The cruel cost of stopping live cattle exports
Miranda Devine – Wednesday, June 29, 11 (08:16 pm)
JULIA Gillard proclaimed “optimism” yesterday about the live cattle trade, which her government has devastated with its knee-jerk response to a TV program showing inhumane practices at some Indonesian abattoirs.
But the damage is done.
Lest we forget, amidst the daily/weekly/monthy/yearly ups and downs of the market, the market is an historically off-the-charts (almost literally) innovation machine.
Be happy that you live when you do and, if you live in the first world, where you do.
Planet Money uncovers the fact that the US government has been minting dollar coins that no one wants to use. We prefer paper. A billion dollars worth of the coins that nobody wants is sitting in Fed vaults. And more are on the way–we’re only up to Ulysses S. Grant.
Why is Congress continuing with the program? This story may help–Arizona is rich in copper and Tennessee has zinc. Wonder what the coins are made of. Probably mostly copper. So Arizona politicians think it’s a good idea. They’ve pushed for the dollar coin before. I suspect somebody made a deal to get someone else to get behind it in exchange for doing that person a favor…
President Obama spoke in Iowa the other day about the economy. In a sense, it was the launching of the re-election campaign. I thought it might be interesting to evaluate the economics and see what he thinks is going to be effective politically. The full text is here. I’ll be commenting on most of it. Here we go:
Let’s start with the White House title for the speech:
Remarks by the President on the Critical Role the Manufacturing Sector Plays in the American Economy
The manufacturing does not play a particularly critical role in the US economy. Employment in manufacturing as a percentage of total employment has been falling steadily since the end of World War II. But a lot of people think there is something special about manufacturing so the title strikes a resonant chord for many people even outside manufacturing.
The opening of the speech itself is a lot of nice stuff about Iowa and the innovative and productive nature of the factory where the speech took place, an Alcoa aluminum factory in Bettendorf, Iowa. Then he gets to it:
So you know that times change. You’ve seen times change. Alcoa has grown as America has grown. Now, you also know that sometimes change can be tough. Sometimes, the old ways of doing things just won’t cut it anymore. I was just talking to Klaus; he was talking about some sheet metal that you guys produce, that for a while you guys lost market share completely. You got your team together, redesigned it, and now you have 80 percent of the market back. That’s adapting to change. (Applause.) And see, when change happens, you’ve got a choice. You can either keep on doing what you were doing and hope things work out, or you can make the decision that not only you can meet the challenges of the future, but you can help set the pace.
That’s true for this company, and it’s true for America. For better or for worse, our generation has seen more than our fair share of economic change. Revolutions in technology have changed the way we live and the way we work. A lot of jobs can now be located anywhere there’s an Internet connection. And companies have become more efficient, so they get by with fewer workers.
This is reminiscent of the President’s recent remarks about ATM’s putting bank tellers out of work. Of course it’s true that technology can make life hard for bank tellers or telephone switch board operators. But as I alluded to above, that process has been going on for the last 60 years (and longer). Most of the economic times for America since 1960 have been pretty good for most Americans. And if it wasn’t good for someone, it turned out pretty well for their children and grandchildren. (If you’re interested, I talk about the role of technology (and trade) on our lives in The Choice and in The Price of Everything.)
Then the President talks about the human costs of a dynamic economy:
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Bob Higgs here (yet again, but always worthily) explains why WWII did not boost the economy. (Is there a more frequently committed instance of the looking-only-at-what-is-seen error than the frequently committed insistence that war is good for the economy?)
And here Bob ponders bank reserves.
Cato’s Sallie James has the dirt on the agreement to extend Trade Adjustment Assistance through 2013.
370 DAYS UNTIL LABOR’S STORY TIME TAX
Tim Blair – Thursday, June 30, 11 (05:23 am)
The government is already spending $5.6 million to send Tim Flannery and his Climate Crisis Circus around Australia explaining why we should love a carbon dioxide tax. The more that Flannery and friends talk, however, the less popular the tax becomes. So now:
They’re giving away another $3 million:
The $3m grant program will be open from 30 June 2011 and will provide organisations the opportunity to apply for grants of up to $250,000 to share their stories and demonstrate the opportunities associated with Australia moving to a clean energy future.
Jo Nova dissects this latest idiocy.
LAW SLAVISHLY OBSERVED
Tim Blair – Thursday, June 30, 11 (04:22 am)
The SMH’s Stuart Washington observes the First Law of Warmenism:
Climate change sceptics would count for nought if their views were not slavishly reported across the media.
The First Law of Warmenism: always exaggerate about everything.
DEPARTMENT OF THE HOWLINGLY OBVIOUS
Tim Blair – Thursday, June 30, 11 (04:12 am)
From the office of Minister for Tertiary Education Chris Evans:
Research confirms a good education is the key to getting a job
And the key to getting rubbish TV reception is to let Labor spend $300 million:
A fuzzy reception, just half of the promised channels, digital set-top boxes and antennas that don’t work, and hundreds of dollars in extra, out-of-pocket expenses. Welcome to the future of watching television in NSW.
Residents in Broken Hill – the first in the state to receive “free” set-top boxes for analog TVs under the federal government’s $308.8 million digital program – have revealed nothing but trouble with the scheme.
Our official hopeless mate just keeps trying.
BROWN TOWN
Tim Blair – Wednesday, June 29, 11 (12:31 pm)
Ray Hadley reworks a Petula Clark classic in honour of Greens leader Bob Brown, whose latest views are instructive:
The mining boom is creating massive problems for other parts of the Australian economy.
All that money. All that progress. Such a massive problem.
STUDENTS USEFUL
Tim Blair – Wednesday, June 29, 11 (11:59 am)
Say what you will about North Korean commie tyrant Kim Jong-il, but his tertiary education policies are outstanding:
Reports in South Korea indicated that the government in Pyongyang on Monday ordered all universities to cancel classes until April of next year. The only exemptions are for students who will be graduating in the next few months and foreign students.
The reports suggested that the students will be put to work on construction projects in major citieswhile there are also indications that repair work may be needed in agricultural regions that were affected by a major typhoon recently.
(Via Brat)
Jeering the dead
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, June 30, 11 (11:51 am)
One hint why the Dutch Government has decided to scrap multiculturalism.
Not worthy of the name “academic”
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, June 30, 11 (11:41 am)
A scandalous attempt by “academics” not just to gag free speech, but to counter inconvenient opinions with a cowardly ban rather than an argument:
More than 50 Australian academics have signed a letter urging Western Australia’s Notre Dame University to cancel a speech by British climate change sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton…
... a letter signed by more than 50 academics has called on the university to bar the controversial speaker, saying “he stands for the kind of ignorance and superstition that universities have a duty to counter”.
Shame on them.
(Thanks to readers Max, David, John, Andrew and others.)
Not a joke: North Korea now heads a UN weapons body
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, June 30, 11 (11:30 am)
Another sign of the moral corruption of the UN:
Nuclear-armed North Korea has assumed the presidency of a key United Nations disarmament body — despite facing UN Security Council sanctions over its weapons programs…
UN officials point out that North Korean ambassador So Se Pyong takes on the presidency of the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament under rules that say the chair will rotate among all 65 member states in alphabetical order.
But critics said Wednesday the rules should be changed when they allow the body — whose mandate is in part to push for world nuclear disarmament — to be led by a country that the West considers to be an international nuclear renegade.
(Thanks to reader Andy.)
Obama beaten by anyone else
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, June 30, 11 (09:17 am)
Any Republican is better than Obama:
It’s the fifth week in a row that the GOP candidate has been ahead and the widest gap between the candidates to date.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds a generic Republican candidate earns support from 46% of Likely U.S. Voters, while the president picks up 42% of the vote. Three percent (3%) prefer some other candidate, and nine percent (9%) are undecided.
That said, once the generic becomes specific, generic virtues become marred by specific faults.
Two months on, the Gillard still needs permission for the deal she announced
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, June 30, 11 (07:04 am)
We should not need any UN permission, but the Gillard Government must reap what it sows - and its deal is now in even bigger strife:
THE United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, does not yet know if his agency will support the refugee swap with Malaysia, as Australians bombard him with emails opposing the deal.
Mr Guterres said the fact the deal remains unsigned so many weeks after its announcement by the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, is proof of his tough approach.
‘’The only reason why it has not yet been signed is because UNHCR has been intransigent in relation to a certain number of very clear protection principles. And that policy will be maintained. I don’t know if there will be an agreement or not,’’ he said from Geneva.
So where’s Australia’s foreign minister to sort out this disaster? Iran’s PressTV tells us:
Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi has lashed out at the West, particularly the United States, for providing support for pliable regimes in the region.
In a Wednesday meeting with Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd in the Kazakh capital, Astana, Salehi outlined Iran’s stance on the latest developments in the region. The meeting was held on the sidelines of the second day of the 38th session of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).... The Australian minister, for his part, hailed Iran’s position and role in the Middle East and called for bolstering cooperation with Tehran.
An Iranian prop.
None of us were there, so let’s move on together
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, June 30, 11 (06:59 am)
Scenes from a nation of tribes, picking at old sores so they’ll never heal:
They want to see past injustices redressed, such as the expensive head tax and unscrupulous dictation tests forced on prospective Chinese immigrants to stem their flow.
Anti-Chinese policies began in the 19th century and lasted until 1973 with the abolition of the ‘’White Australia’’ policy.
“The time has come for a number of Chinese-Australians to get rid of the last vestiges of white superiority,” said Daphne Lowe Kelley, the president of the Chinese Heritage Association of Australia. “We want to be recognised for all our contributions.”
Their call is part of a global movement by Chinese immigrants settled in Western countries.
You weren’t there, and I wasn’t there. So an apology is demanded by people of one race from those of another because of what other people of the first race did to other people of the second race before any of us were born.
Pure racism.
And they were let in … why?
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, June 30, 11 (06:47 am)
This doesn’t strike me as evidence of a successful immigration policy, at least for Melbourne:
THERE are as many as 20 outlaw Middle Eastern clans in the Broadmeadows area, a police officer says.
The Age is sure it’s just a complete coincidence - and mislables the real debate:
For the past five years police in the northern and western suburbs have been battling several distinct family criminal cells. The families are all of Lebanese origin, but police say their ethnicity is not the issue. This is a crime problem, not a racial one.
The world isn’t “racial” but “cultural”. There is a significant difference. But this kind of woolly and weakly apologetic thinking about this issue is exploited by these hoons:
Detectives report that many of the gangs try to intimidate younger police. When a cell member is pulled up he will text mates for support and soon the police will be surrounded, filmed and accused of victimising the suspect.
Uniting Australia through smears and sneers
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, June 30, 11 (06:41 am)
The divisive arrogance of the reconciliation moralists is demonstrated by Sydney City Council deputy mayor Marcelle Hoff on The 7pm Project, as she explains why the council will now refer to European settlement as an “invasion”:
Hoff: It’s like trying to deny the Holocaust. We just needed to tell the truth, and sometimes for some people that is very harsh to hear.
Steve Price: Look, I think this is pathetic political correctness gone mad. What reaction have you had today on talkback radio in Sydney?
Hoff: I haven’t been listening to talkback radio. I don’t listen to talkback radio.
Price: Surely you’ve heard that there has been some criticism?
Hoff: I imagine, depending on which station that listen to, that would tell you what type of person they are. And then you could predict the end result of this conversation.
Price: So there’s been no negative reaction at all today. Is that what you’re saying?
Hoff: Oh yes, there certainly has. But I haven’t been aware of what’s been said by the shock jocks. I imagine that the people who were offended by it were probably already well set in their ideas and it wouldn’t change their minds.
Price: Whenever there is a critic of a decision like this, they suddenly become a “shock jock”. Sydney Council would be better off clearing up the disgrace that is Aboriginal Redfern than worrying about dumb things.
You think they’d have learned from the free insulation fiasco
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, June 30, 11 (06:36 am)
If the Gillard Government had simply handed out vouchers instead of doing the whole Big Nanny thing...:
Residents in Broken Hill - the first in the state to receive “free” set-top boxes for analog TVs under the federal government’s $308.8 million digital program - have revealed nothing but trouble with the scheme.
Let’s just buy dud power stations and switch off the lights, she babbled brightly
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, June 30, 11 (06:14 am)
Amid all the paragraphs of babble about Labor, the Greens and the independents nearly closing their deal on a perfectly uselescarbon dioxide tax comes the briefest of mentions of a disastrous consequence:
As the committee settled on compensation for electricity generators, Standard & Poor’s warned that Australian baseload power generators faced ‘’a serious threat to their credit quality’’ and uncertainty over the carbon price posed ‘’systemic risks’’ for the sector, and raised questions of whether anyone would invest in low-emission energy plants.
Power stations going broke? No one investing in new ones? Are we mad to be taking such a terrible risk.
In another report babbling about a deal that cannot change the world’s temperature by a flicker, the briefest of mentions of a government bandaid that could cost us billions:
Assistance for coal-fired electricity generators is also expected to include a power plant buyout, but over an extended transitional period. Direct compensation for generators over the transitional period is likely.
We’ll be buying entire plants of the kind the Government actually intends to close? Plants that investors won’t want to replace?
Any chance that sanity will be restored soon?
A lesson for Brown
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, June 30, 11 (06:00 am)
Pofessor Sinclair Davidson explains why Greens leader Bob Brown is a an economic menace:
Yesterday, at the National Press Club, Brown did his best to stoke up anger against investors from “Switzerland, London, Calcutta, Beijing” and foreigners who, according to a study commissioned by the Greens and released yesterday, own 83 per cent of Australian mining companies.,,
Brown may have good intentions but he is economically illiterate. That illiteracy is likely to cost ordinary Australians dearly; many will lose their jobs and their standard of living is likely to fall....
The Greens have long run a campaign against the mining industry and particularly the coal industry. In fact their stated party policy is no new coalmines and no expansion of existing mines. They fully intend to close down the Australian coal industry. Sooner rather than later.
Brown makes two arguments in defence of this policy. First, that renewables would replace coal. Second, that the Australian mining industry is largely foreign owned…
. Because of his anti-foreign bias, Brown overlooks the benefits of interaction with foreigners… Australia has long had to borrow money from the rest of the world to finance our economic prosperity. The local economy has grown and foreign investors got their money back. This arrangement has benefited everybody; Australian savings are simply too small to finance our economic growth and standard of living....
Remarkably, Brown admits that Australia gets “jobs, export income, royalties and company tax” from mining. But that is not enough; he wants it all. He seems to object to foreigners, in return for their loans and investments, getting “profits, dividends, [and] capital appreciation”.
Brown’s figures may not be right, either:
While the Greens latched on to claims that $50 billion worth of mining company dividends would flow overseas in the next five years, the party’s own figures also revealed that for every $1 sent offshore more than $4 was invested back in the Australian mining industry.
The $50bn figure for mining dividends sent offshore has also come under scrutiny for apparently being based on the assumption that the sector has the same average dividend payout ratio as all foreign equity profits.
Wanted: paid disciples for a Messiah who’s lost her flock
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, June 30, 11 (05:39 am)
Want $250,000 from the Gillard Government? Then just sign up and give wonderful testimonials about how you’ve been transformed by the green vision that Julia is preaching, and how we can be, too.
The $3m grant program will be open from 30 June 2011 and will provide organisations the opportunity to apply for grants of up to $250,000 to share their stories and demonstrate the opportunities associated with Australia moving to a clean energy future.
And the control the citizens will actually have?
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, June 29, 11 (05:04 pm)
Greens leader Bob Brown really does think this is good and can work:
So why shouldn’t we now join vigorous moves in Europe and at the United Nations for a global people’s assembly based on one person, one vote, one value?
Latest research: no, the Reef isn’t being killed by warming
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, June 29, 11 (03:42 pm)
Julia Gillard claims global warming is already killing the Great Barrier Reef:
Australian natural wonders such as the Great Barrier Reef are already being damaged, and the risk of coastal flooding could double by the end of the century.
Warmist alarmist Sir Nicholas Stern made the same claim:
The snows on Kilimanjaro are virtually gone, the Barrier Reef is probably going...
The ABC was already hypeing up the destruction of the reef by global warming in 2002:
The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority says up to 10 per cent of the reef has been lost to bleaching since 1998.
ABC host Kerry O’Brien back then treated the death of the reef as imminent:
It’s not just Australia’s farmlands which are threatened by global warming, the greenhouse effect could also spell disaster for coral reefs around the world, including our own natural wonder, the Great Barrier Reef.
As Australia prepares for another hot summer, one man is on a mission to capture as many corals as possible on high-definition camera before even more stretches of once-spectacular reef are bleached bone-white.
And remember the alarmism of prominent warmist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg?
In 1998, he warned that the reef was under pressure from global warming, and much had turned white.
He later admitted the reef had made a “surprising” recovery.In 1999 he claimed global warming would cause mass bleaching of the reef every two years from 2010.
He yesterday admitted it hadn’t.
In 2006, he warned high temperatures meant “between 30 and 40 per cent of coral on Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef could die within a month”.
He later admitted this bleaching had a “minimal impact”.
All that alarmism, relentlessly pushed by this desperately dishonest government, is now blown out of the water by the latest research by Townsville’s Australian Institute of Marine Science:
Monitoring data collected annually from fixed sites at 47 reefs across 1300 km of the GBR indicate that overall regional coral cover was stable (averaging 29% and ranging from 23% to 33% cover across years) with no net decline between 1995 and 2009....
Crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci) outbreaks and storm damage were responsible for more coral loss during this period than either bleaching or disease despite two mass bleaching events and an increase in the incidence of coral disease.
While the limited data for the GBR prior to the 1980’s suggests that coral cover was higher than in our survey, we found no evidence of consistent, system-wide decline in coral cover since 1995. Instead, fluctuations in coral cover at subregional scales (10–100 km), driven mostly by changes in fast-growing Acroporidae, occurred as a result of localized disturbance events and subsequent recovery.
You have been deceived again and again and again.
(Thanks to reader Steve.)
Even the rice is telling the warmists they’re wrong
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, June 29, 11 (03:09 pm)
In 2008, the warming alarmists swore we’d soon run out of food:
Impoverished farmers in South Asia and southern Africa could face growing food shortages due to climate change within just 20 years, a new study says…
“The majority of the world’s one billion poor depend on agriculture for their livelihoods,” said the lead author of the new study, David Lobell of Stanford University.
“Unfortunately, agriculture is also the human enterprise most vulnerable to changes in climate.”
Rice crops in particular would be hammered:
Rice is arguably the world’s most important food source and helps feed about half the globe’s people. But yields in many areas will drop as the globe warms in future years, a review of studies on rice and climate change suggests.
...when the evidence from some 80 different studies is combined, the outlook is bleak, says Elizabeth Ainsworth of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
But so far, no such sign in the real world:
Global rice production is expected to touch 476 million tons in 2011, on the back of improved weather conditions, as the influence of La Niña is expected to neutralize by June, United Nation’s body FAO said.
The world rice production reached a new record in 2010, at 464 million tons (696 million tons paddy), up 1.8% from the previous season, FAO said.
(Thanks to reader Craig.)
Apologies to Barnaby, anyone?
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, June 30, 11 (11:55 am)
Barack Obama warns that the US could default:
U.S. President Barack Obama said on Wednesday an Aug. 2 deadline to raise the country’s legal borrowing limit was a real deadline and warned that a default would have significant and damaging consequences.
“If the United States government, for the first time, cannot pay its bills, if it defaults, then the consequences for the U.S. economy will be significant and unpredictable,” he told a news conference.
Remember the confected scandal two years ago when Barnaby Joyce warned of this very same thing?:
TONY Abbott’s new finance spokesman, Barnaby Joyce, believes the American Government may default on its debt, triggering an ‘’economic Armageddon’’ that will make the recent global financial crisis pale into insignificance....
Senator Joyce came under attack from several ministers, including Treasurer Wayne Swan, who said he had been elevated ‘’straight from the reactionary fringe of our economic debate to the second most senior economic policy-making job in the alternative government’’…
Senator Joyce first warned of America defaulting at a Senate estimates hearing in October where he asked Treasury secretary Ken Henry for his views.
Dr Henry warned then that public figures had to be careful about discussing ‘’hypotheticals that are that extreme’’ because such discussions could be misinterpreted in the community.
Rather than tempering his language since his promotion, Senator Joyce has stepped up the rhetoric, saying he also had concerns that some states would have trouble repaying their borrowings.
‘’The first thing you tell a new client is exactly where they are. We have to tell the Australian people precisely where they are,’’ said the former accountant from the Queensland town of St George.
Joyce later lost his portfolio after intense media ridiculing for being so silly.
Beware the herd mentality.
(Thanks to reader Paul.)
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