New York Times advocating Free Trade??

OK, I lived to witness this... NY Times publishing an op-ed in support of Free Trade: "What to Expect When You’re Free Trading" (by Prof Steven Landsburg).
It's probably in response to the wacko idea of compensating people for job losses due to free trade and outsourcing. What's worse is that even candidates looking for the conservative vote advanced this crazy, populist theory.

From Prof Landsburg's article: Suppose, after years of buying shampoo at your local pharmacy, you discover you can order the same shampoo for less money on the Web. Do you have an obligation to compensate your pharmacist? If you move to a cheaper apartment, should you compensate your landlord? When you eat at McDonald’s, should you compensate the owners of the diner next door?

It's the employees who bear the burden of the Corporate Tax

A just released Treasury research paper shows who bears the burden of the corporate tax. Just when presidential candidates talk about increasing corporate taxes, just to squeeze those greedy, economy boosting, paycheck providing businessman, the Treasury research reaches the conclusion:

The incidence of the corporate income tax is an important issue for designing tax policy. Who bears the corporate income tax can affect overall conclusions about the progressivity of the tax system. Policy analysts have often made assumptions about how to allocate the corporate income tax in measuring the distribution of tax burdens.

A common assumption, based on theoretical models of tax incidence, is that capital (i.e. shareholders) bears the burden of the corporate income tax. Recent empirical work using cross-country data on corporate taxes and wages suggests reconsidering this assumption; labor may actually bear a substantial burden from the corporate income tax.

It shows how a 1% increase in the Corporate Tax will result, in the long run, in an almost 1% decrease in wages.

Why is California burning?

This article by Robert J. Smith summarizes very well the real proven causes why we have so many (more and more) wildfires. It's not global warming as some lunatics in the media try to suggest, but the eco-policy that the Left has been promoting.

Court finds inaccuracies in Inconvenient Truth, labels it "political work"

In an event completely ignored by American media, a British court decided that Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" contains material falsehoods and shouldn't be shown in classrooms without a warning which among others say that "the film is a political work" and that showing it without pointing out the innacuracies is "political indoctrination".

Among the inacuracies discovered by the Court after the expert testimony of scientists are:

• The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. The Government's expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.
• The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.
• The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The Government's expert had to accept that it was "not possible" to attribute one-off events to global warming.
• The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.
• The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant's evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.
• The film suggests that the Greenland ice covering could melt causing sea levels to rise dangerously. The evidence is that Greenland will not melt for millennia.
• The film suggests that the Antarctic ice covering is melting, the evidence was that it is in fact increasing.
• The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.
• The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The Government are unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.

Climate news you'll not hear in the media: Arctic melt, ozone and silencing the experts

A NASA report just showed that the melting of Arctic ice has nothing to do with global warming. Of course noone in the media is reporting this, after all it's pure science, not political crap. In brief, "the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds. "Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic," he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters"

Recently, the democratic governor of Virginia has sacked the state climatologist Dr. Patrick Michaels just because he didn't agree with the global warming hype and repeatedly debunked with scientifical data Al Gore's claims. I didn't see any mention of this anywhere.

And finally, it was finally explained that the ozone hole is not manmade. What was considered "consensus" after just 25 years of measurements is now proven false. The ozone hole is expanding and shrinking due to unknown causes, but definitely not related to human activities. So we gave up sprays, aerosols, and every space shuttle launch is like a death watch because freon was banned and it was all for nothing.

The truth on the melting of the Arctic ice cap

You must probably be sick of all the hype around the melting of the Arctic ice cap. From TV news to children movies, we're assaulted every day with stories about breaking ice at the North Pole, standed polar bears, etc. Maybe we need a reality check.

First, all "historical" data regarding the Arctic ice cap covers only 28 years of the Earth's history, since satellite imaging of the North Pole began in 1979. And what happened before? Well, the ignoramus in the media don't have to read history to be qualified to report this historic news. But most people know about Roald Amundsen trip by boat to the North Pole at the beginning of the century. Oh yes, a hundred years ago, you could go to North Pole on a plain old wooden boat, without satellite weather updates. If you didn't hear about the Northwest Passage, then it's time to research the events of 1905. And aparrently, the polar bears were not extinct and New York didn't get covered by water. The North Pole used to get crossed regularly by boat until the late '40s when the climate got colder and North Pole froze up.

In stupid news, a Russian environmentalist wanted to draw attention to the melting of the ice caps and a few weeks ago, in the middle of August, he got stuck in thick ice...

The recipe for a bad CAFE

This article from the Brookings Institution highlights everything that's bad about the new CAFE regulations. As a political insanity not supported by any economists, it will result in billions of dollars wasted and further job losses in the auto industry.