Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

Fiscal Crisis Pending: Quick, Raise Taxes!

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by

James A. Bacon
in

Virginia faces a $1.2 billion budgetary gap in the next two-year budget, warns a new report by The Commonwealth Institute, “The Other Side of the Coin,” and the reason is… no, not soaring government spending that has boosted state spending by 51 percent between FY 2003 and FY 2008… no, not anything done during the Warner or Kaine administrations… it’s the Gilmore-era car tax relief!

States a press release summarizing the report:

The current budget deficit is not due to out-of-control spending, but is instead due to inadequate revenue policies. State spending has increased only an average of 3 percent over the last 10 years, once inflation and population growth in the state are factored. In addition, Virginia continues to lag behind the rest of the country in several key spending areas, including education, health care and mental health, despite having one of the highest per capita income levels in the country.

So, state spending has increased “only” three percent annually for 10 years — that means it’s “only” 30 percent bigger than it was during the Gilmore administration, adjusted for population growth and inflation.

I do agree with one finding of the report: Lawmakers have undermined the tax base by handing out tax breaks like candy. The report specifically mentions the state tax repeal and conservation tax credits, which it estimates will cost $260 million a year, but the problem is much, much bigger. Gov. Mark R. Warner highlighted the problem back in 2003 (or thereabouts). The problem has only gotten worse since then. The corpus of the 2007 state tax code is riddled with more holes than Bonnie and Clyde.

For the latest extravagances, you need go no farther than the Secretary of Finance’s home page, which touts, “Governor Kaine, General Assembly Pass New Tax Relief Legislation.” Aside from increasing the filing threshhold for the state income tax, 2007 measures include: (1) breaks for energy-efficient appliance purchases and the use of alternative fuels; (2) a sales-tax holiday for purchases of home generators in preparation for hurricane season; and (3) an exemption for expenses associated with organ donation.

So, what’s the Commonwealth Institute’s solution? Close the tax loopholes? Rejuvenate the efficiency-in-government reforms of the Warner era? Set different budgetary priorities? Seek innovative solutions to public needs? Push for Fundamental Change in human settlement paterns? No, no, no, no, and no. What we need to do is increase general taxes. Of course, the Institute doesn’t say that explicitly. Here’s what it says: “Policymakers should embrace a long-term solution that stabilizes state revenues and restores a balanced budget.” Got that? We need to “stabilize state revenues” — stabilize them at a higher plateau than they are now.

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45 responses to “Fiscal Crisis Pending: Quick, Raise Taxes!”

  1. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    P.S. Let me note for the record that I consider the elimination of the death tax to be a justifiable tax cut, not comparable to other “tax breaks” that undermine the integrity of the tax system. The income in estates has already been taxed at least once, often twice, already. Further, it applies across the board, not just to left-handed paper hangers, or other selected groups.

  2. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Wait a minute.

    3% over ten years isn’t the same as 3% annually.

    Which is it?

    RH

  3. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    I’d submit that the car tax was an example of inadequate revenue policy.

    It seems to me that an adequate revenue policy would be one that captures a piece of everyone’s revenue, as opposed to one that captures property paid for with revenue that has already been taxed when earned and again when spent.

    If I sell a good. I’m taxed. If I sell a service, I’m not.

    If I own tangible property, I’m taxed, but if I own part of someone else’s property (stocks) I’m not. If I own tangible cash or even gold, I’m not taxed.

    But God forbid I should own a car and use it to make money, shucks, we gotta tax that.

    Our revenue policies are not only inadequate, they are unreasonable, inequitable, unrealistic, and inconsistent.

    People universally hated the car tax. The governemt did the right thing in getting rid of it, but then they didn’t replace it with anything, even though there were plenty of opportunities to do so. And, replacing a tax with a bettter one is not the same as a new tax.

    RH

  4. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    you know .. instead of complaining about the pro-taxers – I think there needs to be a competitive alternate vision – for Virgina – not unlike folks like Newt Gingrinch do at the national level.

    So … far .. we have no-taxers who either seem devoid ideas that make sense and at the same time go for really sneaky back-door “fees” so that they don’t have to call them taxes.

    I sure would like to see some smart conservatives “step up to the plate” and give the pro-taxers a run for their money.

    “User Pays” is a fair policy.

  5. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    By nature, all a conservative has to do is conserve: resist change. Such a position doesn’t require a lot of smarts. Not to say that there are not smart conservatives, just that they don’t need them very much to support the usual position.

    A new idea that makes sense is going to require change. It’s hard to argue for such a thing from a conservative position, unless the change is actually reactionary.

    So, yes, I’d like to see some smart conservatives step up to the plate and tell us how we can improve things, and do it in a conservative manner, meaning a manner that improves the social condition without involving socialism. I’d like to see some smart conservatives promoting business and the environment. Those are the things that will take some smarts.

    As for “User Pays”, its a fair policy only as long as the policy is applied fairly and uniformly. Otherwise, its only a sneaky back door fee to oppress those we disagree with.

    RH

  6. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    …”all a conservative has to do is conserve: resist change.”

    ahhh.. this is what I mean.

    Take a conservative and put him/her in charge of a company and let them resist change – and see what happens.

    The two attributes are very different.

    Tax and spend people do very well with change.. as long as they have the funds to finance their wants.

    But a true Conservative has to do what is financially responsible AND evolve through change…

    See.. that’s the problem with many Conservatives. They’re against change and they’re against more taxes and that leaves them appearing to voters like they have no ideas and are slothful in their approach to challenges.

  7. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    This is the left wing churches behind this group, correct? Eliminating the exemption for religious institutions always goes to the top of my tax reform list. Since Socrates was a pup the true mantra of religious INSTITUTIONS has been show me the money….(not religion per se, just the folks with the tax exempt gold plated buildings. Charity should be deductible, education deductible, but neither the Scientologists nor the Pope should be paid with deductible dollars — and this horse manure release is another reason why.)

  8. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    Ray, Good question — the Institute’s language was not clear. Let’s put it this way… inflation between 1996 to 2006 (the most recent year covered by the calculator I used) totaled about 28 percent. Virginia’s population growth has been running around 1.3 percent annually, or roughly 13 percent over a 10-year period. Combine them and you get 41 percent.

    Over the past 10 years, the General Fund budget has increased from $17.6 billion (FY 1998) to $37.8 billion (FY 2008). That’s an increase of 115 percent! I’d say the Commonwealth Institute numbers are extremely conservative, to the point of significantly under-representing the real, population/inflation-adjusted growth of state government over the past 10 years.

  9. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    OK. So we need 41% just to keep things the same as they were ten years ago.

    Don’t you have more wealth, more complications, mre things to do and maintain than ten years ago?

    Population and inflation adjusted growth is an oversimplistic means to stagnation, which is a lot different from conservation.

    What is the state’s take against the gross state product today vs ten years ago?

    I don’t know know about you or the state, but my population increase is zero, theoretically I should be happy with inflation, then. Even so, my life is richer, more complex, and more expensive than ten years ago.

    Why would I think the state is any different?

    RH

  10. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Larry, I’d say that’s right.

    Now, what do you do when a project will pay for itself over time but needs money up front that you don’t have?

    The longer you put it off the more wasteful and less conservative you are.

    What do you do when you think a project will pay for itself, and it turns out later you were wrong?

    RH

  11. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    Sure, Ray, I would expect the state government to spend more as the state gets more prosperous. If nothing else, Medicaid is a huge cost driver. On the other hand, I also expect the state to identify best practices, benchmark performance, embrace information technology and drive administrative costs out of the system. I expect the state, like the private sector, to show increases in employee productivity — to do more with less. And I expect the state to set budgetary priorities. I see absolutely no justification for the massive increase in state spending that we have experienced.

  12. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    …”Now, what do you do when a project will pay for itself over time but needs money up front that you don’t have?”

    well first you need to commit to prioritization with regard to budget then you need to see if you can pay for it out of tax revenues or bond pay backs.

    But.. as I said.. FIRST you start off with the premise that you (and remember this phrase) CANNOT AFFORD to build the project by increasing taxes.

    You need to use PAYGO + inflation and no more than that.

    You can also build it with user fees and/or a combination of user fees that pay back the bonds.

    Now to show just how smart I am – all the above advice goes totally down the tubes when it comes to Dulles Transit and the new Transportation Authority.

    No wonder no one believes that Government can actually discipline itself.

  13. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    “FIRST you start off with the premise that you (and remember this phrase) CANNOT AFFORD to build the project by increasing taxes.”

    Well, that’s where we part company.

    You start off with the criteria. What works and what doesn’t.

    Second you prioritize them according to what works best.

    Then

    If you have a project that pays for itself – generates new money in the end – or saves more than it costs. And if it is the best project on the list – priority is already completed – then you have to fund it somehow, or you are a complete fool.

    Now it is just math. As JAB has pointed out, raisng taxes costs jobs and money. So does borrowing. But if this is really a money maker, not doing anything costs money, too.

    If raising taxes is the cheapest way out, then you can’t afford NOT to raise them. That is the thing to do and NOT get hung up on your starting premise, attractive as it is in the abstract.

    Besides, if you are correct, and this thing throws off more money than it costs, then you can lower taxes even more later. It is called making a tax investment.

    BUT

    All of that assumes you have the facts on the ground right in the first place, and the whole process is not being driven by agenda driven drivel or partisan politics.

    I don’t think bridges or airplanes fall down because they are liberal or conservative. I think when something doesn’t work there is a reason and we can find out what it is if we look.

    I don’t know if our state expenditures are huge and unjustified. We can find out if we look, maybe, but we ought to take off our liberal/conservative blinders first.

  14. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    …”You start off with the criteria. What works and what doesn’t.”

    don’t you think that your very first criteria is your budget and what “works” financially with respect to your budget?

    Isn’t that where you prioritize what you can afford to do and what you cannot.

    Isn’t that the way that you’ll actually spend time trying to figure out how to accomplish something for less money and doing things smarter, finding out what is wasteful and, in general find out what is cost-effective.

    I’m quite sure when you buy a hay baler that you might lust after that superauto 9600 but .. you’ll settle for the plainold 5400 because it costs half as much as still gets the job done.

    Businesses have to do this all the time – and the businesses that do this better – put the ones that don’t – out of business.

    That’s competition.

    Government has no incentive to spend less unless you completely outsource something to a competitive business.

    What happens when government hires contractors without a bid process?

    Very predictable.

    Does getting the low bid on something mean you won’t get the job done right?

    Only if you write really crappy specs… otherwise.. you’ll almost always get a lower price.

    When is the last time you saw government come back and say that DEQ or DMV had found serious cost-efficiencies and did not need as much money as the year before?

    HA! Never! .. they’d Fire the guy in charge… !!!!

  15. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    No. You prioritize projects according to what makes the best payback. You do that regardless o whether you have the budget to actually pay for the project.

    The way you determine the payback is by figuring out what will make the most difference on the ground. Take Metro. Figure out where people now using metro would have driven from/to absent Metro. (Not all of them would have driven, many more would have used car pools, etc.) Now figure out Where the people currently using Metro drive to/from. The difference is the first cut at how much driving Metro “saved”. Figure out the areas outside the useful metro boundaries, for those drivers Metro makes little or no difference. Then there are those within the useful Metro boundaries that now drive, when they otherwise would not have, on account of the lowered traffic volume caused by the first issue. The net sum is the traffic congestion relief value of Metro.

    The property increase value of Metro is another problem, calculated similarly. calculate the time savings value and throw that in, too (it is probably negative). After you figure out what all the pluses and minuses are, then figure that out over time, and apply your discount rate.

    That is the value of Metro today. That value has nothing to do with whether you can afford Metro, but it is the value just the same.

    You go through the same drill for ever other bright idea on the table (personal rapid transit, aircars double decker roads), and the ones with the most value have the highest priority. Period.

    Only then does budget enter the picture. Do you have enough for priority one? If not, how much will it cost to raise the money. The total is then the true cost for priority one.

    Do the same thing for priority 2. If you have enough money for priority 2 then the cost of raising the funds for priority one might cause the list to shift.

    But the value is still based on the measurable facts on the ground. That superauto 9600 probably costs more than I can afford, but the fact remains that it does a different job than the plainold 5400, and on that basis the plainold 5400 does not get the job done.

    I had exactly that problem this year. I needed a new tractor, and I couldn’t afford the plainold 5400, so I borrowed the money and bought a superauto 9600. As a result, I was able to pick up another hundred acres, that I could not have done otherwise. That difference made the borrowing worthwhile for the big tractor, when it would not have been worthwhile for the other, for my use alone.

    As a result, the entire community is better off, even after I send them the bill. The previous guy was using equipment half as big and it took him three times as long. Plus, I had a location advantage in moving the equipment. And, a tractor cost pretty much the same if it is 25 HP or 90 – same number of moving parts.

    At least that’s the way I was taught in management school.

    Where it gets screwed up is if you consider what you want, or who has power, before you go measure the facts. now it is a political situation, and that is what causes government downfall. Too many cooks in the kitchen, too many “hearings” where people vent opinions. Decision making that is consensual rather than factual.

    Obviously, you don’t always have all the facts. Sometimes you have to make decisions under uncertainty. But there are known procedures for handling that. You have sensitivity analysis, and probabilities.

    So now ProbA = .1 and Value A = 100, and the probable value is 10.

    ProbB = .5 and Value B = 50, so probable value is 25.

    In that case its a no brainer because both the probability and the value are higher than the alternative.

    If ProbA is .1 and Value A is 1000, the probable value is 100 andn some people would shy away because of the risk. But the business answer is unambiguous.

    Provided you know that ProbA is really .1 and not .01. Thats where sensitivity analysis comes in.

    The businesses that do THIS better are the ones that put others out of business. They can rationally take a risk that allows them to hit a home run.

    Businesses have no incentive to spend less, either. Unless they can still get the same profit. the equation is simple: if you don’t borrow enough, you are not growing as fast as you can and you are leaving some profits to the competition. But if you borrow too much, and ProbA turns out to be .01, then you put the company at risk.

    Same with government. The going in argument for government is that they do things the private economy can’t. By doing that, they save the private economy money that they would otherwise have to spend (more security guards, mass transit to the office). The ROI for government is to spend money in such a way that the private economy will have more resources to do what they do well, which generates more tax money, for the government to spend.

    Ideally, both sides win, and that is the nature of a deal.

    The government can do tht for two reasons. They can borrow money at low cost because ther eis little risk the government is going away. The other reason is one of liability. If a police officer shoots someone, it’s pretty much tough luck, but if your security guard shoots someone, that guy may wind up owning the company.

    The disconnect is between government, which has one agenda, and government organizational behaviors where the agenda is entirely different. Organizations like to grow a pyramid under them,and thats where the unneccesary cost growth comes from.

    Ideally, those organizations would have to put their ides on the table and have them evaluated on true value. But that doesn;t happen because a) government types don’t necessariy understand the business of making decisions, if they did, they would be millionairs in business (and some are) and, b) the organizations get whipsawed by special interests, endless hearings, falsely constructed agenda driven data, and going in criteria that are predicated on somebody’s favorite dogma instead of cold hard facts we can measure in the sunshine.

    rh

  16. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    One of the easy business decisions is the one people find hardest to make. If you lay out all the options, and none of them have a positive ROI, then you need to go out of business.

    Government does not have that choice, and so sometimes they must invest in or continue bad ideas. You would think they could jsut stop and shift those costs back to the private economy. But the problem is it will cost the private economy even more, which results in less revenue to the government. Then you have a real death spiral.

    As a farm, I ought to go out of business, and do something else. But because the government is so heavily injected in my business, I don’t have that as a real option: the only buyer would be someone else who is likely to go out of business, unless he can buy it for far below its value, or unless he has so much money that he can afford to lose it indefinitely.

    That is why I’m trapped in a game space wherein all I can afford to invest each year is what I would have to pay the government anyway, otherwise. Consequently, I can’t enlarge the game space as fast as I would otherwise (absent the government “help”). That new tractor fell into that game space, where as the other option would not have. But, considering where I started, it took fifteen years to enlarge the game space, little by little, to where it would work.

    In five to seven years, my neighbors will have paid me to buy that tractor they didn’t want to buy. We will both be better off, but they will have their weekends free at the beach, while I’m working their place.

    The tractor will still lose money, but it will still cost me less than if I didn’t have it. Now you can see why I fell like I’m working for the Government!

    rh

  17. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    urk!@

    I think I need some meds if I’m going to discuss concepts like governmnent and ROI in the same breath.

    The business community goes stark raving bonkers if the Government gets involved in something where they “appear” to take in more than they spend and compete with businesses who sell the same goods and services.

    There’s a reason why the government pays for deputies rather than letting private businesses to that – and there is as far as I can see and understand – there is no tangible ROI..

    I simple cannot conceive off the top of my hand – ANY function of government that generates a profit and then sends each taxpayer their fair share of that profit.

    You talk about “figuring out” the value of something in terms of ROI and from that decide if it’s priority?

    If you decide something is a priority – are you not making a defacto decision to fund it?

    what is the sense of prioritizing something then saying you cannot afford to put one penny towards it?

    There is no value system that is not subjective. It’s truly in the eyes of the beholder.

    That is why it’s called politics.

    You vote your values and I vote mine and the candidate that gets the most votes… pays attention to the values of the majority at a minimum if he/she wants to stay in office.

    Priorities are not all or nothing propositions.

    It’s about balancing what you want to spend money on over a range of items – and the goal is that when you add up everything you do not exceed your revenues.

    You don’t choose one over another – it’s how much do you allocate to one and how much to another and that process – is called – prioritization.

    We don’t zero fund transportation in favor of Education.

    We decide how to allocate the revenues between them.

    where am I going wrong on this?

  18. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    “as far as I can see and understand – there is no tangible ROI..”

    You are not setting the boundaries large enough. Take in the cost to business of paying taxes for secrity, and take out the cost of providing their own deputies, probably at higher cost due to liability and insurance.

    When it comes to governement, the boundaries are necessarily the entire society involved: the government, the winners, the losers and all the other nonparticipating taxpayers that contribute to the overall gain or loss of the first three.

    You can create a government reg that “saves” the government money, but if it costs the sum of all taxpayers more than it saves the government, then it isn’t a savings, its a wealth transfer.

    Unfortunately some people have been smart enough to recognize that. As a result there are laws and regulations that prohibit the government from considering privte costs in some cases, and REQUIRE it in others.

    Whatever the law says about how the costs must be calculated statutorily, IT DOES NOT CHANGE THE NET FACTS ON THE GROUND.

    As I have defined it priorities are not an all or nothing proposition: they are a rank ordering of possibilities, based on value. Properly calculated, that value is not subject to discussion that value is all or nothing in the sense that it is what it is, however much we disagree. It may be infinitely refined but at some point it isn’t worth the effort.

    The value of a Cadillac is $44,000. We don’t need to quibble about the value of the fuzzy dice on the mirror.

    You may have liberal or conservative or fundamental christian or fundamental islamist values that guide your choices. But, whatever you do, if you do NOT select your choices purely on the basis of value recieved – TO EVERYBODY, then you have wasted or let slide money, or stolen it from someone else.

    You are right. We do not zero fund transportation in favor of education. And as a direct tesult we are constantly in a position of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

    Realistically, you are correct. My argumet only applies to chossing projects of the same type or goal. What we do is arbitrarily divide projects into categories, divide the money first politically, and claim that all departments are then free to set their own priorities.

    Having already divided the money politically, that is clearly a lie, and necessarily suboptimal when all expenditures are considered.

    If you really did the analysis I describe then you might find out that if we educate everbody sufficiently, that we won’t need cars (EMR’s claim).

    Alternatively, you might find out that if we had cadiallac transportation, we would all make so much more money and save so much more time that we could afford to tutor everyone.

    But if you analyze all of education to a resonable boundary, it has one value. And if you analyze all of transportation to another similar boundary it has (most likely) a different value.

    At most, one is higher than the other.

    We don’t blue sky every possible plan (Fundamental Change). What we do is to define the possibilities as some small incremental variation of what we’ve got now (Business as Usual).

    That might be OK. After 400 years we have got where we are for a variety of reasons, and now we are in the process of infinitely refining the costs.

    We would hate like hell to throw everything out in favor of fundamental change and then discover that the answer comes back a Cadillac with fuzzy dice. You can’t simply postulate a warm fuzzy end state without throwing in all the costs of change.

    RH

  19. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    my brains is smokin…

  20. Lazarus Avatar
    Lazarus

    I’m late to this party, but I just love how these tax-hike groups dismiss the expense side with a cavalier wave. As the state supposedly is hurtling into a fiscal “crisis,” it’s still business as usual at the agencies. Retiring employees are mindlessly replaced without any thought of reorganizing or re-evaluating anything. Travel, conferences fees, and questionable “training” are routinely approved. Somehow the agencies survive without these itinerant employees at their desk for long stretches. Perfectly good computers, less than a year old, are replaced. Four VITA/Northrop Grumman employees show up to inventory 40 computers or fix one laptop. You could fix a lot of potholes with the money the state is pissing away, drip by drip, across hundreds of agencies and facilities.

  21. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    I’m not surprised your brain is smoking. It took year of graduate school and ten years experience before I figured it out. You get all that gratis, thanks to baconsrebellion.

    Lazarus is right. Once an organization establishes a practice, it isn’t often re-evaluated. When computers came on line there was a real neeed for basic traing to transition people from IBM Selectrics to Wordperfect, and later Word. Now kids grow up with that stuff, but the training classes remain.

    I don’t think I’ve ever seen a similar traing class in thinking about cost benefit analysis critically.

    The concepts are not hard: list the available opportunities and eveluate them objectively. Then figure out what you can afford. You can’t possibly know what you can afford until you know the full range of profits available, and the risks.

    In the real world, it isn’t so easy. Some things are not priced, or they are subjective, some things are unknown, or they are variable, and decisions or worse, data, are modified by politics.

    But variability is countered with sensitivity analysis, and there are methods of valuing things that appear to be subjective. In environmental consideration the value of human life comes up, and it is a common issue for all safety related things.

    One method that has been used is to average the awards made in wrongful death suits. One painful comparison that has been made compared 911 to swimming pools. Apparently, swimming pools kill about 2000 people a year, many of them young. We pretty much know where all the swimming pools are and what to do about it: we can’t say the same for terrorists.

    A pure cost benefit analysis might suggest that fixing the pool problem will save more lives per year at less cost than the war on terror. Here again, it is a question of boundaries. Winning the war on terror has a lot more benefits than just the lives saved.

    RH

  22. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    cost-benefit analysis would seem to be a no-brainer but it’s harder to do at larger societal scales.

    The EPA and the FDA do a lot of this when it comes to pollutants and drugs which are not such odd bedfellows as they might appear.

    Clearly – we can not have a policy that requires a billion dollars to remove every pound of mercury pollution but the idea behind getting reasonable estimates of the health costs verses the cleanup costs ia a good start in my mind.

    And in the end – the folks who pay the bill and get the benefits are the same because the money for cleaning up pollution does not come from “government” or industry – it comes from taxpayers and consumers.

    But I’d tweak you and others a bit about the cost of electricity verses the impacts of pollution.

    The technology to generate electricity without pollution exists right now.

    There are no technological barriers to producing truly GREEN power.

    and yet… most of us .. in essence (except for Waldo and some others) … we CHOOSE to pollute by trying to save money by buying power that generates pollution – that causes direct economic harm to almost everyone.

    If we required Dominion to close down the coal plants – we’d still have an electric grid and we’d still have homes lighted and heated and cooled – AND we’d not have mercury pollution or polluted air… nitrogen in the Bay… no Moms feeding their kids mercury via their breast milk nor the economic harm of fish with mercury levels that cannot be used for food.

    And it’s not like the rest of the world doesn’t use 1/3 the electric power per capita that we do either.

    so.. we have a econmic system .. that that we think “profits” from polluting… when if you actually calculated the costs… on a cost-benefit basis… we’d see the “profit” is really a “loss”.

    agree?

  23. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    I think the comment from Lazarus is similar to EMR’s frequent complaint. Every day we make thousands of little decisions, fiddling at the margins, conductng business as usual, worrying about the fuzzy dice when we need to re-design the Cadillac.

    We are keeping the ship accurately “on track” without worrying about the course we are taking.

    Yet, even if we decide to change course, we can only turn one degree at a time, and we have to take the first degree first. In the environmental world we say think globally and act locally. From a parctical standpoint, even a fundamental course change has to come a little at a time.

    The idea that it is a waste of time to do all the little steps because we need fundamental change has little value, I think.

    You have to plan a course correction to avoid the shoals, consider the inertia, the power available, the wind and current, the extra distance travelled.

    Then you have to execute the plan, according to schedule, step by step. And you need to have the budget to pay the crew and operate the ship. You get more co-operation if the crew is happy, well fed, and rested.

    RH

  24. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    “Perfectly good computers, less than a year old, are replaced. Four VITA/Northrop Grumman employees show up to inventory 40 computers or fix one laptop. You could fix a lot of potholes with the money the state is pissing away, drip by drip, across hundreds of agencies and facilities.”

    Interesting.

    Recently a person whom I trust completely and who’d be in a position to know mentioned that costs for IT systems and services in VA state offices including “field” offices have shot into the stratosphere and blamed a lot of it on Northrop Grumman and the Warner administration. Anybody know anything about this?

    Having spent years in IT, I can understand that replacing old systems and especially having systems integrated with one another can be very expensive up-front but save money as time goes by. These newer systems tend to be more stable, more easily modified, and enable a person to correct John Allen Smyth’s address across any system that he is a part of, thus saving labor costs.

    The person who brought this up has no reason to exagerate and has no animosity toward Mark Warner that I know of but was actually stuttering with rage. A person can’t make a judgement call on something like this without knowing a lot more than I do about VA’s IT systems but the costs seemed totally out of whack.

    Deena Flinchum

  25. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    I don’t know the answer.

    I can’t agree that the technology exists to create power without pollution. Solar power panels and windmills have to be manufactured, maintained and replaced. Making glass is one of the dirtiest industries, and all that other stuff causes pollution, too. Again, it is a question of the boundaries of the problem, but here the boundaries are global.

    I’ve said before that money is a good proxy for resources used. At present the costs of solar panels suggest they use far more resources.

    There are two obvious pproblems with that argument. One is a question of boundaries and unpriced values: what is the value of the atmosphere, and the lives saved by having a clean one?

    If you save all those lives, those people will use more resources, reducing your gain.

    The other thing is that you could eventually have solar breeders: glass factories that operate on solar power. This might reduce the environmental costs, if not the economic costs of conversion.

    “we CHOOSE to pollute by trying to save money by buying power that generates pollution – that causes direct economic harm to almost everyone.”

    The alternative will also cause direct economic harm, and pollution. I submit that we do not know which will cause more harm. I might agree that your premise appears to be correct, or that it is becoming more correct over time.

    If it is becoming more true over time, then the time will come when the economics change enough for solar to pay for itself. It might have already happened, except that we have not properly figured out how to price the atmosphere.

    Your argument is that we could price the atmosphere by charging more for polluting it.

    I agree, but if that is the case, then shouldn’t we also pay people like myself, who actively own and contribute to the management of forests that produce 400 tons of oxygen a year and consume 1600 tons of CO2?

    Such a plan would increase the value of land and make more density more economically attractive. It would reduce my incentive to stop.

    Pollution causes direct economic harm to everyone. Reducing that pollution while keeping the same production and the same price would be an economic gain to everyone. That economic gain would have a value that everyone should be willing to pay something for: we call it the discount rate. If I have to pay a dollar to save ten dollars, thats a deal. If I have to pay ten dollars to save eleven then it is not such a good deal, and I might choose to do something else.

    But, reducing pollution, keeping the same output, and the same price, is usually an impossibility. For almost everyone to enjoy that economic gain and have ONLY the polluters pay for it amounts to stealing. Those that enjoy the economic gain are going to have to expect to subtract out the economic cost.

    Given the cost of solar cells today, that might not be so attractive. But, like I say, I just don’t know. I’d hate to issue the edict without knowing.

    By the same token, requiring people to provide oxygen and absorb CO2 against their will (by denying every other project that might be on the table) amounts to stealing, if you believe the atmosphere has value.

    Same goes for running a power line across my property: thousands benefit and a few pay, in the sense that they are paid unfairly because the boundaries of costs are drawn artificially according to eminent domain law. The power companies and its customers are not required to pay a fair price for what they get, only for whatever used to be there. Inmy case, whatever used to be there was previously restricted by local law.

    The power company chooses the lowest cost route, naturally. Therefore, I have been set up by my local government, in their quest for cost savings, to be taken over by the power company in their qquest for cost savings.

    Who do you suppose is paying the price?

    Had I been allowed the same opportunity as anyone else to build homes here, then some other route might have been more economical. In that case, whoever got stuck with the power line would at least have had the opportunity to have been playing on a level field. Even so, if the user is required to pay full price for what he gets, then the stuckee can be fairly compensated.

    As it happens, the cries of unfair compensation have been partly heard. The power company has indicated it maight absorb some costs and take a longer route: one that has already been damaged by an existing line.

    This strikes me a cynical in the extreme. The obvious problem being that the southern route was never adequately paid for to begin with.

    I think that you frequently argue that we CHOOSE to do certain things without adequately considering that the full result of the alternatives might be worse. Sometimes personal volition simply isn’t enough to overcome all the obstacles, inertia, and expense. I don’t think we can improve our overall condition by laying an infinite number of economic traps designed for others to step into.

    RH

  26. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Suppose I was getting paid for Oxygen, CO2 sequestering, and water. That would mean my land would be more valuable and I would pay more taxes on it. It would also mean that, even under current eminent domain rules that the power company would have to pay more to take it for their use.

    Such a change might be enough to cause the power company to consider other approaches: distributed power, cogeneration, conservation.

  27. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Yes, a lot of the world uses 1/3 the power we do. Haiti has denuded its forests burning wood for cooking.

    Are you suggesting we live like therest of the world? Aren’t there costs involved in that?

    We have a three trillion dollar economy. If we cut that by two thirds, where would the 2 trillion go? Under the mattress?

    Nope, it would get invested in something else that makes money, out of whatever was left of the economy. Pretty soon we would be right back where we are now, and, all that money is a proxy for resources used.

    It would go to China or someplace where growth is encouraged, and with less environmental restriction.

    In this problem, the boundaries are global.

    RH

  28. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    re: green power

    don’t you think by now that if GREEN Power was determined to be “dirtier” than fossil fuel power that it would have exposed long ago as a fraud?

    doesn’t that mean that GREEN Power is, in all likelihood not as dirty even considering the production of the parts?

    re: 1/3 useage. No.. that’s most other industrialized countries. The only industrialized countries that come close to us in useage are those countries that are near the equator and sit on vast reservoirs of oil of which they sell to us .. to pollute while they use the money to buy cleaner power for their countries.

    As a country – we’re literally like the guy who smokes two packs a day when he should know better.

    We should know better. We should be putting on a tour-de-force for all the other industrialized countries in the world AND a model for developing countries to emulate.

    Instead.. we’re the geezer wheezing from the two packs bereting the non-smokers in the room for messing up his enjoyment of smoking…

    and the problem I have with your reasoning on these issues is that you can and do wiggle every which way from Sunday… claiming, in essence.. that we SHOULD find out but that since we don’t.. there is no way to determine a better path… so just do what we’re doing know .. until God reappears and tells us all the truth from on high.. and then we can all repent.

    In other words.. don’t mess with the way we are doing things right now… because we never know that we might make things worse…

    sounds like the Wizard of Oz with a rube-goldberg controller machine that we dare not touch.. for fear that the wizard and his machine might go “poof” and in the process the rest of us all turn purple and grow noses on our backsides.. or worse.

    and from all of this – we do .. public policy and budgetting?

    we don’t need no stinkin elected officials messing around with changing the current system.

    send them home and let them keep the “honorable” in fron of their names but don’t let them mess with laws and budgets.

  29. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    “don’t you think by now that if GREEN Power was determined to be “dirtier” than fossil fuel power that it would have exposed long ago as a fraud?”

    Nope, not necessarily. Green power is primarily promoted by those that have no incentive to introduce the truth. Coal power still has the economic advantage, so there is no reason for that side to expend the energy to expose the truth.

    Besides some people have tried to expose the truth, but that truth is pooh -poohed by the proponents. It isn’t necessarily a fraud, but it may be oversold and oversimplified.

    What you see as wiggling every which way from Sunday, I see as a modest attempt to consider things that I don’t necessarily agree with.

    I think we should measure more, unequivocally.

    I think that since we don’t, then we should not be surprised with suboptimal results. Given the knowledge that we have, we MAY be doing as well as can be expected. Absent knowledge of the best situation we can’t know how far we have to go. But by measuring locally, we ought to at least be able to figure out whether we are going forward or backward. At present we can’t even do that.

    Anyway, it isn’t my reasoning. It is what I was taught based on what we know to be the best practices. Unfortunately those practices are not often honored in Government.

    There are exceptions. Look at DARPA. They frequently issue a BAA with very general requirements and solicit and award multiple approaches to the problem. Then, among those that are proven to produce the best results for least cost, they fund a second competition, and a third full scale deployment of the winner.

    I have hummingbird feeders, several of them. Even though there are virtually unlimited resources available, from the hummingbirds point of view, they insist on fighting over access. They spend way more time chasing each other off than they do feeding, and getting on with the business of making hummingbird life better for all.

    That’s the way I see the Dems and Pubs, Liberals and Conservatives. They are wasting more of our resources by fighting over them than they could easily have by just using their brains instead of their hormones.

    Take turns, share the wealth within reason, don’t push, measure the results.

  30. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    It would seem that if Green Power were a fraud – environmentally – that they who favor/support/have a financial interest in .. fossil fuels would quickly use such info to destroy competitive challenges to their interests.

    Even folks who support GREEN.. if it came out that pollution from manufacturing GREEN power components was worse than mercury and air pollution from coal plants – that there were be no – further consideration – and rightly so.

    we’re actually having that debate on Ethanol and Hydrogen power but it’s hard to believe that out of the thousands of folks studying Green power.. that there is, in effect, a conspiracy to keep the public from knowing that it is “dirtier” than coal-power.

    You’d think the folks who support coal-plants would just love to be able to tell the public that there are no alternatives.. and we are stuck… with what we have.

    come-on Ray.. give it up.. guy

  31. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Look, I’ll put it simply.

    It is unreasonable, inconsistent, and unfair to claim that whomsoever we don’t like (power companies, solo SUV commuters, etc.) are not paying their full economic and social costs when we are a) not willing or unable to put up the verified facts , and b) unwilling to allow our preferred alternative to be measured on the same basis.

    RH

  32. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    “… whomsoever we don’t like”

    it’s not about who we don’t like at all. it’s about practices that accrue benefits to some at the harm/expense to others.

    there is no “right” to pollute.

    there is no “right” to produce harmful substances on your property and then dump them into a public waterway.

    The ability to do that is balanced against the harm that it might do to the public and the public -through Government has the right and the duty to protect the public from those who would make a profit even if it harms others.

    In fact, I think it is unreasonable, inconsistent, and unfair to allow any one person or company to conduct itself in a way that harms others no matter when the practice first started and was unregulated.

    Yes – some practices – some pollution – is acceptable – but the criteria for acceptability is not in the opinion of the polluter nor is it a fixed, unaliable right because it was not regulated initially.

    The criteria for acceptability is determined by the public through it’s elected government.

    If a product becomes more expensive because strictly pollution controls were deemed needed – it is the public anyhow – who pays the bill because the costs of the pollution equipment are added to the costs of the product.

    This is the essentialy point that I have made about trading off coal-power plants verses GREEN Power.

    When we first started burning coal to produce power – we did not know of the harmful impacts. But now we do and we do require tougher emission standards for new plants and this is in no way, shape or form inconsistent, unfair or wrong.

    It is simply an acknowledgement that if emissions are not restricted that they will, in fact, impose more economic harm on everyone than the costs imposed on everyone to keep the pollutants from being emitted in the first place.

    A classic cost-benefit tradeoff if you will.

    Again… it is not up to the company or individual who pollutes to determine if what they do is “acceptable”.

    When that pollution leaves their property – it become the rightful purview of the people who are affected by it.

    If a company can produce GREEN power solar and/or wind AND comply with pollution laws in the process of doing so … AND the pollution is LESS than that emitted by coal-power plants – why would you not REQUIRE the coal-power plants to not emit any more pollution that the providers of GREEN Power?

    What is the justification for allowing higher levels of pollution when the “best available technology” is cleaner?

  33. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Those new GREEN energy saving light bulbs contain mercury and require special disposal.

    Use ’em?

    Don’t use ’em?

    Deena Flinchum

  34. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    yes.

    the first question is – do they generate as much mercury – as you would generate (at the coal power smokestack) by using an icandescent?

    the second question is – does a discarded CF get into the environment the way that mercury from coal does?

    If you burned the CF -then yes.. it would spew that mercury into the atmosphere.. which would eventually carry it into streams and rivers.

    What if you bury it instead or we start recylcing them?

    Did you folks know that your car uses mercury switches?

    Did you know that there is a special program to remove those mercury switches at the junkyards before those cars are re-smelted?

    My point is – that pollution is not what is used or involved in a product – it’s what gets released into the environment.

    If we judged things based on the potential of pollution – we’d outlaw Nukes – right?

  35. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    “…it’s about practices that accrue benefits to some at the harm/expense to others.”

    You mean like the county REQUIRING that I farm and show proof of income via canceled checks, or else pay a high premium in taxes. Much higher on a per head basis.
    Presumably, in fact the county says, that they accrue excess benefits from this. And it comes at my direct verifiable expense.

    I don’t have a problem with your argument, but it has to cut both ways, equally, for all. Does the county require you to prove that you live in your house by turning over personal documents?

    ———————–

    What if we recycle them. Well sure, let’s recycle everything. All we need to do is exactly double tht transport on the highway to collect all the stuff that was previously delivered. Except the stuff going back has a fraction of the value of the stuff going out, so the marginal costs of transport is a lot higher.

    Money is a good proxy for energy and resources. Therefore if it turns out that the cost of transporting and recycling an item is more than the value of the resuliting recycled product, then there is a very good chance that recycling this item resulted in more overall pollution, not less.

    Environmental economists have curves for this. Each incremental cost of cleanliness is a little more than the previous one. Once the costs of cleanup exceed the value of the savings, you are wasting money and resources.

    Ecological economist think that is heresy. They deal only in the non-monetary units of the environment. Money is not an issue. To them, if something is produced that cannot be cleaned up perfectly (that is, used naturally, elswhere in the biosphere) then it should never have been created to begin with.

    Not even yeoman farmers, hunter gatherers, and homesteaders can live up to that credo.

    ————————-

    Larry, everything that is used or involved in a product eventually gets released to the environment. Everything that is used or involved in a product, at one point came from the environment.

    Once we poison the petri dish we live in and die off, everything we have disturbed will eventually return to its “natural” state.

    RH

  36. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    “the public -through Government has the right and the duty to protect the public from those who would make a profit even if it harms others.

    In fact, I think it is unreasonable, inconsistent, and unfair to allow any one person or company to conduct itself in a way that harms others no matter when the practice first started and was unregulated.”

    OK, What do you do when the government encouraged a practice, and later decided it was wrong?

    Isn’t that what the government does when it wishes to promote something: avoid regulation, benign neglect?

    Even if the public has that right and that duty, they also have the duty not to cause undue harm by destroying value that was acquired under the previous rules. Even if the previous rules amounted to a dearth of rules.

    The government cannot be in a position of saying, oh well, we weren’t doing our job before, but now we are going to step in.

    Your argument is fine, but it HAS to cut both ways. Otherwise you are taking a free ride up one side of the benefit curve, while totally ignoring the cost curve. This amounts to stealing: it is intellectually dishonest.

    IF it was true that all the costs of environmenatl regulation were passed on to the consumers, then thats one thing. But we both know that isn’t what happens. We put the steel mills out of business, and buy steel overseas.

    rh

  37. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Go back to my comment about Fidelity an Vanguard. If Vanguard is paying 12% and Vanguard 10% then Vanguard is a better buy, whether you can afford to make the investment or not.

    But just because you have some prior affinity to the Fidelicrats or Vanguardicans, wouldn’t cause you to change your choice, would it?

    But that is exactly what we do when we go into an argument as Conservatives or Greens: we are preujudicing the issue.

    If you have an affinity to the Fidelicrats, then the thing to do is to make sure that they provide the best payback, because that is what will make them the most popular.

    RH

  38. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    re: tax documentation

    If I was asking for a reduction of taxes based on a claimed exemption – yes.

    re: pollution and sustainability

    I guess if someone believes that we are bound to make the earth uninhabitable… then I probably better understand why they’d be opposed to pollution laws and opposed to restrictions that allow pedatory practices by some at the expense of others…

    I believe that we do not have to foul our own nest and that out of thousands of years of human habitation, it’s only been the last 200 that we seem to have gotten confused on sustainability.

    But if someone believes it’s all for a lost cause anyhow.. then why profess to be GREEN at all in the first place but rail against the “unfairness” of pollution laws?

    It would seem to me – that if one believes that GREEN is important – that they also believe in sustainability.

    GREEN does not mean pristine.

    But it does mean that practices that are known to be harmful – and cause direct harm to people’s health and welfare as well as their economic well-being – need to be controlled and outright banned in some cases.

    For instance, this is no argument anymore about asbestoes or lead paint or PCBs or dozens of other products that were not originally known to be deadly and was discovered AFTER they were in-use and directly benefited those that made and used those products.

    It would be irresponsible and just plain DUMB in my humble opinion to have a law that essentially said if you originally did something – that forever it would be your right no matter what harm done to others was subsequently discovered.

    The ONLY right that you have is to conduct and enjoy your life and your activities as long as it is demonstrated that those activities do not harm others – and that standard is a continuous review – not a “look at once and set in stone” … deal.

  39. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    re: the collatoral costs of “recycling” (or not).

    you have got to be kidding.

    if you want to compare the costs of recycling CFs .. you need to have the same standard for the coal plants also.

    Your standard seems to be that you have to recycle the CFs to keep them from dumping mercury into the environment.

    If you just stored them.. they would likely never release the mercury – correct? – and we do this for quite a few things not the least of which are akaline and other kinds of consumer-grade batteries.

    Further we DO recycle even at extra costs – things like freon in air conditions and fridges.
    There are no profits to recycling freon as far as I know.

    If you wanted an equal comparison – you’d look at what it would cost for power plants to NOT RELEASE mercury compared to what you’d have to do to keep CF’s from releasing mercury.

    Use the same standard for both.

    Having mercury embedded in a product that would be sequestered, even if not recycled – is not the same as releasing many additional tons of mercury every single day… to power incandescent lights…

    So what would it cost to “recycle” mercury emissions at the power plants BEFORE the mercury gets into the environment?

    wouldn’t that be the proper way to compare mercury emissions from CFs?

  40. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    “If I was asking for a reduction of taxes based on a claimed exemption – yes.”

    You really don’t get it, do you? I’m not asking for a reduction in taxes. If I was asking for anything, it would only be head to head parity.

    I’m already paying more than most homes, and for less services, according to couinty officials. But that amount will go up, and go up substantially, if I do not continue the farm. Yet even If I paid the additional penalty, and even higher taxes, I am still prohibited from doing anything other than farming.

    I literally have no choices.

    Not only that, but I have to pay an additional tax for the privilege of being registered for the program. If the county is so all fired interested in my farming activities, then why haven’t they come out to visit me? Asked or suggested things they could do to help?

    Because they want the benefits and me to have the costs of providing them. And I’m not even a polluter, in the usual sense of the word.

    ————————-

    Yes, you can store the CFC’s, but that costs money too. And remember that “storage” is what caused most of our superfund sites.

    ——————————–

    “GREEN does not mean pristine.

    But it does mean that practices that are known to be harmful – and cause direct harm to people’s health and welfare as well as their economic well-being – need to be controlled and outright banned in some cases.”

    Right, green does not mean pristine. Everything we do creates some collateral problems.

    Including cleaning up.

    And so, if it turns out that an overzealous attempt to prevent direct harm to people’s health and welfare as well as their economic well-being causes more collateral damage to some other facet of the environment or other people’s well being, then we can’t afford to to do it, because it is a net loss.

    It is exactly like your argument about previously unregulated situations: If we learn something new about the costs of cleanup, then we have to add that to the equation.

    As for you rcomment about how to compare the costs, no, that is not the correct method. The actual method would be far to complex to go into here, and you wouldn’t accept the answer because you have already decided that green is better, no matter what the costs are.

    I simply submit that costs are a good proxy for resources used, and resources used result in collateral costs and pollution. If the costs are higher, conservation may in fact be less sustainable, because we can’t really do anything without the money to pay for it.

    The more often we make the mistake of investing in conservation with a negative payback, the less we will actually conserve.

    I NEVER said that if you originally did something that you have the right to do it forever. All I said is that you have a right to recover damages for investments made under the previous rules or lack thereof. Those are two completely different things.

    What this does is set a standard for new regulations such that the costs ARE evaluated on a an equal footing.

    Otherwise the greens or anybody else, are free to introduce any new regulation without regard to the real costs of collateral damage to others.

    Suppose that, for insance, the government now says we have a fiscal crisis, and we can no longer afford to allow land that is under conservation easement and not farmed, to enjoy the lower land use taxation. But, we are going to keep the conservation restrictions in place, and charge you the same tax rate as we charge for developable land.

    Don’t you think that the conservation owners would go berserk over the loss of return (tax break) on their “investment” in creating the conservation land?

    When I say that we need stron property rights, it is for our own protection. It is exactly so that the woman in Maine can create a nature preserve and say, “It’s my land, I can do what I want.”

    If the conduct of your life and your activities are demonstrated to harm others through excess restrictions, then that situation needs to be subject to continuous, and fair, review. Not a review that is based on the presumption that green is always good.

    I agree that we need the same standard for both sides, but I don’t see that you or others are actually willing to submit to a continuous and fair review.

    I think the way you do that is go measure the facts on the ground, in order to discover the REAL paybacks, and not the fluff that is usually promoted.

    —————————–

    And yes, there are real markets and real profits in some recycled products, Aluminum for one. I think oil and CFC’s are in that category. Since some CFC’s are no longer manufactured, the only way you can keep your previous investment in equipment running is to buy recycled CFC’s.

    But, it might be profitable to recycle aluminum in some areas, and not in others. You can’t just pass a blanket law that says you MUST recycle all aluminum, without actually reducing the benefit of recycling.

    RH

  41. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    re: ..”You really don’t get it, do you?”

    no.. and perhaps I (and others who read here) need to be better educated with respect to what Facquier is doing.

    I would not think that they could value your property for more than it is worth and so the rate you pay is the same rate that others pay unless there are special programs that allow lower taxation for use.

    I do appreciate your willingness to explain the situation. It does give some insight as to the differences between how counties like.. say Loudoun and Prince William deal with growth compared to your county.

  42. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    re: the environment – rules, investments, trade-offs, et al

    I would agree – that if a company or an individual makes an investment based on the current rules that it would be wrong to place retroactive rules, or for that matter, even new rules that might affect the future viability of that businesses.

    The process needs to be fair and equitable which means “grandfathering” of some activities – but not all. This is no grandfathering of DDT nor should there be but we do grandfather mercury emissions.. from power plants.. and this is one of those things.. that as time goes by – might well end up in the same situation as DDT.

    If it does, the public will pay.

    Dominion… will be made whole, you can bet on it.

  43. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    re: “you MUST recycle all aluminum, without actually reducing the benefit of recycling.”

    actually in some places – you separate out the different types or they will not accept any of your trash.

    It’s a matter of the cost of landfill space.

    It costs MORE for the landfill space than it costs to actually give away the recyclables…

    I did a little investigation locally and it’s the same deal.

    With the exception of some items like aluminum and engine blocks, metal, etc – they try to find a recycler who will accept the trash IF it is delivered.

    Again – it’s the cost of the landfill space – a cost that will be MORE if you put MORE in the landfill.

    No more – do you dig a hole in the ground. You must have a double liner; siphon off the leachate (and treat it), and then cover it when it is full. In essence, entomb the trash.

    then you have to monitor the water and the gas that comes from it.

    The method of operation is – as I’ve been telling you.

    Nothing is allowed to leave the property via water or air…

    and taxpayers must pay … for whatever it takes to prevent water and air emissions.

    So .. it is not about recycling – it’s about pollution.

    HOw do you feel about this?

    Do you think this is fair?

    How else would you handle this?

  44. Groveton Avatar
    Groveton

    Eliminate the death tax?

    Oh please.

    It should be 100%.

    The government gets all the money when you die.

    The public might lose the moral heft of Ted Kennedy or the guiding intellect of Paris Hilton but we’d all survive.

    You die, you turn your money back into the game to see ewho gets what in the next go round.

    Just like Monopoly.

  45. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    “you MUST recycle all aluminum, without actually reducing the benefit of recycling.”

    You are not listening. No matter how you separate,how you recycle or how you bury, it is not always worth it.

    It mght be worth going around and collecting aluminum to recycle it in an area where there is a lot of scrap and you don’t have to haul it far to recycle. In a remote area it might cost more to haul it than the value is worth. Therefore a law that mandats ALL aluminum be recycled is wasteful and counterproductive.

    What you are talking about is a different deal. Given that the waste is hauled to a central site, then it will not be accepted unless sorted. For the landfill operator it might be cheaper to give the aluminum away than it is to bury it, as you say.

    But if the supply is low or the smelter is so far away that the aluminum hauler can’t make money, then there won’t even be anyone to give it to. In that case a law requiring all aluminum to be recycled would cost more than just wasting the aluminum and burying it.

    Or you could stockpile small amounts until you have a large load, but that has costs, too.

    ——————-

    “The method of operation is – as I’ve been telling you.

    Nothing is allowed to leave the property via water or air…”

    This is a physical and economic impossibilty. You cannot have a perfectly clean operation, at any price. There is always a trade-off, and always effects on someone else.

    “and taxpayers must pay … for whatever it takes to prevent water and air emissions.”

    Can’t be done. It’s economically and environmentally stupid. Listen to yourself: Taxpayers must pay whatever it takes to prevent water and air emsissions.

    You are advocating unlimited tax increases in order to achieve ever decreasing returns in cleanliness.

    Listen to me. At some point you will cause more pollution in further attempts to cleanup, than you will clean. You might change one form of pollution to another, a more dangerous one for a less dangerous one, but you will nearly always have more pollution and more dispersed pollution as a result.

    It IS a trade off. At some point your attempts to prevent your nighbors from causing damage to you, will cause more damage to them than you have prevented.

    Count on it. It is as incontrovertible as gravity. Environmentalists will get a lot more traction when they know and understand this simple fact.

    RH

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