This blog printed on 100% recycled electrons.
Biofuel boosters, meet your newest friend: Gliocladium roseum, a rainforest fungus that "makes biofuel more efficiently than any other known method." Professor Gary Strobel of Montana State University says this little fungus from Patagonia can eat cellulose (no easy feat—you try lunching on cornstalk) and turn it into myco-diesel—i.e., hydrocarbons that can help us go zoom-zoom.Promoted from the comment section at the Madville Times:
Julie Lavin, of Almost Home Canine Rescue is coordinating a group to attend Monday night's meeting on November 10th at 5:30. If you are concerned or have a fence that would be affected, please contact Julie at jlavin6@sio.midco.net and make sure you contact your City Commissioners, Dick Ericsson, Karen Lembcke, Dan Bohl, Scott Delzer and Mayor Gene Hexom to express your thoughts prior to Monday night's meeting at City Hall.
Now that's the kind of citizen participation I like to see! Remember, the squeaky wheels get the grease (or is it the squeaky pups that get the Alpo?). But please, leash up your pooches outside the City Commission room....
...submit your comments at RealMadison.org!
My Keloland colleagues Todd Epp and Cory Heidelberger don't like corporations. They think all our stuff should be provided free of charge by fairies [Ken Blanchard, "Alphabet Soup Ballot Picks, South Dakota Politics, 2008.11.02].
Today, Social Security is financed by a 12.4 percent payroll tax, the expense of which is evenly split between employers and employees or paid in full by the self-employed. To maintain the fiction that Social Security is a retirement insurance program in which contributions are linked to benefits, rather than what it is—a transfer of income from workers and the self-employed to retired people—income is taxed only up to a maximum of $68,400 [Alvin Rabushka, "Flatten the Payroll Tax—and Save the World," Hoover Digest, 1999, vol. 2].
Obama's proposing a top marginal rate of 39% for people earning $250,000 or more. Folks, the top marginal income tax rate in the United States was 50% or (usually) higher every single year from 1932 through 1986. Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives.......Every. Single. Year. But maybe that's nothing more than that "pre-9/11 thinking" that the current crop of Washington scoundrels wants to banish from our skull cavities.
It was over 90% for 1944-45, and 1950 through 1963. Note that the years during which we were at war the top rate exceeded 90%. Note that we are currently involved in two wars, in massive public debt, and operating with the lowest top marginal income tax rate since before the depression.
Is it really asking too much for the people who interview the candidates to bring this up? Do these people actually think the US was "Socialist" during the entire time that we were fighting the cold war to restrain Communism? [Lee Russ, "Obama Joins Adam Smith, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and All Those Other Damned Socialists," Watching the Watchers, 2008.10.22].
THE Iraq war has cost the US 50-60 times more than the Bush administration predicted and was a central cause of the sub-prime banking crisis threatening the world economy, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
The former World Bank vice-president yesterday said the war had, so far, cost the US something like $US3trillion ($3.3 trillion) compared with the $US50-$US60-billion predicted in 2003.
...The spending on Iraq was a hidden cause of the current credit crunch because the US central bank responded to the massive financial drain of the war by flooding the American economy with cheap credit.
"The regulators were looking the other way and money was being lent to anybody this side of a life-support system," he said.
That led to a housing bubble and a consumption boom, and the fallout was plunging the US economy into recession and saddling the next US president with the biggest budget deficit in history, he said [Peter Wilson, "Iraq War 'Caused Slowdown in the US," The Australian, 2008.02.28].
With China and other foreign countries absorbing Treasury securities directly, and U.S. corporations still coming off of their late-90's investment binge, the beneficiaries of the tax cuts absorbed newly issued securities primarily in the form of mortgage obligations and the bulk of the real investment was spent to build residential homes to excess. We are now seeing the results of that overinvestment.
So the policies of recent years have indeed been stimulative. But stimulative to what? Primarily to unproductive investment and poor credit. There is nothing wrong with debt that is incurred to obtain productive assets, legitimate national security, or the relief of suffering. In this instance, there is little to show but liabilities. The U.S. is now saddled with a burdensome federal debt, a deep current account deficit, reduced competitiveness, a weakened financial system, a tragic and needless loss of life on both sides of the war, and a growing indebtedness that allows major U.S. companies to be picked away by foreign hands like apples from a tree [John P. Hussman, "How the War, Tax Cuts, and the Swaps Market Debased the U.S. Financial System," HussmanFunds.com, 2008.07.21].
There's no magic bullet, says Steven Fazzari, economics professor at Washington University in St. Louis. The root cause of the current economic slowdown in the U.S. goes back several decades. There has been a concurrent wave of increasing consumer spending and rising consumer indebtedness. In the past, consumer spending actually helped the economy as it raised firms' sales and encouraged more hiring. But the associated rise in household debt, most obviously in the recent housing bubble, has come back to haunt the U.S. [Shula Neuman, "Recession's Root Cause Is Consumer Debt, Expert Says," Washington University in St. Louis News & Information, 2008.03.31]
I think the drink tax would be taxing a certain percentage of our taxpayers and not all. We try to make fair taxes, but I think we should find another way to supplement our county budget that would effect [sic] all the taxpayers of the county and not just a partial group. [Gene Anderson, "Anderson, Johannsen Among Five Seeking Commission Seats," Madison Daily Leader, 2008.10.29, p. 2]
Yes. Well over half of the cost of law enforcement, court, public defenders, states attorney and jail are directly related to alcohol. I think this tax should be used specifically to offset these costs. At last estimate, Lake County's share would be approximately $300,000. [Craig Johannsen, ibid.]
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