rickyp wrote:steve

Impossible to compare the performance of governors

And yet romney points to his experience as a governor as a positive...
So if its impossible to compare.... what's the point in using it as a "qualification" ?

rickyp wrote:
http://aneconomicsense.com/2012/04/26/p ... nder-bush/

freeman2 wrote:U.S economic news is not as bleak as Steve would have you believe. http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-05/D9V3UHBO0.htm

Housing market is starting to show some life though the news is mixed http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/ ... U320120523

Retail sales overall have been good. http://mam.econoday.com/byshoweventfull ... 2012&lid=0

I have seen nothing to indicate that the U.S economy will not grow at a rate of 2 percent or so. up until the election. And the rest of the world economy is tanking.

danivon wrote:RJ, as most public employees are State and local, I don't think military winddown will be the main factor. Has the ending of deployment actually led to a reduction in headcount. Most employment stats I've seen are civilian numbers anyway.

freeman2 wrote:U.S economic news is not as bleak as Steve would have you believe. http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-05/D9V3UHBO0.htm

Housing market is starting to show some life though the news is mixed http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/ ... U320120523

Retail sales overall have been good. http://mam.econoday.com/byshoweventfull ... 2012&lid=0

I have seen nothing to indicate that the U.S economy will not grow at a rate of 2 percent or so. up until the election. And the rest of the world economy is tanking.

Steve's 999th smoking gun to show Obama will not win is again not convincing.

But there are other factors helping sales. Demand remains strong from people who put off big purchases during the recession, analysts say.

Americans grew much gloomier about the economy in May, causing a critical measure of consumer confidence to suffer its biggest decline in eight months and ending a period of steady optimism.

Worries about jobs, housing and the stock market rattled consumers, even though gas prices are falling. The latest figures suggest Americans will need to see more encouraging economic signs before their concerns start to dissipate.

The Conference Board, a private research group, reported Tuesday that its Consumer Confidence Index fell to 64.9, down from a revised 68.7 in April. Analysts had expected the index to climb to 70.

The May figure, which represents the biggest drop since October, when the measure fell about 6 points, is now at its lowest level since January.

The lobbying blitz came as the $1.6 billion loan to BrightSource Energy Inc.—a centerpiece of the administration's program to promote nascent green-energy projects—faced a do-or-die moment, and the company called on its Democratic connections to help push the deal forward, according to emails, records and those familiar with the loan.

White House spokesman Eric Schultz said the Department of Energy made the loan-approval decision, not Mr. Biden nor other White House officials. A Department of Energy spokeswoman said it chose BrightSource, whose solar power plant in California continues to move ahead, based on the project's merits.
...
Mr. Obama lauded BrightSource in a weekly radio address in 2010. The company, which is building a 392-megawatt solar-power plant called Ivanpah in the Mojave Desert, had several other Democratic connections, including its then-chairman, John Bryson, a longtime green-energy proponent whom Mr. Obama later named commerce secretary.

After a two-year effort, the company neared a March 31, 2011, deadline when a conditional agreement for the federal loan was set to expire, according to emails from the period released by a House committee.

Even more worrisome for the company was the April 1 start of "tortoise moving season," as the company calls it—a narrow window under endangered-species rules during which BrightSource could move tortoises away from the Ivanpah construction site. The tortoises had to be moved before they returned to their beds under the sand.

"As we were closer to the deadline, it became scarier," Dan Judge, general counsel of BrightSource, said in an interview. Missing the spring moving season would have forced a wait of six months, which "easily could have killed the project," he said.

In a PowerPoint presentation sent to the DOE in March 2011 and viewed by The Wall Street Journal, BrightSource said its cash position was "precarious" and that it would be a "major embarrassment" for the administration if it went under because the White House had held it up as a centerpiece of its green-energy push. "The DOE will be known as responsible for a very high-profile failure," the message read.

BrightSource's investors include Google Inc. GOOG +1.86% and NRG Energy Inc., NRG +2.97% which put up a combined $468 million. But the vast majority of its $2.2 billion funding comes from the loan guarantee. There were also high stakes for utility Pacific Gas & Electric, PCG +1.56% which wanted BrightSource's electricity to meet a California renewable-energy mandate.

BrightSource spent more than $500,000 on lobbying in the third quarter of 2010 through the second quarter of 2011, according to federal records, on behalf of the loan program and its own loan. The records show that $40,000 of the BrightSource lobbying money went to Bernie Toon, who was chief of staff to Mr. Biden, then a U.S. senator, in the 1990s.

On March 9, 2011, just days after being hired, Mr. Toon went to the White House with three BrightSource executives, according to Senate and White House records. There he visited a former colleague, Alan Hoffman, now the top aide to Mr. Biden, whose office was working on green-energy programs, the records show. The White House didn't make Mr. Hoffman available for comment.

Another visit came March 15, when BrightSource executives went to the White House for a meeting with the Office of Management and Budget, which also was reviewing the loan, White House records show. A top Washington energy lawyer with Perkins Coie LLP accompanied the BrightSource team. ...

And the company drew up plans to have its chairman, Mr. Bryson, lobby a friend, then-White House Chief of Staff William Daley. On March 7, the company sent the DOE's loan-program director a proposed letter from Mr. Bryson to Mr. Daley requesting White House intervention, according to emails viewed by the Journal. It read, "We need a commitment from the WH to quarterback loan closure" by March 18.

...The consultancy Verso Economics has calculated the opportunity cost of the United Kingdom's subsidy system for renewables to be 10,000 jobs between 2009 and 2010 alone. A report by the Energy Intensive Users Group (which represents energy-intensive British businesses) and the Trades Union Congress cited steel making, ceramics, paper, cement and lime manufacture, aluminum and basic inorganic chemicals as industries facing up to 141% in additional energy costs by 2020 as a result of C02 emissions-reduction schemes. EIUG Director Jeremy Nicholson notes that "the current policies do seem to be angled towards creating a market for overseas competitors."

Emissions-free solar and wind energy, on which the U.K. plans increasingly to rely, are expensive. The government estimates that a planned offshore wind farm project ringing the coast will cost £140 billion, or £5,600 ($8,972) for every household in the country. Conventional energy could provide the same amount of energy at 5% of the cost.

The U.K.'s Department of Energy and Climate Change commissioned a report (led by Prof. John Hills of the London School of Economics) to examine the issue of "fuel poverty," defined as when fuel bills take up more than 10% of household income. It found four million of England's 21.5 million households fall in this category and the number could rise to 9.2 million by 2016, equivalent to 43% of all homes in England. One of the key factors are green taxes and levies expected to add up to £200 ($306) to bills by 2020.
...
Italy's subsidy system sets the price floor for wind energy at three times the market level. A study at Italy's Instituto Bruno Leoni found the capital necessary to create one green job could have created 6.9 jobs if invested in industry.

Even Germany, Europe's healthiest economy, may be in for some rude surprises. Germany's Renewable Energy Feed-in Act of 2000 requires electric utilities to buy renewables from all producers at fixed, exorbitant rates and feed it into the power grid for 20 years. A German utility executive has observed that solar energy in Germany makes as much sense as growing pineapples in Alaska. Despite this, Germany now has half the world's solar photovoltaic capacity.

Fritz Vahrenholt, the departing head of the renewable energy arm of RWE Innogy and a former hero of the German environmental movement, now says: "We're destroying the foundations of our prosperity. In the end what we are doing is putting the German automotive sector at risk, the steel, copper and chemical sectors, silicon, you name it."

Speaking of green-tech stimulus, it appears that Fisker Automotive — one of the Obama administration’s high-profile recipients — has had to recall more of the handful of vehicles it has produced since getting its cash:

Fisker Automotive is recalling another 19 of its Karma luxury plug-in hybrid sedan because of a fire hazard, according to a report posted over the weekend on the Web site of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The action widened a recall undertaken in December, which affected 239 vehicles.

Fisker said 10 of the 19 additional vehicles were in the hands of consumers.

By the way, that’s nearly 2% of their total output. ABC News reports that Fisker might now never produce any vehicles inside the US, the reason for getting the loan guarantees in the first place:

The luxury carmaker Fisker Automotive continues to signal it could ditch plans to build its next generation hybrid electric vehicle in the United States, despite the nearly $200 million in Obama administration loan money it has already received.

Fisker received federal funds in part to help purchase a shuttered General Motors plant in Delaware, where it predicted it would one day employ 2,000 auto workers to assemble the clean-burning gas-electric family car, known as the Atlantic.

But company executives began hinting in February that it would reconsider that plan and look for a cheaper place to build the car after the Department of Energy froze the $529 million green-energy loan the company had received, and had been drawing on since 2010.

Fisker used the first $169 million in taxpayer funds to bring to market the Karma, a flashy $100,000 hybrid sports sedan that it assembles in Finland. After a series of delays and stumbles, the company announced it had sold its first 1,000 Karmas, bringing in $100 million in revenues so far this year. The sleek, high-end model has been well received by critics, and the company reported this week it has started to sell in Europe, and could soon be on sale in the Middle East.

And thankfully, drivers in Europe and the Middle East will enjoy those cars at a lower price, thanks to subsidies provided by American taxpayers that will eventually create no American jobs.

Take, for instance, the decision to map the human genome. The federal government funded that project at a whopping $3.8 billion cost, over a 15-year period. But consider the payback. One study — funded by the industry — calculates that the Human Genome Project has helped drive $796 billion in economic activity and raised $244 billion in personal income; it supported 310,000 jobs in 2010 alone. These numbers may be exaggerated, but the scale of the impact is clear across such vast fields as agriculture and medicine and new areas such as gene therapy.
A lot has been said about the government’s $500 million loan to Solyndra, which was indeed a bust. But how often do you hear about the Human Genome Project? “From a simple return on investment, the financial stake made in mapping the entire human genome is clearly one of the best uses of taxpayer dollars the U.S. government has ever made,” says Greg Lucier, chief executive of Life Technologies, whose foundation sponsored the study cited above and whose company produces the $1,000 gene-sequencing technology. Lucier, and many scientists, argue that we’re at the beginning of a new wave of biotechnologies that could be applied to produce food, fuels and medicines, and to counteract problems such as pollution and climate change.
Federal funding for research and development — a drop in the bucket compared with farm subsidies — has long been in decline. From 1970 to 1995, it fell as a percentage of gross domestic product by 54 percent in physical sciences and 51 percent in engineering. Federal R&D funding increased slightly in recent years but has resumed its long-term slump — just as China and South Korea are increasing their funding 10 percent year over year. The budget for Turkey’s government agency for science and technology is slated to grow 15-fold over the next 15 years. In a knowledge economy, American jobs will depend more on scientific research than they did in the 1950s, yet we spend much less as a share of GDP.
Government investment in basic science has had huge commercial payoffs. For example, 13 Nobel laureates had devoted major parts of their careers to cholesterol research before cholesterol-reducing statins came to market. Now it is the largest-selling class of drugs in the world: More than 40 million people take them.

Funding existing technologies is more complicated. Sometimes it works. The Air Force and NASA were the only buyers of semiconductor chips when they were first manufactured in the 1950s and through the early 1960s — when costs started plummeting and private industry got interested. Or consider “fracking,” a technology that was developed using Energy Department grants and loans starting in the late 1970s.

On the other hand, there are Solyndra and many flops like it. Even here, however, the case for funding basic science is unimpeachable. If solar panels are to become a subsidy-free form of energy, the breakthrough will come at the level of basic science, in cheaply producing highly efficient alternatives to silicon. Several companies have started using compounds that are now expensive, one of which, Alta Devices, occupies an office building that once served as the headquarters forSolyndra.