A Helping Hand

As you may have heard, one of Mr. Obama's economic advisers has quite.  As a part of her farewell speech, Christina Romer offered the following:

“To this day, economists don’t understand why firms cut production as much as they did, or why they cut labor so much more than they normally would,” said Romer. “The current recession has been fundamentally different from other post-war recessions… Rather than being caused by deliberate monetary actions, it began with interest rates at low levels… Precisely what has made it so terrifying, and so difficult to cure, is that we have been in largely uncharted territory.”

Perhaps I may be of assistance to Ms. Romer.  The administration and the Congress have demonstrated that they are hostile to businesses large and small.  That have immeasurably increased the cost of hiring employees with their health care law.  They continue to threaten to increase taxes on taxpayers.  And they meddle in financial regulations as if they were Captain Picard from Star Trek:TNG and saying "make it so" actually made it so.

Were they not so incompetent at governing, business owners might have the confidence needed to hire new workers and expand the economy.  We are not in uncharted territory.  We are in old and familiar territory.  It has been trod by decades of europeans.  We walked it in the 1970s and in the 1930s.

And the solution remains effective, if lacking in the "nuance" that leftists desire.  It is the free market.

Get government spending under control.  We are not under taxed, they are spending too much.

Pass regulations that solve problems instead of regulations designed to stifle markets.  It is not only acceptable for people to earn large sums of money, it is desirable.

And stop trying to make us look like Europe.  Our forebears left Europe...and other places....for a reason.

Lack Of Facts Undermine A Theory

The more we dig, the less substance we find.  In this case we have partisan speculation that is part of a fund raising campaign that gets sucked into a formal international report as "peer reviewed" evidence.  That formal report is then presented as the ultimate proof of an urgent crisis; documented, peer reviewed, above reproach "proof".

When called on the error, the people that published the report acknowledge that they have no data but continue to suggest that the chances of the phenomenon occurring are "very high".

And people wonder why folks like me are skeptical regarding the theory of anthropogenic global warming.

This is not the first time that a closer look at "the science" has indicated a lack of rigorous "science".

The report read: "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate."

However, glaciologists find such figures inherently ludicrous, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035 unless there was a huge global temperature rise. The maximum rate of decline in thickness seen in glaciers at the moment is two to three feet a year and most are far lower.