chevy volt energy usage

Posted in Climate Change, general science, politics | 10 Comments

Awaking a Sleeping Giant, Part II

Posted on 02-Jul-2012 by Highvoltage

Businesses fail every day for a variety of reasons but if you want to guarantee the destruction of a business, the quickest way to do it is through its culture.   Establish a culture that:  forbids opinions outside the status quo, eliminates conflict, promotes a culture of ‘going along to get along’ and rewards complacency.  If you can successfully instill that culture in your organization then its days are numbered and the end will be swift and painful.

A nation is no different than a business and the quickest way to destroy a country is not from an outside invasion but from the inside (i.e. its culture).  We are seeing this death spiral playing out in the United States and unless we act swiftly, we will see the destruction of the US in our lifetime.

Conservatives seemed to have adopted that culture of complacency during the Bush 43 years and we saw what that produced – Democratic control of the House of Representatives and Senate in 2007, A lame presidential candidate in 2008 (John McCain) and a Hopey-Changey Obama swept into power. 

The Conservative movement had an awakening in 2009 which caused a minor change in Legislative control in 2010 and while this caused the Leftist agenda to down shift, it hardly put the brakes on this destructive course and we definitely didn’t turn the corner.  The fact that Obama is still polling with numbers suggesting he can win a second term shows that the minor victories in 2009 (and the Wisconsin Union smack down) didn’t change enough people’s beliefs on the direction that US domestic policy needs to move.

After first hearing of the SCOTUS decision affirming Obamacare on the basis that Congress can levy taxes, it might appear that all the momentum that Conservatives thought we had was cut off at the knees but I contend that this is just the catalyst we needed to rejuvenate the Conservative movement. 

While it should have been the job of the SCOTUS to rule against the Federal Government forcing citizens to buy a product, they chose another route that might provide an even stronger motivation for the US voters to unseat Obama and move the Senate under Republican control.  Here are the important words from Chief Justice Roberts who wrote the majority opinion:

“We do not consider whether the Act embodies sound policies. That judgment is entrusted to the Nation’s elected leaders.”

“Members of this Court are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments. Those decisions are entrusted to our Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”

This verbiage from Chief Justice Roberts was a backhanded compliment to the Obama regime – Yes, he viewed Obamacare as constitutional but only because the individual mandate is a tax and Congress has to power to levy taxes.  Roberts was telling the American people that elections have consequences!  If we are complacent and elect people who want to move our country to Euro style socialism then we shouldn’t look to 9 people to reverse that path.  I agree with that logic, to some extent, because the representatives that a Republic elects should not be overturned by 9 people unless those laws violate the constitution.  It’s arguable whether the individual mandate violates the constitution but we elected these people to enact this socialistic law so we shouldn’t look to SCOTUS to fix our collective stupidity.

Mike Flynn at Big Government stated the situation perfectly (emphasis mine):

“Yes, Obama and the Democrats are entitled to a bit of a victory lap today, after Chief Justice Roberts searched deeply within his political self and found a path to uphold ObamaCare. Sure, the individual mandate was unconstitutional on the two arguments made by the Obama Administration. But on the argument they expressly didn’t make–that the mandate was really a tax–the Court decided that Congress was well within its power to enact the provision. So it’s still the law of the land. But today’s ruling will probably go down in history as the most effective GOP voter turnout operation ever. There is only one way to repeal ObamaCare, and that is through the ballot box. It will happen.”

Conservatives, the situation is not hopeless.  We are in a war, not a battle.  We can’t assume the nation’s course will be corrected based on one election cycle.  We still have the power to fix our problems and return this nation back to its founding principles but it will require every conservative fighting with any weapons they have (twitter, facebook, blogs, water cooler conversations, organizing protests, etc.) and we will need to fight this war for many years, if not decades.  The time to remain complacent is over and we must not be afraid to offend. 

Posted in politics | 3 Comments

A Week Off The Grid

Posted on 30-Jun-2012 by Highvoltage

While the rest of America was pouring over the details of recent SCOTUS decisions on Obamacare and Arizona immigration reform, my family was recharging our batteries at a lake house with no Wi-Fi or 3G cell coverage.  In other words, we were officially off the grid for 7 full days!

I’ll admit it, it was tough not getting up to the minute updates from my favorite sites like Red State, Hot Air, The Wall Street Journal, The Foundry and yes, even NPR.  I missed the real time feedback to breaking news stories from Twitter and providing my two cents worth via this blog and my own twitter updates. 

Political junkies thrive on the daily, no hourly, updates from the blogoshphere, Twitterverse, TV news and the internet and I’m no different.  We need these updates to provide fodder for conversations on these online media outlets as well as conventional conversation tools such as the company water cooler.

It’s tough for a political junky to ditch current events for a week but I am thankful for this time each year that my family uses to recharge our batteries.  It’s good for a family to spend their waking hours for a whole week devoted to only the interaction of each other and not the TV, news coverage and sports coverage. 

We choose different venues for this each year and this year we chose Lake Norris in Tennessee and we could not have been happier.  If you’re looking for a great lake house getaway, I suggest you point your Google search to the Secluded Lynch Hollow Lagoon property (Phil Day owner) via Robin Conley Property Management.  We were extremely pleased and I highly recommend them.

I encourage all to take at least one week a year away from work, current events and other stresses that distract us from our primary responsibility-> our family.

Here are some pics from the vacation:

 

 There was a new invention that I discovered this week that is perfect for floating in the lake with your favorite beverage, called the “Broodle”, and has a magnetic attachment that keeps your beverage Koozie attached to the “noodle” that you can float on.  A must for any beach or lake vacation! 

I’ll give myself a day to decompress and catch up and then it is back to WAR!  Consevatives need to fight harder in the coming months than ever before and I am recharged and ready to assume my position on the front lines!

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

What Liberals Really Want

Posted on 21-Jun-2012 by Highvoltage

Even though they try so hard to hide them, Leftists eventually reveal their true beliefs. 

They go to great lengths to give the illusion they are working for the common good and that private industry should fall prostrate on the ground and worship the government for all the wonderful things they provide but they really aren’t interested in saving ‘things’ as much as promoting a socio-economic paradigm change that leads us away from Capitalism.

Remember Elizabeth Warren’s speech that tugged at the Leftist heart strings?

“You built a factory out there? Good for you,” she [Warren] says. “But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”

“She continues: “Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

What a pompous ass!  That was the kind of speech that will make Liberals and lovers of big government stand up and cheer but there is a big problem with Ms. Warren’s little rant as was shown in a Red State post:

“I can certainly unite around the basic sentiment Warren portrays here: The relationship between the private sector and the government needs to be a symbiotic one, and not a parasitic one. That facet is excellent, and it draws people in.”

“Here’s where Warren misses: While the relationship between the government and private sector is parasitic, governmentis the parasite.”

“The core of the issue is this: Government creates nothing on its own. All people who work for the government or are otherwise supported by the government cannot thrive without someone creating wealth for government to tax. All those roads that were built came from taxpayer money. All those policemen are paid with taxpayer money. Most of those schools where the workers were trained came from taxpayer money.”

To see further evidence of this Leftist logic gone wrong, the good people at Destroy The GOP put together a list of things Republicans should do and the top 15 are shown below. 

If you’re a Republican who hates taxes, please do the following.

Do not use Medicare.

Do not use Social Security

Do not become a member of the US military, who are paid with tax dollars.

Do not ask the National Guard to help you after a disaster.

Do not call 911 when you get hurt.

Do not call the police to stop intruders in your home.

Do not summon the fire department to save your burning home.

Do not drive on any paved road, highway, and interstate or drive on any bridge.

Do not use public restrooms.

Do not send your kids to public schools.

Do not put your trash out for city garbage collectors.

Do not live in areas with clean air.

Do not drink clean water.

Do not visit National Parks.

Do not visit public museums, zoos, and monuments.

This is a classic straw man argument that Leftists are fond of brining up in an effort to paint conservatives as people who are against roads, bridges, national parks, zoos, police departments, fire departments, etc.  Conservatives have never said we should have zero government and most of the items on the list in the previous link are things conservatives gladly support giving their tax dollars to.  But as I’ve shown before, we don’t have a tax revenue problem; we have a spending problem and there is no better state to demonstrate this problem than California.

We see in an NPR article that the state of California will be forced to shut down several state parks because they don’t have the money to maintain them. 

“On July 1, 15 California state parks are slated to be closed permanently to the public — the first such closures in the state’s history. They’re the victim of budget cuts in a state with a $16 billion shortfall.”

“Over the past year, park enthusiasts have scrambled to save dozens of parks from closure, including Henry W. Coe State Park, California’s second-biggest state park, located about 30 miles south of San Jose.”

“With 135 square miles of spectacular wilderness in the Diablo mountain range, Coe Park is considered one of the Bay Area’s greatest secrets. Its namesake, Henry Coe, was a cattle rancher whose land became a state park in 1958.”

This is truly sad because parks are one of our national treasures that should be preserved for the enjoyment of its citizens but with a $16 billion deficit, something has to be cut.  But fear not, this story has a happy ending because a private citizen, Dan McCranie, has stepped up and raised the money to keep at least one of the parks open.  From the NPR article:

“McCranie made his money in the semiconductor industry. For 30 years now, when he has needed to escape the grind of Silicon Valley, McCranie has sought refuge in Coe Park, where an inscription on a monument to Henry Coe reads, “May these quiet hills bring peace to the souls of those who are seeking.”

“I’m crazy about this place,” McCranie says. “I think everybody who comes here is crazy about it.”

“When McCranie heard that Coe Park was on the list slated for closure, he stepped up with three-quarters of $1 million to help keep it open for the next three years. While McCranie is Coe Park’s main donor, others have also contributed smaller amounts. In total, about $900,000 of private donations will be given to the state of California to fund rangers and maintenance staff for three years.”

“McCranie, who is turning 69 soon, says he couldn’t think of a better thing to do with his excess wealth than to preserve Coe Park. Still, he admits he did not tell his wife before making the donation. “I figured forgiveness would be better than permission,” he says with a laugh.”

“McCranie figures that now that private donors have stepped up, state money will never come back to Coe Park. So it will be up to them to create an endowment fund big enough to keep this park open in perpetuity. But this model is precarious if enthusiasm flags or fortunes shift.”

Well that is just awesome!  A successful capitalist who played by the rules, paid his taxes and amassed a large amount of wealth has voluntarily chipped in (and encouraged other to chip in as well) to save the park and keep it operational for the foreseeable future. 

What is not to love?  The park will stay open for the enjoyment of the public and this plan will not require any state tax dollars.  Mr. McCranie and his associates are on their way to cutting 1/16th of the California state budget deficit using money from the private sector.

Surely Liberals are happy with this, right?

Not according to Rob Reich.  From the NPR article (emphasis mine):

“Getting the state off the hook for funding parks may also set into motion a slippery slope, says Rob Reich, who is a co-director of Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.”

“On one level, Reich says, McCranie’s donation makes a sweeping philanthropic statement. But Reich is also troubled by the questions it raises: What about parks in areas that don’t have a lot of money? Who saves them? And what about donors who attach all kinds of strings to their gifts? And does private philanthropy replace the common good?” “You get lots of people like [McCranie] or others who do this who have great intentions and are civically minded and spirited,” Reich explains. “But acting one by one by one, they set into motion this dynamic … where suddenly we’re not acting collaboratively or collectively as a public. We’re acting individually as philanthropists to benefit the thing we’re most passionate about. And suddenly we don’t have a civic sphere anymore. We don’t have political participation. We don’t have an ‘us.’ We have a bunch of ‘I’s.’ “

Did you catch that?  Mr. Reich is concerned that governments are losing the control over the money and private investors are acting independently to spend their money where they desire.  Does that sound like Socialism to you? 

Mr. Reich’s view of government is antithetical to my view of how our founding fathers envisioned the role of government.   Mr. McCranie and his associates just demonstrated how Capitalism is a far superior economic system to Socialism because we have evidence where private citizens used the profits of their labors to give back to the community.  How often do you think this happens in a Socialistic country? 

When it gets right down to it, Leftists aren’t concerned about parks, schools, bridges, roads or other projects that benefit the country’s citizens.  They are more concerned about huge coffers of government money where the collective ‘we’ (i.e. politicians) decide where to spend the money instead of the “bunch of I’s” that have the freedom to spend their money based on their own desires and what the Free Market produces.

This is the heart of what Leftists really desire and this NPR article demonstrated it beautifully. 

Posted in economics, politics | 3 Comments

Campaign Donations Are Equivalent To Free Speech

Posted on 21-Jun-2012 by Highvoltage

In 2010, SCOTUS ruled on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission which stated that corporations and unions could make unlimited contributions to political candidates and this ruling opened the door to Super-PACs that allowed for corporations, unions and individuals to make unlimited contributions to political causes (but not directly to candidates).  Ever since that time, The Left has been upset about the amount of money flowing into Conservative candidates’ coffers and Super-PACs.

From Think Progress (emphasis mine):

“The Supreme Court is presently considering whether to hear a Montana Supreme Court case holding that the Court’s election-buying decision in Citizens United does not prevent Montana from stemming the flow of corporate money into politics. Republican leaders and corporate interest groups like the Chamber of Commerce asked the justices to double down on Citizens United, while twenty-two additional states have asked the Court to close the floodgates unleashing unlimited money into state elections.”

Think Progress equates the SCOTUS decision on Citizens United with election buying.

From The New Republic:

“A corporate takeover of U.S. politics was precisely what many predicted after the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United.”

Leftists view Citizens United as equivalent of a corporate takeover.

From the Daily Kos:

“In the short term, we’re screwed. 2012 is going to go down as the election in which American politics became the politics of money to the nth degree – and not just corporate money, but money from people with the power to force their delusional world views on the rest of us. Crankocrats in other words.”

Liberals believe that money from conservative donors is given by Crankpots and those who have a delusional view of the world.

Never mind that millions of dollars are being funneled into the Obama campaign from Union Thugs like the SEIU.

“The Service Employees International Union said it will spend a similar amount of money to re-elect President Barack Obama as it did in 2008, but will reach out to three times as many potential voters this year with a focus on eight battleground states.”

“The union spent about $85 million in 2008 and “this year will look similar,” said political director Brandon Davis.”

It’s hard to believe the Left is complaining about how much money Romney has raised when Obama’s war chest is much larger than Romney’s, which is shown in the following graph from Open Secrets.

It is true that Romney has raised more money in his Super-PAC (Restore Our Future) than Obama has raised in his Super-PAC (Priorities USA Action) – to the tune of $56.5 million to $10.6 million as shown in the following Open Secrets link.  It is also true that Obama still has more cash on hand in his personal account than Romney to the tune of over $106 million, which is shown on the table in this link ($115.2 million for Obama and $9.2 million for Romney).  I really don’t understand the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Left when Obama has more money than Romney but I suppose facts have never stood in the way of a good Leftist meme.

Campaign Donations Equate to Free Speech

In my viewpoint, limits on campaign contributions should be eliminated and I came to this position because I believe campaign donations equate to speech and therefore should not be limited.

If we start limiting the dollar amounts given to candidates (as we do now) then what else should we limit?  If we assume that a disproportionate amount of campaign donations give one candidate an unfair advantage over another then we must assume that this advantage comes from the added exposure that money buys (advertisements, get out the vote effort, staffing, etc.).  But a candidate’s exposure also comes from the main stream media, blog sites, Twitter, Facebook, bumper stickers, lawn signs and conversations around the water cooler at work.  Should we start limiting that exposure as well?  Do we put limits on the number of news stories that TV stations and newspapers devote to the various candidates so that one candidate doesn’t get more ‘positive’ news stories than his rival?  Do we limit or censor activity on Social Media to ensure there isn’t an unfair advantage to a candidate that is more popular?  Do we ensure there are equivalent numbers of bumper stickers and yard signs in a particular geographic area?  Do we limit the political conversations at work so that one candidate won’t get more exposure than his opponent?

Once we start limiting campaign donations, in an effort to limit exposure, then we must look into other areas which impact a candidate’s exposure.

If a candidate is truly popular then that candidate will receive more campaign contributions because more people resonate with that candidate’s ideas and want to support him.  Is the fact that a winning candidate had more campaign contributions than his rival a result of all the money flowing into his campaign or was the larger amount of campaign contributions a result of the candidate’s popularity?  This is a classic ‘chicken and the egg question’ and I lean more to the latter (campaign donations are a reflection of the candidate’s popularity). 

I don’t care if Obama raises $1 trillion for his campaign and his commercials are on TV 24/7, I will still not vote for him.  No matter how much money Soros, the Hollywood elite and unions give to Obama, the added exposure from that money will not alter my vote and I suspect there are those on the Left who would say the same thing about Romney.  What we are really talking about is persuading the middle and I still have faith in the American people to avoid deception from a barrage of campaign advertisements and I think they will vet the candidate’s positions on their own and not vote based solely on TV advertisement.

Eliminate this limit on Free Speech and allow companies, unions and individuals to contribute unlimited amounts to local, state and federal candidates.

Posted in politics | 1 Comment

Rearranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic

Posted on 20-Jun-2012 by Highvoltage

Today, the Fed announced they are entering into another round of Operation Twist in an attempt to spur economic growth. 

“The Federal Reserve said it was extending its “Operation Twist” through the end of year. It will add $267 billion more to the program in which the Fed sells some of its medium-term bonds in order to buy longer-term ones. In theory, that pushes down the interest rate on longer-term loans, especially mortgages.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – The Fed has already exhausted all its big weapons to ‘fix’ this economy and now they are down to BB guns which won’t have any measureable effect on the economy.  Don’t get me wrong; I can’t blame the Fed for doing this today because they have to do something and this is all the ammunition they have left to shoot off.  With short and long term interest rates at extremely low levels and very minimal inflation, there isn’t much more the Fed can do with their limited tool box.

But there is something the country can do to get the economy humming but sadly it won’t be possible until January 2013 and I’ll take this opportunity to redirect you to a blog post I wrote last September (the last time the Fed did the Twist) where I explained why we have to wait that long to see any real economic recovery.  Go read the whole post but here are my last 2 paragraphs (and take it easy on me, I wrote that post with only 1 month of blog experience so the grammar sucks). 

“So my contention is that all the added regulations, which were implemented by the Obama administration, is stifling the economy. The tools in the standard tool boxes have not worked because the increased regulation has dropped expectations so low that we can’t get out of our own way. It’s like we are in a car pressing on the accelerator but we don’t move because the parking brake is on and our other foot is pressing the brake pedal to the floor. It’s time to let the economy and the Free Market work but we have to release the brake. If we continue to stifle corporate growth through over regulation, the traditional tools will have no effect on the Market and we are seeing that play out right now.”

“My recommendation is to put down the tool I like to call ‘over regulation’ and pick up the tool I call ‘free market’ and watch the economy take off. We also need a President who will foster a culture of optimism but instead we have a community organizer who: is intent on confrontation, is unwilling to admit his failures and refuses to compromise. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait until 2013 when we remove President Obama and have a Conservative majority in the Senate because the Democrats have shown that they are hell bent on punishing corporations with higher taxes and increased regulation.”

Posted in economics, Over Regulation, politics | 1 Comment

Obama’s Epic Fail Countdown

Posted on 18-Jun-2012 by Highvoltage

Sometime this month the Supreme Court of the United States will issue its verdict on whether the individual mandate is constitutional and what parts, if any, of Obamacare can remain intact.  It’s anyone’s guess how SCOTUS will rule but the general consensus is that, at a minimum, the individual mandate will be struck down and since that is the primary source of revenue for the rest of Obamacare then the rest should be scrapped.

Until we hear from SCOTUS, let me share a few links to whet your appetite on the upcoming epic fail that is Obamacare.

From Town Hall we see this informative flow chart developed by Avik Roy:

There are other links from my blog that describe the destruction that Obamacare is already causing and also giving us a glimpse of what is to come if this law isn’t repealed or struck down:

The Lies of Obamacare Exposed

Regulations are Literally Killing Us

Obamacare – Destroying Jobs, Entrepreneurship and Innovation

A Messenger from the Future

Another Cautionary Tale Regarding Obamacare

Let’s face it – Obama pinned everything on this signature healthcare reform law.  He has done nothing with regard to the economy that he can campaign on in November so this is his flagship campaign issue and what his 1st Presidential term (and hopefully his only term) will be characterized by history.  The clock is ticking on SCOTUS striking down most, if not all, of this Legislation and we can grab popcorn and watch the Left implode during the next 5 months.

Posted in healthcare, politics | Leave a comment