It’s the 21st Century, Stupid!

The New York Times titles its article Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts. And it’s right. Those donor countries who relied on the blind belief in free markets that is currently the fashion in many developed countries and the World Bank were wrong and the new president of Malawi was right. Subsidies for poverty stricken farmers to be able to have seed and fertilizer was necessary for them to produce their own food and should probably be expanded to other countries with similar situations. The free market has little to do with farmers whose current production isn’t even enough to allow them to feed themselves.

So can we arrange for the Economics School of the University of Chicago to lose its government funding since we shouldn’t be subsidizing religion even if it’s the First Church of Free Market?

Congress finally passed a compromise bill affecting auto mileage standards. Notice the finally part of that. Also notice that it was passed in spite of the automobile companies continued resistance. When you see the ads they run pretending to give a damn about the environment and mileage remember that. Also, when they say that it just isn’t technically feasible keep this guy in mind. It’s true that his full blown rebuilds aren’t economically feasible for anyone but the wealthy and that their cost would never be recovered in fuel savings. But it is also true that it puts the lie to the claims that there is no technology that exists to reduce mileage as drastically as we really need.

 Then there’s the research at MIT that would produce an engine that while more expensive than current ones would be much less expensive than hybrids. What I wondered about when reading this was whether in their savings calculations they accounted for the reduced weight of the smaller engine and reduction in supports needed for it in determining what it would do for gas mileage.

When it comes to innovations that would allow even further divergence from the old gas engine standard there’s the in-wheel motor that has different companies creating their own versions of it including Bridgestone, Mitsubishi and PML.

There’s lots of tech out there to do what Detroit is saying can’t be done. They apparently just don’t want to put forth the effort. There might be what they view as good reasons for doing it given their current financial problems but looking solely at the short term will do nothing to help guarantee their long term existence. Now in my opinion if there was a technology that was proven to produce major fuel efficiency improvements and they just couldn’t feasibly afford to retrofit their factories to produce it I wouldn’t have a problem with the government subsidizing that retrofit so long as the accounting was transparent. It would just do too much good for our country to not do so.

Lots of single mothers, whether they are such because of their children’s illegitimacy or divorce have a hard time financially. It’s a commonly known item of our social and political environment. The public funds that the poorest among them receive hardly constitute a fortune and is basically barely enough to scrape by. The politicians who like to preach against welfare rail against the fathers who aren’t helping provide support They then pass laws to help track these men down and get the child support they should be paying from them, generally making it seem that they care about these women and children. But they don’t force the men to send money to the mother of their child(ren), they collect the money. And keep it. Yes, they keep it in order to reimburse the government for the welfare the mother and children received. The mother might get part of it but if they are receiving public assistance it won’t be all of the funds or even most of them as the New York Times points out today. What’s wrong with sending these funds on the the families, maybe keeping a small part of it to help defray expenses? I think it would be the better approach.