Pump Gas on April 15th!

Damn.  It is happening again. In this year as in several other recent years, an email is circulating urging people to boycott the mean old oil companies. On one day. Without changing consumption patterns.

I first saw it on Facebook. Many of you may have seen it by now too, or may recall its incarnations in earlier years.

Please don't be suckered into this. It's just another incarnation of the bad old meme that we can solve the world's troubles without, well ... taking any trouble.

If only everyone would just refrain from pumping gas on April 15, we'd tame the oil oligopoly, bring peace to the middle east, and so forth.

Um ... no.  You will accomplish absolutely nothing this day. Look at that notice. It actually encourages you to gas up on the 14th so you won't need to pump on the 15th.

How does that hurt the oil companies???

If you buy gasoline a day earlier than you otherwise would, you've actually done them a favor. They have your money a day earlier, and money has time value. It earns them some interest that extra day!

More generally, the oil companies might worry if you and a lot of other people changed your consumption habits to something that didn't require so much of their product. But that's a more long term and more difficult commitment on your part. It might involve, for instance, moving closer to your place of business.

If your consumption is going to stay the same, then the stream of revenue going to the sellers of the products you consume will be the same, even if you jigger and re-jigger the timing a bit.

"Ah, but they tell us it worked in 1997," you remind me. No, it didn't. What "worked" to bring prices down in 1997 was the oil-for-food program with Iraq. A brief history lesson: after the first Iraq War, during the Presidency of George H.W. Bush, much of the world imposed sanctions upon Iraq in an effort to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein, which that war itself had left standing.

Saddam survived the sanctions, and in 1995, President Bill Clinton, in response to arguments that ordinary citizens in Iraq were being hurt by the continuation of these sanctions, announced a program that would lessen the hardship without, it was hoped, making life any easier for the government. The idea was to allow Iraq to barter sell its oil, but to put the revenues into an escrow account and ensure that they would be available only for foodstuffs and medicines.

Saddam's government signed a Memorandum of Understanding in May 1996 agreeing to participate in their program.

By 1997, then, Iraqi oil was again flowing into world markets. It was this that pushed down the price through that year, not some silly one-day-only boycott.

And, by the way, I challenge any one to show me any evidence from 1997 that any such boycott took place that year at all!  The earliest one I can find any evidence of was two years later. And that had no impact on prices whatsoever.
   
So pump gas, or don't pump gas on April 15th, confident in the expectation that nothing is going to happen that day at the retail outlets across the US or the world that will make any dent on ... anything.

Jobs Creation Chart

There's a "Jobs Creation" chart circulating around Facebook, amongst Obama re-election advocates, that shows that the rate of negative job creation (i.e. the rate at which jobs were being lost) started declining in May 2009 --four months after Obama's inauguration, and reached zero in early 2010, months before Republican gains in the House in that Tea Party dominated campaign.

Further, the chart shows that since then the jobs-creation rate has been positive, though rather slow.

This is presented as a triumph for Obama, who is portrayed with a cartoonist speech bubble above his head saying to Bonior, "You're welcome. Now can you just help a brother out once in a while?"

There are problems with that, as an argument in favor of preserving the Obama presidency. First, it ignores the impact of Fed policy. Everything that has happened by way of jobs creation (and it hasn't been much) is rather readily understood as the natural stimulative consequence of all the money creation, the "quantitative easing," we've seen from Bernanke.

Second, that's not a good thing! Loose monetary policy is the problem not the solution. Greenspan rescued us from the (relatively mild) recession of 2000-2002 precisely by cheapening the US dollar. That created a few good years, and a bigger bust when the dancing inevitably stopped.

We are in the position of a severe alcoholic who starts every day with a drink, because he's got a splitting headache and he needs a hair of the dog that bit him.  The problem of course is that this just leads into another day, another dog, another headache, and the need for another such hair. Further, to cycle isn't going sideways. The cycle is heading downward, to a fatal car crash or cirhosis.

Third, the administration's "stimulus" packages have stimulated nothing.  How can I be sure of this?  Because in their candid moments, high officials thereof say as much. Including the highest of them. In an interview with The New York Times in October 2010, the President said, "there's no such thing as a shovel-ready project."

THAT we can believe. The record of government spending on "infrastructure" in the hope of getting money circulating and good times rolling is pretty clear. When projects are made ready, they amount to "bridges to nowhere." There are good reasons why the private sector doesn't build such bridges.

Which "brother" will I most want to "help out"? Whichever one realizes that truth and significance of a quote often attributed to one of the Rothschild's: "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes her laws."  The enemies of a country could do no better job of undermining ourselves than we have done wirth decades of increasingly funny money.

A Simile

Leon Gettler, one of my FB friends, noted on his wall recently that he is compiling a list of his favorite similes. He gave as examples these:

"I lit a cigarette that tasted like a plumber's handkerchef." -- Raymond Chandler

"Let us go then you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, Like a patient etherizefd upon a table." -- T.S. Eliot.

I suggest that the following belongs on any such list: "in his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings."

That is F. Scott Fitzgerald writing about Gatsby's parties. He doesn't write, "like moths to a flame," as any hack might. He expects his readers to throw in the flame, and he substitutes the whisperings for it, mingling one simile intimately with one metaphor.

Worst Reasoning ... Ever

The following has been circulating at Facebook.

"In the 1950s and 1960s when the top tax rate was 70 - 90%, we laid the interstate system, built the internet, put a man on the moon, defeated Communism, our education system was the envy of the world, our middle class was thriving, our economy unparalleled.

"You want that back?
"Raise taxes on the rich."

------------

That might just be the most lame argument I've ever encountered.

Begin at the beginning: were the rich actually paying 70% or more during that period, or were they availing themselves of various loopholes and paying a good deal less?  My guess (subject to correction) would be that they probably weren't actually paying much more than they are now. 
This matters because the general 'point' is that good things happened at time X, and Y was true through the time X, so Y must be the cause of the good things in X. That is either valid for EVERY pertinent Y, given the EXACT Y involved, or it is not valid at all.

Thus, as to taxes, every loophole that existed for the avoidance of taxes by the wealthy during the period in question must be scrupulously preserved or restored in order for us to get back to the wonderful postulated good old days.  For the loopholes are all part of the Y, right? 

And there are other candidate Ys that had nothing to do with the tax system.  Those were the years of the Bretton Woods accords, after all, which lasted from 1944 until 1971. These accords created a gold standard with regard to international financing.  So maybe it was the gold that was behind all those good things!  (Indeed, personally I take this quite seriously, although I acknowledge that just daydreaming about good old days would not make up an argument for it.)

The 1950s and 1960s were also a period when neither the US nor the UN recognized the People's Republic of China. In both contexts, only the government in Taipai was China.  So ... withdraw recognition from Beijing!  and go back to spelling it Peking!  You want those good things "back," right?

But ... look at the list of "good things" again.  The US "defeated Communism" in the 1950s and 1960s?  Assuming that the word "Communism" in that sentence refers to the bloc of nations led by the old Soviet Union: didn't its "defeat" come after the reduction of the highest marginal taxes?  In the late '80s and early '90s?

What the US did in the 1950s and 1960s was "contain" Communism.  By, for example, making a point of committing to the defense of Quemoy and Matsu, the forward posts of the regime in Taipai that we continued to recognize as the only legitimate China.  So why should this lead us to the conclusion that we should replicate the tax system of the period without also replicating its diplomacy?  Rescind the recognition of Beijing!  (Or, recognize reality and don't do that -- but drop silly arguments.)

The US created the interstate system during the period.  Yes: but should we pay no attention now to the possibility that that is one of the causes of subsequent troubles?  After all, it made the rapid consumption of gasoline a lot more easy and a lot more tempting. That in time became a geostrategic imperative: we have to keep importing the crude oil that makes that possible in ever-increasing quantaties.  In the good old days, the best way to get to California was to take route 66.  It made for a nice TV show but unwieldy travel. You want those good old days back?  Tear up the interstates!

Does that sound silly?  Well, consider again where I got the idea for such an absurd conclusion!