I seem to recall that when the foundation was originally created, it wasn't intended to last forever (though I could remember that wrong or plans might have changed). And Buffet is making significant contributions to the foundation on the condition that they be used for charity that year and matched by the foundation.

Of course. I don't expect you'd get a mere 3% from actual consideration of the larger budget items.

Sure we can. It's worth remembering that economic activity is not a good measure of economic benefit. Most government spending hinders the economy. It takes from someone productive and gives to someone less productive. So not doing the transaction is an instant economy boost. But the government transaction can result in short term increased economic activity because the productive person might not throw it immediately into the economy like the other would.

I consider the two synonymous. It's not materially different if you spend $3 million to see if teens are likely to have sex than you spend $3 million to make rich elderly or a megacorp richer.

Social Security is 21% of the budget (and a significant portion of the unfunded liabilities). Most of that is for retirees. That's foolish spending right there - above 3%. There's military spending of almost 17%. Most of that is for pointless procurements for wars the US will never fight or privating contract at triple the cost of the military doing it themselves. I bet we can find another 3% (if not much more) there. Global war on terror is only about 5%, but that combined with the war on drugs probably has 3% of foolish spending in there somewhere.

I believe we can find similar problems in each Medicare or the other "mandatory" spending (merely creating a distinction between "discretionary" and "mandatory" spending is a sign of foolish spending, especially when those terms don't mean anything). And I think there's enough foolish spending out there to have generated more than a third of past debt that we still owe. So there's another 3% in interest payments due to foolish spending. See where I'm going with this?

My take is that foolish spending is probably on the wrong side of two-thirds of the US federal budget. I would count the entirety of Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, at least half of other "mandatory" spending, at least half of military spending, and the entirety of interest. That's just shy of two thirds right there.

That freedom leads to other freedoms. For example, the freedom to manufacture things, such as guns.

Opportunity costs, the costs from paths not taken, are invisible. I believe high taxes have stopped plenty of people from succeeding. And have inhibited those who do manage to succeed anyway. But those could have beens are invisible to us. I can't show you a person who succeeded because the private world retained another ten percent of collective income. There's no repeatable test here.

And success from milking public funding or protective regulation is just as successful for the person doing it as success from a useful private endeavor. So there are a number of successes that wouldn't have happened in the advent of lower taxes.

Everything is debatable. That is the fundamental lesson of the sophists from ancient Greece.

Sure. That doesn't mean opportunity is positively correlated with such things. For example, labor in the developed world has to compete with cheaper labor throughout the world for decades. So how did the developed world respond to this challenge? They made their labor much more expensive with a variety of social security programs. I think such things only make sense, if they provide more value than they lose.

No, it wasn't. Though if that were the case, then he'd be about $30 billion poorer than if he had done that activity. Keep in mind that $7 billion is a profit over the period of a year while that $36 billion, donated over many years, includes donations from others (for example, Warren Buffet is a very significant contributor as well) and earned income on the donations that were already made.

For what? What's the actual evidence for a "massive corporate tax dodge"?

Why would you think that? First, it is obvious that there are tax benefits to giving away money to charity. But these benefits are less than 100%. That is, if Bill Gates donates, say $3.4 billion to the foundation at a federal tax rate of 35% he will get back almost $1.2 billion in saved taxes (assuming as happened here that he was earning enough to make that happen). That means donating to charity is a money sink, though a subsidized one.

What likely happened is that his investments did well. He has a lot more money where those donations came from. My take is that he would have earned somewhere around 9 billion after taxes for that year.

There may also be an additional tax advantage to donating assets that have appreciated greatly.But it still strikes me, if he's not earning a vast amount of income or capital gains, then he doesn't have a need for a tax shelter.

Why? Sure, if all you care about is health care or social services, two things that the US tends to be remarkably poor at, then maybe the US isn't for you. But if you're looking for a relatively free country, a country with relatively low taxes, or a country with a lot of opportunity you aren't going to do much better than the US.

Oh well, I guess we'll just have to grow corn or whatever in the parts of Baffin Island that do have topsoil and aren't that bare rock and lichen. Or maybe we'll grow it in the vast regions elsewhere that do have those conditions for topsoil.

And you don't have a clue what a problem is.

Why not? It's not like that is a particularly challenging problem. You know, a "problem". It's just a matter of either moving things around to better locales or planting crops that grow better in the new environment.

As I've argued before, I see no evidence that global warming will even cause a noticeable constraint for human civilization. We are so fluid and adaptable over the time scales that AGW acts on that I think the effects of AGW will be near invisible to us.

Costs are small because costs are small. From your link:

There's probably more costs with complying with the market regulation than with the actual trading of allowances. We didn't see drama in the European CO2 emission markets until they hit actual hard caps and emitting CO2 had large regulatory costs. Then things broke. Note that the price never passed $30 per ton (of CO2 not carbon as claimed in the article). So how will the RGGI region fare when CO2 allowance costs grow higher and surrounding regions aren't subject to these costs?

What did I say that gives that appearance? There's only so much that actually happened. I merely poked holes in the myths you parroted, such as the alleged greater intelligence of Obama (despite his continued inability to demonstrate that supposedly greater intelligence) than G. W. Bush, asserting that Bush didn't "take control" of Katrina (when he did, just at a later time), or the myth of the start of this line of discussion, the claim that Obama handled Sandy better than Bush handled Katrina (when most of the differences can be explained by the incompetence of the New Orleans government - from construction of flood control systems to preparing for a large hurricane).

Then you state that you see no point in discussion this further "with someone who believes that no matter how bad things were handled it wasn't Bush's fault and no matter how well they were handled it wasn't to the credit of Obama". I agree. You should spend your time instead getting educated about what actually happened in these disasters and how local and state governments responded.

All scientists aren't involved. Aggregation of paleoclimate data, for example, is done by a few, publicly funded organizations.

Like blind men studying an elephant. Too much remains unknown about where carbon comes from and goes.

There was a recent proposal for a climate change "reparations" fund. They were hoping to eventually fund it at about $100 billion a year. That alone would probably be on the order of the total global profits from "Big Carbon" in an average year.

There are also substantial amounts spent on CO2 emission markets, renewable energy development and subsidy, and development of electric cars and related technologies. I would say that it is on the order of tens of billions per year. So what am I to think of the scientific prowess of someone who only pays attention to one part of a problem?

For someone who claims to work in science, you are remarkably confident about your opinions.

Maybe you don't actually work in science and just pretend to on Slashdot. There isn't empirical data to support your claim. For example, electric power and transportation costs (for corresponding types of transportation, cars compared to cars) are more expensive in areas that have severely restricted or taxed use of fossil fuels than in areas that haven't.

Second, there is ample evidence for the claim that interfering with an economy by making it less efficient has costs. These costs increase as the degree and extent of the interference increases. Monkeying around with the energy and transportation infrastructure for the world is not going to be a negligible impact. I think it immensely foolish to insist otherwise.

In favor of AGW is the claim that there are global scale externalities which would also be a form of economic inefficiency. The problem with that claim is that the degree of these costs seems rather low. I think it reasonable to insist that we demonstrate that AGW has these costs first before we plunge into widespread mitigation of AGW. The people who claim to be in favor of the "science" don't seem interested.

That hasn't happened so far.

That's pathetic because it is trivial to game. They'll just provide a rubber stamp to some flunkie somewhere and that will become the rigorous judging process.

That's what AK Marc said, aside from the observation that GPA doesn't really matter for other uses than continuing one's education. I've only been asked my GPA for continuing education and a job at the US federal Census Bureau. Nobody else has cared.

But will it try to tell the truth? People forget that there are massive conflicts of interest present among the sponsors of the IPCC and its reports. And these have resulted in deceptions which exaggerated the extent and impact of AGW in the past.

That hasn't been demonstrated.