Letters to the Editor
Jeffrey P. Harrison
Published Letters: 387 Editor's Choice: 40
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Who the hell cares about the deficit?
[Read the article: Did somebody say "recession"?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What we should be talking about is the other d word. Debt.
We should also be talking about a rational approach to the country's finances. The ad hoc we-need-to-juice-the-economy approach that is being recommended for the current situation would be fine if our financial house was in order. But it's not.
Yes, we probably need to stimulate the economy to avoid a recession. The details of the stimulus is not of interest to me here (not that I think they are unimportant). The bottom line is that any stimulus package is going to send more government money out the door without a corresponding income stream to provide the money. Macroeconomics says that's OK in the short term and it is as long as you remember the second half - after the stimulus has done it's job, you have to pay the money back. You can do that by lowering spending or raising taxes. Unfortunately, that's the part that everybody forgets. That's why some 13% of the budget is spent just servicing our debt - not retiring any of it. This is like a subprime mortgage on steroids.
Since Washington seems to forget that taxes are supposed to pay for government spending, we appear to be headed into the kind of debt spiral that has devastated so many families. With an administration that is spending money like a drunken sailor on shore leave on an ego trip in the Middle East and a military that costs more than the entire rest of the world spends, we're going to be paying high taxes. Somebody needs to be mentioning the second half while they're arguing about the exact form the first half takes.
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Ah, yes but
[Read the article: The payoff from being environmentally correct]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Regulations mandating certain cleanliness standards can spur inventiveness. I consider this approach suboptimal for several reasons not the least of which is that the business is being forced to make changes to meet regulations and not to obtain a competitive advantage. Regulation is a notoriously blunt instrument that is equally notoriously impervious to change in response to changes in the business/technology environment. Experience says that little innovation results from regulation. Business merely cobbles together the least expensive solution to meet regulation, frequently with deleterious consequences to other aspects of the product because they know that their competitors are going to have the same problems.
This does, however, point to the real flaw in the argument. Yes, preventing the pollution in the first place may well be cheaper than cleaning up at the end of the pipe but what if you don't have to clean up at the end of the pipe? A colleague of mine made essentially the same argument as Mr. Porter in the early '90s. My response was: "What if you're a developing nation and have no or only weak environmental regulation?" Then you don't spend millions cleaning up at the end of the pipe and you don't spend millions on research to clean up before you get to the end of the pipe. Now that's what I call a competitive advantage.
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sp
[Read the article: Michael Gordon "reports" on the "only serious" Iraq option: Staying forever]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn, I suspect that you occasionally think of Maureen Dowd as a toady but I think you meant today in your column today.
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Who's paying attention anyway?
[Read the article: Everybody does it]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Perino makes it sound as if the intelligence community did a lousy job of intel work instead of the intelligence community produced a report with cherry picked and questionable data as dictated by this administration. So now that we've "fixed" the problem of the intelligence community getting "help" so they come up with the "correct" answer, what happens? What else? Shrub ignores it.
Just like he did the warnings that Al-Qaeda was planning an attack and that huge wad of wind and water known as Hurricane Katerina that was bearing down on New Orleans, he'll ignore anything that is reality based. Lord, save us from non-reality based weenies in Washington. So, friends and neighbors, next time you hear some politician tell you that his faith "informs" him, I want you to think of Shrub listening to the voices in his head informing him what God himself wants.
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Well, if you ask me
[Read the article: Virginia schools' Web scandalette: "Get over it, kid!"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]He got what he deserved. You're also right: the lady is not internet savvy. If she had been, she'd have posted his voice message in response to what was his wholly inappropriate posting of her voice message. I suspect her rant would sound a lot more balanced if one heard what provoked it. I must confess, I get pretty frustrated listening to people react to a response to a provocation while ignoring the original provocation.
Bottom line. Fuck up #1. Calling him at home. If you want to speak to him in his official capacity, there's a number for that: it's called his office.
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I'm glad you realize that food stamps don't cause obsesity
[Read the article: No more food stamps. You've eaten enough]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It should be plain as the nose on your face that giving people money for food can't, in and of itself, make them fat. Unfortunately, your arguments notwithstanding, providing the poor with relief for their poverty isn't actually a stimulus for the economy. I do have a couple of suggestions tho'
1. We could ban the use of high fructose corn syrup in food and force manufacturers of manufactured food to go back to using sugar which would increase the demand for sugar and allow the government to stop spending so much money on price supports. We could then use all the high fructose corn syrup we're not using for food anymore for ethanol.
2. We could stop talking about taxes and start talking about spending. Maybe if we weren't spending more than the entire rest of the world on the military, we wouldn't have to have such high taxes. What a concept! Reduce taxes by reducing the thing that causes taxes, government spending. Sorta like reducing obesity by reducing the intake of high fructose corn syrup.
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Wow
[Read the article: McCain wins, and conservative heads explode]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There must be fewer fascists in the actual population than the "conservative" punditry.