You're a selfish bunch, too! IIRC, the problem was that the SSC + the ISS + the Human Genome Project meant that there would not be money left for the "small science" grants that most researchers depend on. Something had to give. The SSC lost because a handful of physicists were up against 1000s of scientists from other disciplines. Personally, I'd have rather seen the ISS die rather than the SSC, but one of the three had to go.

All taxes modify your behavior. Income taxes change the rewards earned from work and thus affect your willingness to work that extra hour. Sales taxes increase the cost of consumption thus increasing your willingness to save. Property taxes raise the cost of, and thus the incentives to own, higher valued property.

Taxes that fall into the category of "taxes used to modify behavior" are usually Pigovian taxes that attempt to make people pay for the externalities they are imposing on others because the market price of the taxed good does not cover the true cost of producing or consuming the good. If smokers do not have to pay for the health costs of smoking by paying higher health insurance premiums, for example, the cost can be recouped through a tax on cigarettes. Higher gas taxes are useful for making SUV owners pay for the cost of maintaining large armies to protect oil supplies or pay the costs of global warming they are imposing on others.

Frankly, we would all be a lot better and have smaller govt and pay less in taxes if the govt just got out of the behavior modification business a let adults live as adults, choosing how they want to live as long as it it legal.

You share a planet with ~6 billion other people. Frankly, almost everything you choose to do imposes a cost on other people. Why shouldn't you be expected to pay the full costs of all of your decisions?

Interesting that the research he quotes to make his point is funded by those groups who stand to lose the most if global warming legislation is passed.

Let's look at who some of the people who fund icecap.us are:

Robert C. Balling Jr - Balling has acknowledged receiving $408,000 in research funding from the fossil fuel industry over the last decade (of which his University takes 50% for overhead). Contributors include ExxonMobil, the British Coal Corporation, Cyprus Minerals and OPEC.

Sallie Baliunas - Between December 1998 and September 2001 she was listed as a "Scientific Adviser" to the Greening Earth Society, a group that was funded and controlled by the Western Fuels Association (WFA), an association of coal-burning utility companies. WFA founded the group in 1997, according to an archived version of it website, "as a vehicle for advocacy on climate change, the environmental impact of CO2, and fossil fuel use."

Robert M. Carter - Sits on the advisory board of the Institute of Public Affairs which is funded by the mining and tobacco industry along with Monsanto. 'I don't think it is the point whether or not you are paid by the coal or petroleum industry,' said Professor Carter.

The EPA is doing its duty by choosing to ignore junk science funded by the coal and oil lobbies.

Sorry, my initial comment generally applies to U.S. grads of the top programs. The foreign grads usually have a different career path that not infrequently leads to high government office (Treasury Secretary or even President of whatever African, Latin American, or East European country you came from). Until recently, Wall Street was grabbing many of the best and brightest as well (both U.S. and foreign). I have several friends who went on to solid research careers at the Fed. But EPA? No way.

There are two standard academic journals where the specialized stuff in Environmental Economics is published: Land Economics and The Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. Carlin has published only a single article in Land Econ and none in JEEM during his entire career dating back to the mid-1960s. Furthermore, he only began publishing on the economics of global warming in 2007. Finally, anyone who is first rate coming out of a Ph.D. Econ program in MIT gets a Prof job at Berkeley, Harvard, Chicago, etc. The second raters get placements at Nebraska, Auburn, Oregon State, etc. It is only the dregs that end up as civil servants in places like the EPA. I would almost completely dismiss him except that I did notice that he had co-authored a couple of papers 15 years ago with Kip Viscusi who is certainly not a lightwieght in the field of risk assessment but who has also happily accepted money from Exxon for studying the economics of punitive damages resulting from the Exxon Valdez oil spill case.

Bottom line: Carlin is a 60 year-old fart who has done no significant research in his entire career and has a political viewpoint that is coloring what little work he has done.

If you really want to see how big an explosion lithium can make, compress some lithium hydride while bombarding it with neutrons.

Don't blame the media for ratting out Joe the Plumber. The media just gave him the rope he used to hang himself.

But I'm also aware that cash *never* gains value, it only loses purchasing power.

Then why is the $500 computer for sale at Best Buy today 1000+ times more powerful than the $5000 IBM PC XT sold in the early 1980s?

One of the Baron Rothchilds died in the late 1800s from a bacterial infection that we would cure today with $4 worth of antibiotics. All of that gold that he held could not save him.

The idea that cash will only lose purchasing power is silly when you actually compare the goods and prices available today with the goods and prices available 20, 30, or 100 years ago.

You've discovered peridoxium.

It's time to give up the knee-jerk Bush bashing and get some new material.

Why? That's like asking people to give up watching the Three Stooges just because we've got plenty of more recent comics. Some things will always be classics.

I'll bet that JPL is handled the same way as DOE's Nat'l Labs. ORNL, Livermore, Los Alamos, etc. are physically owned by DOE which hires a contractor to manage them (Univ of TN && Batelle for ORNL, Univ of CA for Los Alamos). So JPL is probably physically owned by NASA and the employees are paid by CalTech acting as contractor. If CalTech actually owned JPL, they could probably tell NASA and DHS where to put their security checks for employees whose jobs don't require security clearances.

The polls show that most Texans find the idea of leaving the U.S. to be thoroughly idiotic.

Thinker? Reason Magazine is a bastion of shoddy thinking and dishonest analysis. Rather than honestly analyze issues, they start with an ideological position and then massage the facts to fit into that ideology. Most of them would make lousy Justices too.

+5 Informative.

While I am sympathetic to many aspects of Libertarianism, I find much of the philosophy and its proponents to be stuck in 1776 as if the world has been technically, economically, and environmentally static for the past 233 years.

The problem is that there are only a handful of media outfits left that are willing to to pay to put boots on the ground. How many U.S. reporters are there in Iraq right now. Two, maybe three? The Boston Globe is buying its Iraq coverage from the same reporter that the the NYTimes uses. And he is the same guy who is interviewed by Jim Lehrer on PBS. So if this guy makes a mistake, it is propagated and repeated by the hundreds of papers that buy their international (and often national) coverage from the Times.

That wouldn't have anything to do with the massive housing crisis would it? Perhaps people overextending themselves on mortgages, drunk on cheap credit and tax deductible interest.

There is no evidence that mortgage interest deductibility contributed to the current crisis. What the deduction tends to do is raise the general price level of all owner occupied housing above what it would be if there were no such deduction and thus prices lower income households out of the market. Remember, a married couple that does not itemize deductions has a standard deduction (2009) of $11,400, so they must be paying about that much in interest and local taxes per year to break even vs. the standard deduction.