Wired for Politics

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Now, to the Best - Sen. Jim DeMint

After I posted the previous article about the horrible Sen. Graham, I knew that I needed to write something about how great South Carolina’s other Senator was.  Well, looks like I don’t have to.  Sen. Demint did it for me.  Below is an article he penned for the National Review Online.  It appears that he’s going to become a guest columnist, which is a wonderful thing.  Please take a close reading of Jim’s article.  We need more men like this in leadership.

 Principles Before Policies - by Sen. Jim DeMint (R - SC)*

* I’m proud to put the state and party that Sen. DeMint represents

Never did (or will) like Lindsey Graham

Quin Hillyer is spot on today in his column at the American Spectator.  I’m not going to comment on his article, only to say that Sen. Graham is an embarrassment for South Carolina.  Especially, when our other Senator is as thoughtful, intelligent and Conservative as Sen. Jim DeMint.  I’m ashamed that Sen. Graham represents my home state.

The Worst Republican Senator by Quin Hillyer

Trade Deficits

To many Americans, global free trade is a good thing.  We get to buy more things at cheap prices, and the world pays for us to do this by investing in America.  Despite its current weakness, the U.S. Dollar is THE global resurve currency, which allows us to export much of the dollar’s inflation to other developing nations (see China & Saudi Arabia) while we enjoy the benefits of more consumption.  However, something I know most Americans don’t believe is a good thing is our huge trade deficit.  Investor’s Business Daily has a piece out this week about what trade deficits tell us about an economy in the global marketplace.

Last year, for instance, we rang up a record $708.5 billion deficit for both goods and services. But we imported the equivalent of $738.6 billion in investment capital to offset that. This was used to buy Treasury notes, bonds and stocks, and to fund real estate, plants, equipment and worker training.

Looks like we got a good deal there. 

So what does it say that our deficit is now shrinking?

On the whole, it means foreign investors find the U.S. economy a less inviting place to be, maybe because of the housing meltdown and concern over the upcoming election. But if the trend continues, it means we’re all going to have to consume less and save more to make up for the decline in foreign capital.

That might not be a bad thing, but don’t let anyone tell you it will be painless. In the short run, a falling trade deficit will boost GDP. Indeed, based on Friday’s data, it’s likely first-quarter GDP growth will be revised up from the first estimate of 0.6% to roughly 1.2%.

But in the long term, having less foreign investment means our economy will grow more slowly. That’s the downside.

Don’t believe it? Just look at Germany and Japan. They’ve run huge trade surpluses for years, yet their economies have grown slowly at best since at least 1990. They export lots of their capital, as all trade surplus nations do, so they have less to grow on. We import it — and grow faster.

I know that for years the only thing that Republicans and Democrats have been saying is that we need to ‘reduce’ the trade deficit, almost at all costs.  From restricting imports, renegotating trade deals (which one would assume would put new constraints on us and our partners) and out right protecting many sectors of our economy (mainly ones with unions). 

I know I’ve often wondered why Germany and Japan haven’t grown faster and more robustly in the last two decades with the hugh trade surpluses they have.  One thing I do know about their economies, is that that they have very restrictive import regulations.  General Motors and Ford don’t have near the market access in Japan and Germany as BMW and Toyota do in America.  Again, this would corroborate with the above statements.  By restricting imports, they are also restricting investment in their countries, thus slowing overall growth.  I do think that the U.S. needs to fight for more openness with our trading partners (mainly China, India and Japan), but what we don’t need is to focus only on the deficit numbers and enact policies that will lower the deficit, but also hurt growth. 

Fool me once, shame on you...

Walter E. Williams over at Townhall.com reminds us of the folly of making predictions about something so complex, we struggle to make models that are accurate one or two days in the future.

At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.” In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore’s hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and “in the 1970s … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich’s predictions about England were gloomier: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

…

Harvard University biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, “… civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” That was the same year that Sen. Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look Magazine, that by 1995 “… somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

Needless to say, all of this talk about man made global warming is nothing but pure conjecture based on incomplete and overly simplistic models. We can’t even properly model past weather events with current models and all of the data we have today. Argh.

Something that has always gotten me thinking about this whole global warming thing has been the actual temperature measurements. Recently, NASA admitted that it had made errors in evaluating global temperatures based on ground station errors, satallite data analysis problems and ocean ship measurements. And that’s with all of todays modern technology. It’s hard for me to believe that between 1900 - 1950 (and even into the 1980’s) anyone could take a very accurate measurement of global temperature. Add to that, the fact that the predictions propose disaster with only a 1-2 degree increase, which I would think, is well within the margin of error of pre-1990’s technology (one could argue, as I did, that even with today’s technology, it’s hard to get it accurate).

Furthermore, what comprises a ‘global’ temperature’? Do you take measurements equidistant from one another all over the globe? No. You get as many readings from as many places as you can, control as best you can for interferance, and average it out. That leaves places (espically the vast oceans) under represented, thus skewing the average towards more heavily populated and developed areas, which also tend to be warmer. One example of this is the fact that the huge land mass at the bottom of the earth (Antartica) has been cooling quite a bit over the last 35 years, but thanks to the above mentioned problems, these temperatures have not been properly represented in global temperature averages (considering, you can even say that such a thing as one ‘global temperature’ exists).

Lastly, I do not need to tell folks that closely follow the global warming debate that none of the computer models used to predict dire castrophies take into account the biggest greenhouse gas on our planet: water vapor. Ever wonder why the folks living in desert regions layer their clothing? That’s because the air where they live is dry, thus, while it’s very hot during the day, at night the temperatures drop way down because there is little or no water vapor to hold in the heat from the daytime. In most desert regions daytime to nighttime temperature swings can be up to 30 or 40 degrees, with a common delta being around the low 20s.

And Al Gore want’s to ‘end the debate’ so we can start acting? You’ve got to be kidding. More on GW later.