Stimulus that works
As we are going to get stimulus wherther we like it or not it might be a good idea to spend it where it can do some good. Jim Flaherty wants to get 3 billion dollars into the system without assorted checks and examinations which would slow the process down. Essentially he wants to by-pass the bureaucrats. Who are not happy about this.
That’s a good idea, here’s another. Let’s triple the GST rebate. Right now a family of four gets $738 per year if they are eligible and the phase out threshold is about 31,000. So only relatively poor people get the rebate. In the household economy of a poor family an extra dollar is spent almost immediately. If we tripled the rebate to, say, a nice round $2400 a year that would be $600 a quarter. Would this cost something – of course it would. But if you believe in stimulus in the first place then you will want it to do to people who will actually spend the money in the economy as quickly as possible. So rather than pissing away billions for car makers, why not increase a payment to people who really need the money.
February 28th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
We need to move towards electric cars. The battery technology (Altair NanoSafe) exists to make electric cars feasible for a large chunk of the population. Except that our power grid can’t handle it. If we’re going to have stimulus, why not start with upgrading our power grid so that it’s more flexible and smarter, and can handle electric vehicles?
February 28th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
I agree with you on the grid. But we might also want to look at radically reducing the weight of passenger cars in cities and on commutes. You folks in the country need heavy cars and trucks to keep the deer population down; but why are people driving two ton trucks into work and home again?
Victoria is interesting as it really does have a lot of smart cars, electric bikes, hybirds, little scooters and plain old bikes. This has much to do with the relatively mild weather. Riding a bike around Oak Bay is a pleasure 250 – 300 days a year. But smaller, lighter, electric cars make a lot of sense. And you can likely get them by allowing them in the HOV lanes. you can also get them by designating specific roads as under 1500/1200 pound roads. Safer, cheaper, fuel efficient and, on the off chance there is anything to the global warming thing, earth friendly.
The only problem with electricity, other than the grid, is generating enough. Here in BC that is not yet a problem. And it will not be a problem in the rest of Canada if we start building nukes, ideally quite small local nukes, sooner rather than later. But that is about the only way I can see having the generation capacity to run an electrical fleet.
February 28th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
We need nukes for power generation, no question.
February 28th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
In BC and AB that works, but doesn’t the Ontario gov claw that money back? (Seriously asking). If you are going to insist on fiddling with the relationship between citizens and their monetary contribution to society, consumption taxes are the best option for measuring and streaming cash to the group identified as worthy. And yeah when you are really poor the GST check is looked for in the mail, and a weekend direct deposit that can be pushed back can really hurt. The problem is car makers will wither and some will die and they will no longer need funding, and we can shift manufacturer dollars into retraining dollars and hopefully see the end of the funding eventually. Hand those dollars to the poor for the explicit reason of consumption and I dare you to identify the pol who will cut that money off, ever.
March 1st, 2009 at 5:01 am
Why accept the premise that we have to go “green”?
There is plently of oil and natural gas,and we haven’t begun to exhaust all the locations for drilling.
Gas fired generating stations are cheap and faster on line than nukes.
Like the dotcom bubble I have yet to hear how we can make money by going “green”?
March 1st, 2009 at 6:56 am
Jay: I’m surprised that with your political acumen and healthy cynicism that you have misread the purpose of “stimulus”.
“Stimulus”™ (AKA porkulus…I love that one from Rush) is the new leading edge of the old political pork barrel schemes. It’s Tammany Hall politics underwritten with tax dollars. It is meant to go to government’s perennial corporate welfare clients with the ROI being cash infusions for campaigns and “official” support for future anti free market Fed policies from the corporate sector.
So if you are an individual struggling to stay in the middle class and have used the money for your kid’s college fund to bail you out of the losses from your retirement investments or a lost (good) job, you fall through the cracks in the Porkulus planning.
If you are a fixed income pensioner whose home equity/value is threatened by mandated green upgrades, and who lost mobility because you can’t fuel or register your 20 year old car and current stagflation eats up the pension check paying utilities and groceries inflated with carbon taxing, you are SOL for Porkulus.
However if you are a designated corporate client in need of public subsidy to keep your inefficient uncompetitive government-protected interests solvent, you’re in….if you are some con artist with a Rube Goldberg carbon-neutral contraption to hawk, you’re in. If you’re a public sector union employee your non value added job has been made more secure by the expansion of government.
Porkulus is about maintaining the parasitic or atrophied sectors of the economy, not the stable productive sector or private consumer….they just get the bill for all this.
March 1st, 2009 at 10:19 am
Yeah, because the stable productive sector and private consumer have been doing a great job keeping things rolling until now.
March 1st, 2009 at 10:20 am
(please do feel free to read in several sets of air-quotes, it makes it that much funnier.)
March 1st, 2009 at 11:49 am
“Why accept the premise that we have to go “green”?”
I lived and worked in Edmonton, Alberta from 2000 to 2005. Within weeks of moving to an acreage east of Consort, Alberta, the cough and constant mucous were gone. Whenever we go to visit friends in Edmonton the cough immediately returns. Not only that, my wife and I can literally smell and taste the pollution. I can’t believe that people choose to live under those conditions.
So, yeah, if we can find ways of powering vehicles that make economic sense and reduce the amount of garbage spewed into the air (note that I’m not including CO2 in this), everybody wins. You can’t work in a downtown office in a major city and not realize there’s a problem (unless you suffer from some form of mental impairment).
I’d personally love to own a Phoenix SUV powered by an Altair battery. It would get me to and from work, even with our lousy Canadian winters and the fact I have to drive for almost 2 hours each day. Problem is that our power grid simply won’t support everyone driving one of these vehicles. We can’t generate enough power at peak periods or get it to the end user with our existing infrastructure.
If there must be stimulus spending, I’d rather see it go to projects like this than to bailouts for American car companies and the usual Canadian corporate welfare cases like Bombardier.
March 1st, 2009 at 2:09 pm
“Yeah, because the stable productive sector and private consumer have been doing a great job keeping things rolling until now”
Must be…because private capital/productivity is what bails out all these lame Keynesian fantasies that never have worked.
March 1st, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Sean, if you are talking reducing particulates and sulphur dioxide we agree. These are the real pollution issues that ruin people’s health not quilt over putting groceries in a plastic bag. The global warming fraud takes attention and funds away from fixing the real dangers and good news like the level of SO2 emmitted in 2010 in the USA will be 50% of the 1980 level and particulates emmited down 27% from 1990 to 2007(as per the EPA) are not reported by the media because they’d rather run Gore’s propaganda. We’ve been going green where it matters for the last 3 decades.
March 2nd, 2009 at 6:47 am
“Sean, if you are talking reducing particulates and sulphur dioxide we agree.”
Yes, exactly. That and silly things like overpackaging. a 2 GB Secure Digital memory card shouldn’t need to be shipped in a 6×8 inch plastic clamshell package. Not that I want to have legislation put forward to deal with the latter, but seeing that sort of thing annoys me. So much so that I e-mailed the company to tell them I would no longer be purchasing their products because of the ridiculous overpackaging.