symbolicalhead

symbolicalhead

52p

12 comments posted · 0 followers · following 0

12 years ago @ DoD Buzz - Sens to DoD: Use Ameri... · 3 replies · +7 points

You may have a point on Chinese steel, but don't forget there are many other steel producing countries we import from -- Japan, Taiwan, Germany, and Canada spring immediately to mind. All have highly respected steel industries. Citing poor quality Chinese steel is not sufficient justification to reject imports from those other steel producing countries, even if you are 100% right in your analysis of the cost/benefits ratio of Chinese steel.

Also, I think it is important to say that this statement, "the tax money put back into the system by employing US workers more then pays for it" is a rational impossibility. That would be the monetary equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. You have created a positive feedback loop with the output of the function feeding into itself as the input. I suppose it would be nice if money worked that way, but it doesn't.

If I take a dollar of tax revenue and spend it on US steel, part of the money buys the raw steel, part of it pays the workers that work the steel, and part of goes to overhead and transaction costs. It is an impossibility for the taxable income I collect off the worker to exceed the tax dollars I paid him unless the steel, the overhead, and the transaction have _negative_ influence on the cost, ie, the steel company is paying the government to take the steel off their hands. For that matter, even if I paid the work the entire dollar and no other costs were involved, the taxable income rate is only 35%, so in the best imaginable scenario I could only get back ~ 1/3 of every dollar paid him/ Assuming "pays for it" mean only the difference in price, in that specific case you'd be right with a 25% premium over Chinese steel, but for that case one has to allow zero steel costs, zero transaction costs, zero overhead, and zero tax deductions, so that 100% of every tax dollar paid out was also taxable income. I don't think that is a real world scenario we can rely on.

One could argue that the delta between the cost of Chinese steel and the cost of US steel paying unemployment for a laid off steel worker returns the balance to the US side, but that isn't the argument you made, and also implies that a steel worker can't possible work at anything else.

And of course that might just stick a Chinese steel worker on Chinese unemployment, which increases the Chinese government's expenses, which then turn around and demand a higher interest rate on the money they lent us to buy the steel in the first place. Or they get angry at us sticking a tariff on their goods while begging them for the money and refuse to lend us the cash at all.

I could go on and on. My main point is that these decisions shouldn't be based on dreamy theories, like that spending N tax dollars to purchase something results in greater than N dollars in tax revenue as well as the something.

For what it is worth, my view is that we should always commit as few resources as necessary to obtain products of sufficient quality for our purposes. That may mean China (or Germany, or Canada) sometimes, and the US other times. Anything else which is done to engineer some kind political result is unlikely to succeed due to the complexity involved, and unfairly prejudices some taxpayers who will have to foot the higher than necessary bills to the benefit of others which happen to be more politically connected. Longterm that is a recipe for every single person in every single industry forming a trade lobbying group to get their product subsidized and protected until we all go down in flames.

12 years ago @ DoD Buzz - Sens to DoD: Use Ameri... · 3 replies · +7 points

Probably not... for two reasons. One, they have a duty to the taxpayers to spend the money wisely. Paying more for the same product is rarely--though not never--spending wisely.

People "see" the benefit of helping local steel even though it costs more, but they don't see all the 10,000 other things that extra money could have been used for instead. With the same amount of money, you might have been able to buy the truck _and_ new body armor, or the truck _and_ new radios, or the truck _and_ [fill in the blank]. Instead all you get is the truck.

That is to say, either you don't get the new radios you might have gotten, in which case the troops are being shorted (but don't know it), or you push on and buy them anyway, in which case the taxpayer is getting shorted (and may know it, but can't do anything about it). In that latter case you "see" the military truck and radio, but you don't "see" what all those millions of taxpayers would have done with their own money that is now gone, like buy their kids new bikes. So it was possible to have trucks, radios, and bikes, but instead because you paid so much more for the trucks it is "pick two." Someone is getting cheated here, and likely as not it is the kids wanting new bikes for Christmas. You helped the steel industry, but only because thousands of local bike shops took it in the shorts, not to mention thousands of bright-eyed munchkins.

The second reason is that it almost certainly violates any number of international trade treaties that we have signed, which prohibit exactly this kind of subsidy/support. We can't--or at least shouldn't--sign treaties with someone and then break them whenever it seems convenient to do so.

12 years ago @ DoD Buzz - The vibrations from th... · 2 replies · +9 points

"Defense" is not an economic good in itself, it is a cost -- overhead for all the stuff you really want to do.

You can't possibly make a country richer by funneling money into defense, any more than you can by spending more on insurance agents, tax auditors, or police officers.

Yes, we need tax auditors, insurance agents and police, as well as soldiers and warships, but any prudent person would realize you want as few of them as possible to do the work, not as many as you can possibly borrow money to hire.

That doesn't mean you want a weak military. On the contrary, it means you want the strongest and best trained military possible for the least amount of money and manpower that will make it happen.

There is no gain to be had from having a bloated and inefficient military apparatus that gobbles money endlessly with nothing much to show for it, much less to call the very waste and inefficiency "stimulus" or even an economic positive of any sort. Waste is just waste, and it is that much worse when it is paid for with money stolen from taxpayers.

12 years ago @ DoD Buzz - Despite troubled water... · 0 replies · +5 points

Perhaps, but they haven't gotten any of the modules which are spec'd working yet. How long will it be till they deploy as yet unspecified modules? I would speculate in the decades.

12 years ago @ DoD Buzz - Obama fires back in de... · 0 replies · +4 points

You accurately quoted the text of the Resolution section 1542, but you skipped over section 1541, most particularly the part entitled "Limitations" which immediately precedes the lines you quoted:

The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to:

(1) a declaration of war,
(2) specific statutory authorization, or
(3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.

----

Even the WH has never argued that any of conditions (1), (2), or (3) applied. Instead they claimed they were authorized variously under our treaties to the UN and NATO -- except that both of those treaties explicitly state that no matter what resolutions those bodies may impose, the treaty can in no way to be construed as removing the requirement to gain the approval of Congress before action is taken by US forces, in accordance with the Constitution.

12 years ago @ DoD Buzz - The second front in th... · 0 replies · +1 points

"That was well within the 60 to 90 day window under which a president must consult Congress about a foreign intervention, the White House says."

"Says" is the key part of that, and is well done if it was meant to convey a kind of wry humor. An even better question though, is not what the White House says, but what the law says. The law says the President may act in accordance with one or more of (quoted directly from the Act):

(1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.

None of those are asserted to have applied by anyone, even the WH. The President violated the WPA from the beginning, violated it continually throughout the "kinetic period" of the war, and continues to violate it today.

12 years ago @ DoD Buzz - All right, armchair ad... · 0 replies · +4 points

In the real world, I can't imagine any ship getting authorization to fire on small boats that are even 10nm away, even if everyone in the world knows they are a clear threat.

Whatever is done, I can see happening only at the last minute and at close range. That means a bit can be done with the helicopters (which I can assume would have been launched when the boats were still a distance away), but there will be a lot of work for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bofors_57_mm_gun

Only problem is you really need at least two of them. A couple of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx (or equivalent) wouldn't hurt either.

Missiles are nice, but you can't be firing 15 Harpoons to deal with glorified speedboats. The only hope I see on the missile front is that something like Israel's new Iron Flame gets adapted to a lightweight, self-contained naval mount. That would be the perfect solution for this sort of thing.

12 years ago @ DoD Buzz - America's 'immoral' in... · 0 replies · +1 points

"[T]hey were at not having been 'consulted' before the strikes on Libya. (Even though their leaders were.)"

This is not some idle concern. The Constitution explicitly says that the House must _authorize_ war. You can't just say, "Well, I did talk to one or two of the House leadership and they thought it made sense," and somehow believe that counts as the same thing. That is blatantly a violation of the Constitution.

Even the War Powers Act only grants the right to act in three circumstances: (A) war, (B) a statutory authorization (the favored route nowadays), and (C) in response to an attack, or imminent threat of an attack, to the US, it holdings, or its military. The War Powers Act also explicitly states that it cannot be construed to mean that authorization can be gained from any international body (eg, UN/NATO).

No one even in the administration has argued that any of those cases apply. The short version is, right or wrong to intervene, the way the intervention was done has been in blatant violation of both the Constitution and the War Powers Act. That is not just some hissy fit by Congress to point out.

If this goes unchallenged, it will mean that from now on any President can take us to war at anytime, anywhere, without requiring any authorization whatsoever from the people's representatives -- something directly at odds with over 200 years of our history and the written law of the land.

13 years ago @ DoD Buzz - Fly F-22s Over Libya, ... · 3 replies · +7 points

I wish rebels the best in most cases -- but what a tremendously horrible idea.

"We built them. Let’s use them..."

If that is true representation of sentiment, all the peace advocates that have called for disarmament over the years have a much better argument than I'd ever believed. If having powerful weapons sets countries out on a quest to find somewhere to make use them, then I'd have to say the peaceniks were on to something when they said we were better off not building them.

"[W]hen will America use its enormous power for good..."

Advocates should think about how this would apply individually. If someone were physically strong, think of all the good they could do! They could go through life, enforcing their will on everyone around them. All to the good, of course, always for the good. Everything and everyone would be their business, because they had the "power" to make people do good, and power [apparently] implies the right do to whatever you'd like with it.

In the past, whenever I heard "might makes right" it was meant critically... I didn't realize it was the new rallying cry for interventionists everywhere.

Personally, I prefer governments (and people) that recognize that not everything and everyone is their business.

The alternative of an unlimited government using its "enormous power" to enforce "good" throughout the whole globe is absolutely terrifying.

13 years ago @ DoD Buzz - Psst, Congress! KC-X A... · 0 replies · +1 points

The biggest public signal was Dr. Thompson's strong hinting that direction in Forbes a couple of weeks ago: http://blogs.forbes.com/beltway/2011/01/31/air-force-tanker-program-flies-into-new-political-storm/?partner=yahootix

(HT: Bill Sweetman)