Good Column By Friedman

Finally, a column by Tom Friedman that I can agree with. In today's NY Times, Op-Ed Columnist: Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda argues for a dollar per gallon gasoline tax. This happens to be an idea I suggested many years ago, for the same reasons: we would send less money to our adversaries overseas, we would have a better energy policy, and a great source of government revenue.

Of course, I would like to see some of the revenue used for nuclear fusion R&D and building more nuclear fission power plants. (I would also like to see the United States exit the World Trade Organization and put tariffs on goods and services of nations which do not trade fairly with us, such as China, but that is a different - though related - issue.)

The gasoline tax would be similar to a tariff, and that is good, because American tariffs add to our federal treasury, as opposed to the treasuries of the countries we import from. The latter still make a lot of money off the American consumer, but tariffs would also favor American producers of goods and services.

A quote from Friedman's column:

“Think about it,” says Phil Verleger, an energy economist. “We could have replaced the current payroll tax with a gasoline tax. Middle-class consumers would have seen increased take-home pay of between six and nine percent, even though they would have had to pay more at the pump.

End quote.

That is another idea I favor. I have often called for eliminating the payroll tax and making the federal income tax more progressive. The payroll tax is the opposite of progressive: it is regressive; it hurts the middle and lower classes more than the upper class. This would not be "class warfare"; class warfare is what we have now, with the upper class waging war on the rest of America.

I like to call a spade a spade. So today, I applaud Tom Friedman's column.

Another Stupid Friedman Idea

I know I should stop reading Thomas Friedman's column in the NY Times, but I am incorrigible and, besides, his column is often a convenient example of the muddled thinking which leads to stupid policies. That said, see The Green-Collar Solution in today's paper.

The basic premise (from activist Van Jones) is to use boatloads of taxpayer money to train and hire disadvantaged youth in "weatherizing millions of buildings, putting up solar panels, constructing wind farms". In other words, spend a lot of dough on "do nothing" jobs.

We don't need all that "green" stuff. We should design and build more efficient products, but mostly we need to design and build thermonuclear reactors. We should spend taxpayer dollars on R&D for fusion power, not on training youth to do construction work. Besides, a large part of the construction industry labor comes from illegal aliens, which implies that disadvantaged youth don't want to do that kind of work anyway.

(The best advice today for helping "disadvantaged youth" can be found in "Come on, people : on the path from victims to victors" by Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint.)

Recall that Friedman was one of the biggest cheerleaders for Bush's War on Iraq. We have already spent about $400-$600 billion on Iraq, and will probably spend double that in Iraq before we come to our senses. What a waste. Our military should have had plans to crush Al Qaida after their first series of attacks on us in the 1990's, and we should have had a president on 9/11 who was prepared to execute such plans. Instead, we invade Iraq!

The same mindset was at play in the 1960's and 70's when we invaded Vietnam. Had we instead invested the money in R&D, we would already have had decades of cheap energy, saved a trillion dollars from going to Arab countries for buying oil and funding terrorism, and there would never have been a "Gulf War" in 1991, nor a 9/11 attack on the US, nor an invasion and occupation of Iraq in the 2000's.

But at least we were able to feed the egos of our "war presidents".

Thanks, Tom. I feel better now.

Caspian Anachronisms

Birds of a feather do flock together. Presidents Vladimir V. "KGB" Putin of Russia and Mahmoud "I'm a douchebag" Ahmadinejad of Iran met in Tehran yesterday. They held hands and drank tea while castigating the "Great Satan", and they are planning to enter the Twentieth Century with hoped-for development of the oil and gas reserves of the Caspian Sea.

Meanwhile, we can only hope that the US will soon develop viable thermonuclear (fusion) power reactors, making oil and gas deposits obsolete in the Twenty-first Century.

Update re Bussard Fusion Reactor

Dr. Robert W. Bussard passed away on October 7, 2007, but I believe one or more of his colleagues are continuing his research with funding from the US Navy. He received his PhD in physics from Princeton University. Please see a lecture he gave at Google last year: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606

It seems to me that this is one of the most promising approaches to viable thermonuclear (fusion) reactors. I still don't understand why more funding (beyond the limited funding from the US Navy) has not found its way to the corporation he created, EMC2 FUSION DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION (http://www.emc2fusion.org/). One explanation can be found at http://www.emc2fusion.org/2007-3-5%20DefenseNews.pdf.