Abhorrent Solutions II
I have a number of "ignorant and abhorrent" ideas about how to do things - and I'm comfortable calling them that because I know first how little I know, and second that no expert would ever consider any of them. With that in mind, here are three of them - with rational comments very much requested.
Renewable energy
Leftists around the world are succeeding in legislating what they call clean energy requirements - in most cases expressed as legislated targets for the replacement of energy from fossil fuels with energy from what they classify as renewable sources such as wind and solar.
Imagine, however, that a Colorado state supreme court judge received an honorarium for speaking at a bar association conference and then, on his tax return, claimed his travel and personal expenses for the conference as an offset to those earnings. In doing so he will have affirmed, in an official signed IRS filing, the obvious: that those expenses form an integral component of the net financial impact of his trip and presentation - but that logic, which most would agree is fully reasonable and correct, applies equally well to zero emission energy.
Thus our judge's wind powered Tesla produces almost no measurable emissions rolling down Boulder's Main Street, but get the courts to agree that all of the pollution expenses incurred for that machine to be able to roll down the street need to be allocated to it, and no electric vehicle will qualify as zero emission under Colorado law.
What this means is that a single court case demanding legal acceptance of the obvious could end every zero emission mandate in the country - and force re-assessment of every wind and solar project.
The supporting information for this is so absurdly one sided any reader not already knowledgeable on the subject would assume that I was just making it up if I reported it directly. Both Grok and Perplexity are, however, extremely good at tabulating stuff like this - so please ask the AI of your choice a question like the one I asked perplexity.ai:What is the total energy input required in MWH equivalents per metric ton for the most common forms of each of the following materials: steel, concrete, aluminum, copper, and diesel fuel?Then look at the answers in terms of what's needed to power that Tesla from wind: (all of which you should want to verify via, again, the AI search bot of your choice):
- a 4.2 MW wind tower produces, on average in the United States, about 1MW of power, 15% or more of which is lost in transmission (and another 15% or so is lost during car charging);
- a 4.2MW tower has about a 10 year blade life; a 20 year life for the generator and nacelle; and a tower that will stand for 40 to 60 years;
- the typical 4.2MW installation is made up of about 2,000 tons of steel, concrete, copper and other materials that need to be mined, refined, transported, and worked with in manufacturing and installation;
- the aluminum ingots used in a 200 mile transmission line, by themselves, require more electrical energy to refine than a single 4.2MW wind generator will produce in two years.
- a 200 mile DC standard 400KV transmission line will need over 1,000 support towers each of which needs about 30 tons of steel and another 45 tons of concrete;
- all of this needs fairly intensive maintenance - and virtually every process from mining the ores to nacelle lubrication, depends on coal, natural gas, and/or diesel fuel.
Bottom line? it's unlikely that a typical wind farm 200 miles away from the power customer will ever break even on fossil fuel energy inputs versus "clean" power delivered - nicely explaining why free power from wind and sun tends to be three to five times as expensive as power from natural gas or coal.
Drug Abuse
Death penalty administration is a very big issue in the United States - one that generates considerable uncertainty and years of delay throughout the justice system.
On a personal basis my only issue with the death penalty is that people have been wrongly convicted and so believe that the state should incarcerate rather than kill - but see nothing wrong with police or other intervenors killing the obviously guilty during the commission of, or immediate flight from, a violent crime.
Personal feelings aside, I don't understand why legislatures don't put an end to the court battles and endless public hand wringing over the means of execution -they must know that nearly all of it is just a strategy for delay that lawyers love and taxpayers hate. So why not just mandate having the judge set an execution date within two days of which the prison slips an overdose of fentanyl into the condemned's food? Death by overdose is hardly unusual, certainly not cruel, very cheap, effective, easy to administer, often both directly appropriate to the crime and within the desired lifestyle of the convicted - and this approach is virtually certain to greatly reduce voluntary fentanyl use nation wide.
A tax on income security
Democrats love taxes and conservatives generally hate them but get forced into approving increases because the left, when in power, runs up both entitlements and deficits - and those payments have to come from somewhere.
So here's a plan: a tax on the unearned benefits arising from security of income will be hated by democrats and liked by conservatives. Let me clarify:
- An unearned benefit arising from the security of income usually appears as a cost not incurred. For example, if two people with essentially identical skills, credit histories, and current income apply for the same mortgage or other loan from the same bank, the applicant working for an organization, like Harvard University or Government, whose ability to pay is considered unimpeachable, will pay a lower rate than the bank will ask for from the one working for a small business - and that difference is an unearned benefit reflecting a difference in the bank's perception of the borrower's income security.
- If Joe puts his savings into a blue chip investment account while Jane puts hers into a high risk, entrepreneurial focus, venture account the financial market zeitgeist will, without any conscious effort by anyone, "conspire" to ensure that Joe almost always make a little money on his investments while the same people will feel no compulsion to protect Jane's monies and treat it, instead, as in-play, at-risk, and losslessly (to them) disposable. In the longer term, the winners among a large diversified group of Janes will accumulate more earnings than the total accumulated by a similar group of Joes, but most individual Janes will lose relative to the Joes. Taxing Joe on that difference implements a tax on the unearned consequences of income security.
This may seem a bit convoluted - taxing people on monies they didn't earn? - but in practice it's very easy to do because taxpayers itemize by source of funds and nearly every employer, bank, fund, or investment house has a public credit rating; and it's also fair because the borrower employed by Harvard, like the blue chip investor, derives a benefit from the expression of public opinion about the source of his funds, and not from anything he does himself.
Since liberals generally have more secure sources of income than conservatives, the tax will hit those who love taxes much harder than it will those hate them - and, more importantly, this form of taxation will raise the average level of risk undertaken in financial markets, thereby unleashing a tsunami of American investment, innovation and opportunity as monies move from Wall Street to Main Street.
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