Comment Re:Cap & Trade = Energy Rationing (Score 1) 874
Allow me to explain (b). The government made those loans interesting for tax reasons for large banks. (read the CRA)
Oh, so you've read the CRA. Good. So you can explain the tax credits to banks (or better yet, cite the CRA!)? What they were? What was requird to get them? Tax incentives for borrowers is one thing, but for banks? That's darned interesting.
So there we have it. Lots of loans, who are, in the long term, extremely unprofitable BUT having them in your possession on Jan. 1 of any year is unbelievably profitable.
You didn't come anywhere near reconciling your claim with the four pieces of evidence I pointed out. Like how that affects the majority of the subprime lenders--who were not covered by the CRA. At all. Or again, why CRA covered loans did not underperform mortgages in general.
It seems you've dropped the GSEs from you complaint. What happened there? Where is the devastating explanation of how they drove the housing crisis from behind?
So you've created a game of "hot potato". You have a package that blows up & you pass it around.
Ding! That's definitely the source of the problem. But the incentive to do it is there in the absence of the CRA or any other bogey man piece of legislation. How do we know this? Because the majority of the hot potato loans were being originated by "nonbank entities" rather than by regulated institutions. I would think somebody as data driven as yourself would have checked that out.
You seem... err... out of your depth on this one.
Sulphur dioxide emissions have reduced by a little under 50% in the US. World-wide, however, they have risen. The net result was, obviously, a large rise in these emissions...However, the policy only bought some time, it did not solve the problem.
Sooo... "buying time" is not a useful activity at all, right? Because to me, that's a very useful activity. The longer you have to sort out your emissions problems, the better off you are for reasons explained below.
More to the point, was our economy crippled in the process? Why am I not busy stacking millions of skulls of dead American children in a gulag somewhere?
I can't find any CFC numbers. However, CFC's cause the expansion of the gap in the ozone layer. I wonder if it has shrunk ? Since if your claims are right, then we'd see a massive shrinking of the hole in the ozone layer
... I'm sure you've checked that beforehand ... heh ... I forgot ... democrat ...
Did you use your mad data-finding skills to note that CFCs take an average of 15 years to get to the upper atmophere and stay there for an average of 100 years? Considering the date of the Montreal Protocol and that total atmospheric concentrations of the chemicals didn't start decreasing until the early / mid 90s, no I wouldn't expect that at all.
The data from the Montreal Protocol agreements are an excellent example of what can happen when a handful of the top powers get together and tax an emission. It lowers their emissions and spurs innovation, creating products that then make lowering emissions a low-cost, enabling countries that originally didn't sign on (*cough* China) to be more easily goaded into lowering their emissions. But perhaps I should defer to a more rational person who has spent 3 minutes on Wikipedia.