Food for Thought, Pulp Edition, and a ‘Peace Dividend’
Tim Taylor (via Mark Thoma) reads part of President Obama’s Proposed Budget and finds this gem:
The share of electricity generation from renewable sources was 19.7% of the total in 1960, fell to 9.4% by 2000, and had risen to 13.2% of the total in 2014.
I assume that means almost 1/5 of the U.S. energy supply 55 years ago was from lumber. Erik Loomis can tell you what happened next.
ETC: bob in Comments notes that I managed to ignore hydroelectric as a renewal power source. Anyone still taking advice from my 2008 article about water investments in Institutional Investor is appropriately cautioned.
ETA:
My favorite data point in a quick perusal: From its 2010 peak to 2014, DoD-Military spending dropped from $690,469,000,000 to $581,456,000,000. Even if you assume the lowest-range economic estimate of waste for military spending, that’s a real economic gain of around $32.7 billion, or just under half of the total spending on Education.
I believe hydroelectric is considered a (the?) renewable source – and I can believe that 1/5 of US electricity generation in 1960 was hydro.
Most of the dams that would be built were built before or soon after.
Lord ,
Yep. ~20% of electricity in 1960 , ~ 9% by 2000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USHydroPower.jpg
Which would mean that at least thru 2000 , virtually all the renewable electricity was hydro.
re: “I assume that means almost 1/5 of the U.S. energy supply 55 years ago was from lumber”
actualy, since we’re talking a percentage of the total, the decrease from 19.7% to 9.4% could just be that coal generation doulbed, and that hydro was hence a smaller percentage of that…
(i was around 55 years ago, and dont recall any woodburners)
Correcting cherry picked data on massive DoD trough.
The “plot box” of DoD spending (w/o Overseas Contingency Operating (OCO) funds) between 25% and 75% is $407B to $545B in FY 13 dollars.
In 2010 spending was near peak for the Global war on the Taxpayer which started in 2002.
In 2010 the war and rest of the pentagon took around 5.5% ($630B FY 13 w/o GWOT $ OCO of $150B) of GDP, that is about the same percent of GDP and more in real dollars than the Reagan build up and Vietnam!
By 2014 percent of GDP is just under 4% ($545B FY 13 w/o GWOT) . This is greater than 75% of the years since 1948.
To compare the whole pentagon took 3.5% ($400B FY 13) of GDP in 2000.
US will continue to spend historically high amount to fight goatherds compared to the Cold War.
One more thing.
Decline in pentagon troughing seen in 2014 included sequestration, which the pentagon cuts were matched with cuts in [non war profiteering] other discretionary spending
For FY16, we will spend a shade over $1T on education.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2016USbn_17bs2n_20#usgs302
Let us also consider that, around 1960, defense spending was 50% of the federal budget. It is now under 20%.
Actually you were just 80 years to late on the wood item. According to what I read most energy use in 1880 or so was from wood. in particular if you include wood stoves for heating and cooking. For the near subsistence farmer a wood lot was a way to be more nearly self sufficient in energy. I believe that before WWII for example most of the cooking one of my grandmothers used was on a wood stove, but this was on a farm not in the city.
The big change was the coming of electricity, and as well the completion of the national rail network in the mid 1880s.
To add a bit further is wood used in that mode a renewable resource in particular if you manage the rate of usage it is. However for example the steamboats on the MS river used most of the wood near the banks by the 1880s.
Since this post is about the federal budget, I suspect that the statement about spending on education was federal spending, not total spending including state and local.
Regardless of the numbers. Our present geniuses in the pentagon eliminated one of the best air ground support aircraft for a new jet that cost near a billion a copy and is a failure in dog fights.
Warren,
You should see what Heritage says about the frightening prospect of spending less than 5% of GDP for the ineptitude of the pentagon.
In real dollars, adjusted for inflation the pentagon gets as much as in high times of Reagan.
In real threats the US faces goatherds.
In “force structure” the US pays as much as when it had twice the units.
So much for high tech improving “efficiency” and with all the faulty systems high tech effectiveness is a mess.
Beene,
I helped “activate” A-10 units. It is an awesome weapon and remains so against most things the ground troops in contact need to have blown away.
Even then, early 1980’s, the USAF wanted the F-16 sports edition. It was fast, could fill in to intercept and not nearly as accurate, and took 200 miles to turn around and take a “second run”. But it is sexy!
Congress helped keep A-10 alive, one of the very few smart things they do.
Lately it seems the USAF is relenting on trying to retire it.
F-35 will be another decade to get to were the F-16 is, if ever.
ilsm, thanks for the update on the A10. I’m sure the young men on the ground will definitely vote safety over sexy.
“I suspect that the statement about spending on education was federal spending, not total spending including state and local.”
If true, then that makes about as much sense as complaining that the U.S. government does not spend enough on sewer maintenance and garbage trucks.
Ilsm, you seem to be arguing that, because the DoD is inept and inefficient, they should get less money. (And let me say that I agree that the DoD is inept and inefficient.) Is that a fair summary?
(Love the Warthog, BTW!)
So this brings up the question, how much should the U.S. government (not State and local governments) spend on each the various functions of the government, as a percentage of GDP? Do not go over 20% total, since we have never gotten more than that in revenue.
The major groups are:
Pensions
Health Care
Education
Welfare
Protection
Transportation
Other Spending
Warren,
US has been neglectful toward domestic tranquility and the general welfare.
The common defense is secure at <1.3%* of GDP. That is gold plated.
Empire! The empire is getting too much of US GDP.
Inept weapons like the star wars, F-22, F-35, V-22 and Ford class aircraft carriers, etc should not get any money. They do not meet the tech specs, which are not so close to implied missions to fight fictions.
Strategies that deliver nothing but endless body count and collateral damage should not get any money.
Permanent occupation of Europe, Japan, and Korea should not get any money.
Cornering Russia by moving NATO eastward and arming former Warsaw Pact countries should not get any money.
Inciting war fever over enemy combatants and scare tactics about Putin should not get any money.
Retired DoD types like me should not go to work (I did) in the war welfare companies ever!
Because the DoD is welfare for war profiteering, corrupt and wasteful it uses too much money, delivers too little and some of the profits go to buying their customer and the customers' bosses in congress.
What should be spent on DoD? The common defense, not tilting with China for [Vietnam's fears] in the South China Sea to justify a Pacific Fleet's phony "anti access/anti denial (AA/AD) mission".
Fortunately, the rest of the world's minor powers have strategy and that do not include plundering its future on the backs of their own poor and their enemies' body bags.
As to spending your 20% of GDP: it needs to go to eliminate the great evil of poverty in the US, and assuaging human suffering, not causing it through bombs.
*What Germany spends and they do not have an oceans between them and the Red Army which is less than the NATO standard of 2% of GDP to "stand up to Putin".
If we were not defending, excuse me, “permanently occupying” Europe, how much would Germany have to spend on its defense?
As for poverty, that is defined by the UN as making less than $2 per day. By that definition, we have eliminated poverty in the US.
But aside from that, cannot We The People eliminate the “great evil of poverty in the US”? We have food banks, homeless shelters, not-for-profit hospitals, and free clinics. (And the State and local governments provide twelve or thirteen years of education at no cost to the students.) What else do we need?
Germans would not spend a penny, war in Europe is a lot of good with nukes!
Failed system requires all this stuff.
But aside from that, cannot We The People eliminate the “great evil of poverty in the US”? We have food banks, homeless shelters, not-for-profit hospitals, and free clinics. What else do we need? –
A just distribution function.
Food banks, homeless shelters, not-for-profit hospitals, and free clinics do not eliminate poverty. They exist because of poverty. Eliminate poverty and the need for food banks, homeless shelters, not-for-profit hospitals, and free clinics will go away.
>> What else do we need?
> A just distribution function.
Define JUST.
“Food banks, homeless shelters, not-for-profit hospitals, and free clinics do not eliminate poverty. They exist because of poverty. Eliminate poverty and the need for food banks, homeless shelters, not-for-profit hospitals, and free clinics will go away.”
By the U.N.’s definition ($2 per day), we HAVE eliminated poverty.
But be that as it may, if we eliminate poverty, we would not need all the government programs, either.
“Define JUST.”
Try looking at what is not “just”;
Augustine prescribed “just war” so his folks could help Constantine, US is way off the mark, been so at least since 1950.
US empire is evil. Poverty in the same neighbor as plenty. Rigged markets, sustained by the winners whose religion is the market they use to plunder.
You need to define it for yourself.
To me: Values based on the “Golden Rule”.
Or Yama Yoga: Do no harm, and seek truth.
Old Testament:
“Seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” Isaiah 1:17 Isaiah a pretty progressive guy for 1200BCE.
Value the many, not the 1%.
Try mediating. my next response will address logic fallacies.
“But be that as it may, if we eliminate poverty, we would not need all the government programs, either.”
Funny how that works. Maybe, just maybe, we would end up better off if we attacked the cause of poverty instead of government poverty programs. Let’s go after the cause, the result.
A key misunderstanding may relate to the actual goals of anti-poverty programs. They do not in fact intend to eliminate poverty, only to render it less visible.
It turns out that one of the key lessons of the dirty thirties is that a lot of hungry impoverished people standing around street corners everywhere selling apples or whatever tends to depress and undermine the existing viable economic activity. You at least want to give people enough to eat and a place to get out of the way so the better off folks can get on with it.
Unfortunately that lesson may have been lost generationally as the first hand experience has passed away. As municipal police have to keep suppressing various kinds of encampments and tent cities it may have to be relearned unfortunately.
All of which explains why I have maintained for years that these programs will eventually encompass basic cable and internet access. It will probably turn out to be cheaper than decent food in the long run.
On defining JUST:
> To me: Values based on the “Golden Rule”.
Sure.
> Or Yama Yoga: Do no harm, and seek truth.
Nothing wrong with that.
> Old Testament:
> “Seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”
> Isaiah 1:17 Isaiah a pretty progressive guy for 1200BCE.
Really? Where does he advocate for ANY of the government programs of the progressives?
> Value the many, not the 1%.
How ’bout we value EVERYONE, whether the successful and the unsuccessful?
I’m down with all of those definitions of JUST, but none involve government action — only personal action.
On government:
> US empire is evil.
That whole Manifest Destiny thing? Perhaps. But what ethnicity is not so tainted? Islam spread by sword and fire, stopped only by Pepin at Tours. The Turks are from China. Bulgarians and Hungarians were from the steppes of Outer Mongolia. The Francs took Britannia from the Angles and Saxons, who took it from the Britons. The Ancient Greeks drove out the prior inhabitants. We are dealing with an invasion here and now, and our culture will go under just as those did. Is that “Hispanic Empire” also evil, or just how culture spreads?
> Poverty in the same neighbor as plenty.
I’d like to buy a verb, please.
> Rigged markets, sustained by the winners whose religion is the market they use to plunder.
Make that two. At least this I understand. Which markets are rigged? The labor market? The meat market? The K-Mart market? Who rigged it, and what do government transfer programs have to do with fixing them?
“Maybe, just maybe, we would end up better off if we attacked the cause of poverty instead of government poverty programs. Let’s go after the cause, the result.”
Absolutely!! Yet our government programs seem to do the opposite. Being born to a single mother is a HUGE risk factor for poverty, yet government programs reduce benefits if the mother marries the father (or anyone else). Being able to get a job as a teenager is a HUGE plus for avoiding poverty, yet our government prices young Black men out of the labor market, putting the lowest rung of the ladder out of their reach. A criminal record is a huge risk factor for poverty, yet our government punishes petty drug crimes, making it almost impossible for that person to get a job. Going to a good school is a huge plus, but our governments force inner city youth to go to horrible schools, rather than allowing them to choose a better school across town.
“Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it. No single piece of legislation, however, is going to suffice.”
– President Lyndon Johnson, 1964 State of the Union Address
How’s that been working out?
http://budget.house.gov/waronpoverty/
“[Anti-poverty programs] do not in fact intend to eliminate poverty, only to render it less visible.”
That’s not what Pres. Johnson the Second said.
“It turns out that one of the key lessons of the dirty thirties is that a lot of hungry impoverished people standing around street corners everywhere selling apples or whatever tends to depress and undermine the existing viable economic activity. You at least want to give people enough to eat and a place to get out of the way so the better off folks can get on with it.”
At least FDR put people to work (CCC). They learned useful skills and they earned their money. We could use a bit of infrastructure spending right now. Part of the problem there is the unions. Unions would not tolerate paying people welfare wages to do what are now union-wage jobs.
“How’s that been working out?”
Ask Reagan, Clinton and stop using house data.
#8 Burden of proof reversal.
I do agree nothing done has addressed the failures of the “sacred market”, whose winners own the House.
Ayn Rand created a wave of Chauvanists for Wall St.
Perhaps Bill and Hillary had it right, with welfare reform and give the states funds for new prisons in low income areas. We now have a new industry and jobs for locals.
The States can already do that. Why take money from the people of one state to make prisons in another state?
Well only the federal government can create more desperate people who may resort to crime instead of starving. Then since we have a republic and usually give more to poor states, we have satisfied those wanting welfare reform and those who want jobs created.
Warren I did not say I like the program, but it is what was done.