Category Archives: Economy
Tapped Out In Flint
Flint Michigan has third world tap water.
In a cost cutting move the City stopped buying water from Detroit and began building a pipeline to Lake Huron. Detroit cut Flint off before the pipeline was complete. The city began drawing water from the Flint River. People complained that the water was foul and smelly. The water department insisted it was safe.
The Flint water was so corrosive the auto industry stopped using it. The corrosion damaged pipes and caused lead levels to rise to five times acceptable levels.
Now it’s a huge infrastructure problem with no fix in sight. The entire population depends on bottled water passed out at fire stations.
The EPA didn’t acknowledge the water crisis in Flint until President Obama announced emergency federal help last week.
EPA also dragged its feet on its release of 3 million gallons of water from the Gold King Mine into the Animas River in Colorado last summer.
Yellen Takes Off Training Wheels
Janet Yellen took the training wheels off the economy on Wednesday. After seven years of near zero percent interest rates, the Fed hiked rates a quarter percent.
Meanwhile, Congress passed a 2,000 page, 1.2 trillion dollar budget. That tacked another 157 billion onto the 18.5 trillion dollar national debt.
Yellen
On Friday the Dow dropped 370 points.
David Stockman says, “sell the bonds, sell the stocks, sell the house”. IBD wonders if the markets know something the Fed doesn’t.
Global Community versus Global Warming
The civilized world rebuked ISIS by agreeing to turn down the global thermostat.
Al Gore was giddy. He proclaimed, “the global community is speaking with one voice”.
Last time the “global community” tried to speak with one voice was the Kyota Protocol. Poor countries said screw it, we want to get rich too. So this time around the rich countries agreed to buy off the poor ones for $100 billion a year. Or, as The Wall Street Journal editorial board put it, “governments of the West are going to dun their taxpayers to transfer money to clean and green governments run by the likes of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe”.
But not to worry. John Kerry says the deal is non-binding. It’s not a treaty because a treaty would never get past the US Senate. In other words it’s empty symbolism. Not that that’s a bad thing, according to Robert Tracinski:
As a global warming skeptic, who thinks it’s absurd that the entire world is supposed to get together to prevent relentlessly rising temperatures (that aren’t happening) and who considers the idea of an international political target for global temperatures at the end of the century to be a monument to the hubris of central planning, I’m not bothered that the Paris Agreement is empty symbolism.
Greatest National Security Threat
Not only is climate change our greatest national security threat. It causes terrorism. Trust me.
Isis Oil Crisis
President Obama is so green it’s tough to get him to take his own side in a fight.
Former CIA Director Michael Morell told Charlie Rose the reason President Obama refused to bomb ISIS oil facilities was to save the environment.
Really.
Obama was also reluctant to bomb ISIS oil trucks because he didn’t want to harm the drivers. When the trucks finally were bombed, we gave 45 minutes advance warning by dropping leaflets telling the drivers to run away.
Dick Morris thinks this is “loony”. ISIS pays its jihadis with the $2 million a day it makes in oil sales. Here’s what Morris had to say about the environmental cost of putting a stop to that:
This kind of environmental fantasizing was in vogue during the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein’s destruction of all of Kuwait’s oil fields was thought to be likely to cause huge damage. Paul Crutzen, a noted atmospheric scientist, predicted that a “nuclear winter” might ensue with a cloud of smoke covering half the Northern Hemisphere for at least 100 days. Carl Sagan argued that the effects of the destruction of Kuwaiti oil fields could be comparable to the explosion of the volcano Tambora in 1815, which produced “a year without summer.”
It never happened.
