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So let me get this straight Wild Cobra...you would leave the subsidized industry in place, flying in the face of our obvious need for alternatives, in the name of free market economy? losing argument all day every day. I see your bloomers
free market economy argument = joke.
So let me get this straight Wild Cobra...you would leave the subsidized industry in place, flying in the face of our obvious need for alternatives, in the name of free market economy? losing argument all day every day. I see your bloomers
LOL...
With "tax break."
LOL...
You call those subsidies?......
NEXT!
I'm for no subsidies. I'm for tax breaks.
So tax breaks cant steer our economy and cripple the compe ion, by putting big oil in favor? your really squirming to avoid the kill shot here...
Im done here. go ahead and take the last word, but your arguments have been completely discredited.
LOL...
My god, what a joke you are. It's some of these 'green' companies that are getting actual subsidies, and not paying those big taxes. You want to blame the oil companies?
get real man.
way to muddle the issue with off-topic discussion. If those green companies were running the gulf into , making people sick, and pushing us into ENDLESS conflicts overseas big enough to send the American economy into bankrupcty, I guess you might have a point.
And thats ing REAL MAN.
Idiot. I mean the green companies that have made solar collectors, wind mills, etc.
What about the subsidies we have alowed big oil in the way of AMERICAN SOLDIERS LIVES? lost so that they can get thier hands on what used to be Saddam's. What about the war funding in the way of nearly 1/10 of our total national debt? you dont think oil execs were sporting maximum erections when we declared war in iraq? you dont think the administration did that to pad thier stock interests?
You know the truth, you are smart enough to know the truth, yet you continue to cloud the real issues. I dont know when your allegiances were bought, but that fact is no longer in doubt.
The war wasn't over oil.
You can take that tin hat off any time.
That war was predicted in the 70's man...even then top level conservative policymakers knew that the resources in the middle east would result in war there. and when our dependence got out of control and China began to move in on some of our supply, we used what we had...military might...to get what we didnt...the richest oil reserves in the world.
Its common knowledge to anyone who does thier homework.
"war wasn't over oil."
You Lie
head's National Energy Task Force in early 2001 was all about the maps of Iraq showing where the oil fields. dubya was talking about Iraq in his first cabinet meeting. Invading Iraq was primary PNAC objective in the late 1990s.
Only dumb s still believe the lies that invading Iraq was for WMD, UN resolutions, AQ, aluminum tubes, mobile weapons labs, or Saddam as threat to USA. I repeat the truth for 1000th time, to match your lies.
Whatever.
Now you're just doing a dance around a tin sombrero.
your not as smart as i thought...I'll cite it for you in a bit...
And the world will end in 2012.
That's always been a hot region. Why should any do ented prediction be surprising?
Following the Oil shocks of the 70s, top level administration in Nixon's white house advocated that we physically invade an OPEC nation to get our hands on the easy stuff. The threat of a counter strike by Russia was all that diverted us then. Coincidentally, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were all involved in that administration.
Years later they would go on to fulfill those aspirations in the Bush Admin.
I cant find the cite, but this is history that a smart mofo like yourself should know. And I think you do know.
the specific cite I wanted was Wolfowitz's reference, inside work he did in a conservative think tank in the 70s, saying that America would invade a middle-eastern country within the next 25 years
why is it hot? tell me that, and Ill tell you why we invaded iraq.
your either bought, or your dumber than you give yourself credit for.
12 un resolutions violated. being the 4th largest military in the world and creating a chaotic environment in the middle east. believed to have nukes. aided and funded terrorist organization and al qeda. shot at american planes. committed war crimes. was a commie dictator who starved his own people to death while he lived luxuriously.
he had no nukes. he had no chemical weapons. his country had been operating under sanctions and embargos for years, Iraq was in shambles. Shot at US planes for years, never hit one due to the lack of anti-aircraft weaponry. no threat to anyone in the US. Never confirmed any ties to al-queda. committed war crimes, lived luxuriously, starved his own people as a dictator, WHO WAS PROPPED UP BY THE US GOV UNTIL HE TRIED TO OVERSTEP HIS BOUNDS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND BECAME A THREAT TO OUR OIL SUPPLY.
ITS ALL ABOUT THE TEXAS TEA.
Try again, brother.
read that stuff above, man...how can you just side-step all that cir stantial evidence?
we never propped up saddam. in fact we propped up the shah in iran to counter saddam and his ties to the soviets.
he had no nukes, but no one (besides sean penn) knew that. since he booted the weapons inspectors, we never found out he didn't have one. there are confirmed ties to al quaeda and saddam. saddam did shoot down planes. iraq the country was in shambles but he still had a huge army.
"he booted the weapons inspectors"
You Lie
dubya pulled out the WMD hunters with only a few weeks remaining before dubya's invasion-for-oil.
St Ronnie and his MIC accomplices very definitely supplied and supported Saddam in the 80s against Iran. Remember, Iran's oil has been on the Repug/conservative menu for 30+ years, as has Iraq's. So befriending Iraq to destroy the Iranian embassy-violating Iran would give US access to Iraq's and Iran's oil.
Again, you seem to want a level of data and certainty that is simply not possible, nor desirable to attempt to obtain due to cost.
We have lots of data on the cost "marketability" of various forms of renewable energy.
Both solar and wind have been narrowing the gap, even without subsidies for decades. Most financial analysts who study this have noted that the better sites for wind have come into very close cost compe ion to new coal power plants, and look to hit the holy grail of renewables "grid parity" fairly soon.
Costs for various forms of solar have come down as well, and both efficiency gains and cost gains from efficiency of scale will continue.
The free market is going to pick these forms of energy as time goes by.
Do you want to cede a compe ive advantage to countries that recognize this?
You say that it will cost "hundreds of billions of dollars for 50+ years".
Can you support that with any actual estimates?
You criticise me for not knowing everything for certain and wanting to base decisions on that, but you JUST DID THE EXACT SAME THING.
You assumed it would take too long and cost too much, then used that as the basis for not doing anything. You not only did the exact same thing you accuse me of, you did it on the basis of no real world data.
How is that a recipe for good policy?
Since Karl Popper, every student of scientific method knows that a statement such as "all swans are white" can be proved wrong, but it cannot be proved right. So I start with a natural advantage vis-à-vis my colleague, Josh Lerner, who is stuck in a rather unenviable position in this debate. Industrial policy "fails most of the time", or "fails more often than it succeeds"—these are at least plausible arguments. But industrial policy fails always?
My advantage is greatly heightened by the fact that Mr Lerner is a scholar who is as reasonable as he is knowledgeable. So it is in his book "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" (2009) that we find one of the most effective ripostes directed at the market-fundamentalist account of American technological prowess. "The public sector", Lerner writes, referring especially to the role of the Department of Defense, "proved a critical catalyst to growth in Silicon Valley." And what is true of America is true worldwide as well: "Public programs played an important role in triggering the explosive growth of every other major venture market around the globe." With this said, what is left for me to add?
The white swans of this debate are known as "white elephants"—those colossal projects spawned by industrial policies that never fulfil their architects' dreams and end up bleeding their national treasuries dry. As we know, the landscape is strewn with such white elephants—Concorde, the Proton and the countless factories in the developing world operating at half capacity and at great loss.
But there are black elephants too, and in truth they are far more pervasive than the Tasmanian black swans that adorn the flag of the state of Western Australia. Beyond Mr Lerner's Silicon Valley and venture capital examples, we might mention South Korea's POSCO, possibly the world's most productive steel firm, and Dubai's Jebel Ali port, one of the world's largest and most successful ports—both established by public money and widely derided as uneconomic at the outset. Or we might mention the Chilean salmon industry—the creation of a public venture fund (Fundación Chile)—which stands in sharp contrast to the free-market brush with which Chile's economic success is so frequently (and so misleadingly) painted. If pressed further, we might add to the list Brazil's aircraft industry, Taiwan's and Singapore's electronics industries, China's auto and auto components industries, and many others.
Anyone who thinks failure is the norm in industrial policy should consider this factoid. Latin America experienced far more rapid productivity growth during the early post-war decades when it was heavily subsidising and protecting its "infant" industries than it has since the 1990s when those policies were chucked overboard. I would not wish to go back to those old policies—we can certainly do better. But despite its evident excesses, it is surely telling that "import subs ution", as Latin America's earlier economic strategy was called, outperformed anything the region has experienced since (or before).
The essence of economic development is structural transformation, the rise of new industries to replace traditional ones. But this is not an easy or automatic process. It requires a mix of market forces and government support. If the government is too heavy-handed, it kills private entrepreneurship. If it is too standoffish, markets keep doing what they know how to do best, confining the country to its specialisation in traditional, low-productivity products.
Economists understand well the role that industrial policy plays in successful cases. New industries require lots of capital that private entrepreneurs may not have. They require co-ordinated investments in related industries that individual entrepreneurs cannot organise by themselves. They generate demonstration effects and technological spillovers that raise social returns way above private incentives. All these are valid reasons for governments to give private investors a nudge.
The critic responds that all these ideas are fine, but the problem is in practice. Fixing these "market failures" is difficult and governments can just as easily mess it up. Once you open up the door to intervention, all kinds of special interests are likely to get into the act and try to divert policy to their own, selfish ends.
Quite true. But then again this is not that different from what happens when governments engage in, say, education policy, health policy, or tax policy. In each of these areas, governments are driven by economic and social goals that are often articulated loosely and targeted imperfectly. In each of them the policy process can be hijacked by special interests. Few but libertarians draw the conclusion from this that government departments should be abolished and schooling, health, or social insurance should be left completely to markets. We debate how best to provide these public services, not whether they should be provided at all.
So it should be with industrial policy. Fostering structural transformation and innovation is a central public purpose. Governments cannot evade the challenge. The only debatable question about industrial policy is not "whether" but "how."
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