You are the one that previously was arguing that what matters is the popularity of a cause. I'd argued that on principle adults should be free to create whatever sort of voluntary relationships they want, including same sex unions but also polygamy. You argued that there had been no outcry for polygamy and so only same sex marriage should be dealt with. I'd suggest either being consistent and arguing from principle as the ACLU and Libertarians do and noting that polygamy legalization is also the principled thing to do, or to not pretend you care about principle when in reality you only care about whatever is politically feasible and politically correct.

Boulderites supposedly push thinking global and long term thinking. A better answer seems to be biodegradable plastic bags (which are being developed, and can be less resource intensive than paper bags), or other creative solutions entrepreneurs may dream up. It is far more likely that the rest of the world would eventually adopt solutions like those than that they would copy Boulder's fees or ban. Boulder is a hotbed of entrepreneurs and an ideal test market for new green products and a ban or fees makes it less likely to be helpful in nurturing an approach more likely to have a global impact.

Also the concern over landfills tends to be overblown to begin with among those who don't have perspective on how small they are compared to available land and that plastic bags are a tiny part of that and the issue is being worked on. Scientists have discovered there are bacteria that consume plastic so it may be possible further in the future to go and biodegrade landfills. The problem is less likely to be on the minds of grad students and entrepreneurs looking for problems to solve in educated high tech cities like Boulder if plastic bags are banned here, while they remain used in the rest of the world. Even further in the future with nanotechnology it may be possible to not only clean up landfills but extract any useful raw materials in the process.

Odd, your wikipedia link doesn't work. If you cut and paste it the link works, but if you click on it (at least in my browser) it leaves off the trailing period. I'll see if I can paste in a working link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_A._Pielke,_Jr.

An IntenseDebate bug, I had to edit the link to get it to work.

I'd expected to see lots of true believers posting here whining that he isn't alarmist enough for them.

A compromise position usually winds up being somewhere between the 2 starting points. When the starting points are both increases.. you will get an increase. If he wanted to decrease the budget he would decrease the budget. Unlike Demopublicans, a Libertarian president would keep vetoing budgets, forcing them to either come up with something better or pass it over the veto. Of course in the unlikely event a Libertarian were elected, odds are there would be Libertarians elected to Congress as well, though obviously its doubtful it'lll happen this year.

I'll look at that study later, need to go offline for a bit, the clips above and this are just some clips I had around, not specifically dealing with the low point of the crash, but dealing with private returns.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/us/how-privatiz...
"How Privatized Social Security Works in Galveston

In a hypothetical calculation, Mr. Gornto said, an employee who earned $25,000 annually for 40 years could retire with a 20-year payout of $2,297 a month under the Alternate Plan. Under the same circumstances, an employee making $125,000 annually could retire with a payout of $11,490 a month.
Social Security benefits change depending on the yearly adjustment for inflation, the year of retirement, and the age of the worker. But at a maximum, a worker who retires in 2011 at age 66 could receive $2,366 a month in Social Security benefits."

No, I'm saying that SS hasn't been privatized, SS is the topic of this page.
http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/...
"February 13, 2012
Still a Better Deal: Private Investment vs. Social Security
Despite recent declines in the stock market, a worker who had invested privately over the past 40 years would have still earned an average yearly return of 6.85 percent investing in the S&P 500, 3.46 percent from corporate bonds, and 2.44 percent from government bonds.

If workers who retired in 2011 had been allowed to invest the employee half of the Social Security payroll tax over their working lifetime, they would retire with more income than if they relied on Social Security. Indeed, even in the worst-case scenario—a low-wage worker who invested entirely in bonds—the benefits from private investment would equal those from traditional Social Security."

http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/priva...
"Private Social Security Accounts: Still a Good Idea
Suppose a senior citizen — let's call him "Joe the Plumber" — who retired at the end of 2009, at age 66, had been able to set up a personal account when he entered the work force in 1965, at the age of 21. Suppose that, paying into his personal account what he and his employer would have paid into Social Security, Joe was foolish enough to invest his entire portfolio in the stock market for all 45 years of his working career. How would he have fared in the recent financial crisis?

While working, Joe had earned the average income for full-time male workers. His wife Mary, also age 66, had earned the average income for full-time female workers. They invested together in an indexed portfolio of 90% large-cap stocks and 10% small-cap stocks, which earned the returns reported each year since 1965.

By the time of their retirement in 2009, Joe and Mary would have accumulated account funds, after administrative costs, of $855,175. Indeed, they would have been millionaires a few years earlier, but the financial crisis lost them 37% in 2008. They were unfortunate to retire just one year after the worst 10-year stock market performance since 1926. Yet their account, having earned a 6.75% return annually from 1965 to 2009, would still pay them about 75% more than Social Security would have.

What's more, this model assumes that in retirement Joe and Mary switch to a lower-risk, conservative portfolio that averages a return of just 3%. Of course for young workers today, Social Security promises even lower returns of only 1.5% or less, given the actuarial value of all promised benefits. For many, the promised returns are zero or negative. And if Congress raises taxes or cuts benefits in order to close financial gaps — as everyone who rejects personal accounts effectively advocates — the eventual returns for young workers will be even lower."

In the real world high taxes lead to tax avoidance. Lower taxes lead to less of it, and that can lead to higher tax collection when companies bring the money here.

re: "you chastise the businesses and the whole economic system for doing just that. "

Its unclear how you make that leap, that is a strawman I've never implied.

I don't assume apriori that all congressional testimony is based on indisputable facts. If you do then perhaps I should point you to myriad Cato congressional testimonies. My main point is even without taking the time to examine whether the claims are accurate, they ignore the obvious point that the companies could have laid of US citizens or in other ways behaved even worse according to your metrics if the cash weren't brought back to the US.

Also as noted regardless of how they spent the money, the point is the cash coming back to the US is of benefit to the economy since it doesn't sit idle. It winds up being invested, either productively in private entities. Even if if in theory any of that particular money wound up being loaned to the government, that still left more to invest privately.

Unfortunately research needs to consider "what if" alternatives rather than merely what did happen. All these details you posted merely serve to obfuscate the basic reality that money comes back to the US rather than being left overseas, and more taxes are paid on it. Fantasies about claimed lost tax revenue are just fantasies because the companies aren't bringing the cash home now and wouldn't magically decide to do so without the taxes being lowered to provide incentive. All this stuff is assuming businesses are irrational, and that funds coming to the US rather than stimulating the economy (in the one useful notion of fiscal stimulus, outside funds coming in rather than internal funds being shuffled around) are somehow magically useless. Its not rational.

re: "Those already in their sixties have little time to recover from the market crash,"

Its unclear what you are referring to. We haven't had a privatized retirement system. I don't have time at the moment to find the link again I've posted before, but calculations show that if we had the returns even at the low point during the recession would still have been better than social security.

Private retirement is an investment which helps grow the economy and benefits everyone, social security is a ponzi-like scheme that allowed politicians to buy votes on the back of future generations that would need to bail it out. If the economy doesn't do well then a ponzi-like scheme struggles.