It's okay if we disagree - I just hope that you can see my point of view.

I worry about people who depend upon the government because the government can up and disappear from time to time. I don't mean that literally - the US is pretty stable and I don't expect to see it actually disappear. But I do expect swings in policy that leave people in a lurch. I do expect abandonment of promises, a la the Detroit pensioners. I think that making promises to people about a future that you do not control is immoral. And, yes, on a philosophical level, I do believe that people should be able to look after themselves to the extent that is possible.

It is very difficult to separate them. Nearly all of the seniors who are completely dependent on Social Security were at one time working - otherwise they would not get very much money. The fact that they now depend completely on Social Security is both a success and a failure of the program. It is a success in that you don't have destitute seniors at the same level you had prior to the program's start. But it's a failure in that millions now depend on the government as their retirement plan. Ideally there should be some kind of incentive to get people to save on their own so that they don't require a government check to survive.

So I don't think I agree that they are separate programs with separate goals. I think we'd both agree that it would be better if people did not have to rely on government assistance.

To your point, Medicare is perhaps better separated out, since we seem to have decided that the old deserve socialized healthcare - full stop. If people are getting substandard care via Medicare and the problem is deemed to be financial, then yes the only answer is to raise taxes so that we don't under-fund our elder care.

But the numbers ARE big, and after almost 50 years of growth in government assistance programs we still have the same percentage of people living in poverty. I concede that number is contested, but even the more optimistic number shows that the people lifted from poverty are now dependent upon the government to keep them out of poverty. Government assistance, as it is implemented now, is not being used as a safety net - it is being relied upon permanently.

I don't think very many object to the idea of a safety net - but it is not anti-poor to suggest that government programs should have a goal of getting people to stand on their own two feet.

  To "bring it back" to the original reason I commented, I don't think it is wrong to suggest that a specific solar policy might be better or worse for people with low incomes. Raising taxes to throw even more money at the problem of poverty is asking a lot given the track record that this method has.

Social Security is not smoke and mirrors - it is money being moved from low and mid-income earners to everyone over 65. It is actually quite straightforward. Medicaid/medicare is similar, except that the recipients can also be needy.

High-wage earners already have their Social Security subject to income tax, so it does get further reapportioned to the needy. Take the total spent on social security and cut it in half if you want to adjust for non-needy recipients - it's still a huge entitlement program that mostly supports people who would otherwise be impoverished.

Don't bring up entitlement spending? That, along with healthcare are the largest chunks. 2/3 of federal spending are dedicated to people completely reliant on government. This may or may not have decreased poverty - depending on whose statistics you believe - but at what cost? Total dependence? What happens to these people when government collapses, even for a little while? Katrina, that's what. I really, honestly, do not mind throwing money at people so that they do not starve. But let's not pretend that is anything more than charity. If you "care for the poor", you'll support programs and policies which get them on their own two feet - not make them wards of the state. Admonishing people who don't want to simply throw even more money at a failed "solution" will not help anyone.

The PV distributors are the Rent-A-Center of solar :)

The solution to the poor has always been to throw more money at the problem, and yet we now spend 50% of our total budget on health, education, or entitlements. And yet we still have poor people. In fact, the official poverty statistics remain unchanged. Even the most optimistic poverty statistics show that these services are not lifting anyone out of poverty, but are instead the only thing keeping them out of poverty.

I suggest that, while there is nothing wrong with supporting people so that they don't starve, perhaps the solution of "throw more money at the poor" is not as effective as you seem to think.

While that is absolutely true, the population of CA is still far better off than they would be without the reservoirs - they would have had to move (or die) 2 years ago. The fact is that they will pump water where they need to and it will get expensive, and maybe make certain types of agriculture uneconomical. But we'll defeat mother nature's attempt to kill us.

"Follow the money" is indeed a good strategy. I recommend you apply that philosophy equally to those who have made careers out of denying AGW. It also shouldn't take too much time to realize that we are probably 20 years into something of a consensus on AGW within the scientific community, and "the government" has changed hands between the Democrats and Republicans a few times since then. If there was political influence, you would expect some wavering amongst the scientific community - and yet there has been none.

It wasn't me, it was ncc74656.

So you are asserting that all of the climate scientists are bad at their jobs, and if only some smart people would step up and build some proper models, we'd see just how wrong they are. Interesting. If only there were some smart people who wanted to look into climate science...

I completely agree, and my post was meant to be sarcastic. I'm completely against the fatalist attitude.

Seems like we need to adjust either terrestrial radio or let Pandora pay less.

The nice thing about us - versus an anthropomorphized "Mother Earth" - is that we don't need to throw a massive amount of volcanic ash into the air in some completely uncontrolled way. We can put some into the air and see what the effect is like. We can gradually increase or decrease the amount applied. We can stop the "eruption" at any time and let the effect quickly dissipate.

I'm not trying to be glib about this - the ideal is to stop throwing CO2 into the air in the first place. But the fatalist approach irks me - we have never been fatalist about what Mother Nature throws at us. She makes droughts, we make reservoirs and food storage. She makes floods, we build dams. Our whole existence is best summed up as one big fight with that wretched bitch.

Yes, let mother nature take care of us. All hail our Goddess Earth.

Even if the 97% number is a complete fabrication, you'd have a very hard time finding someone who has studied climate for a living who has an opinion that humans haven't significantly contributed to the warming of the planet. Sure, you'll find the odd physicist or meteorologist - but no one who has made it their living to model the climate. Picking at the 97% number is really just grasping at straws and trying to win the argument on semantics.