Index 
Response comment to a comment by Jacob Reyna on November 1, 2013 about an earlier comment regrarding the $800 billion stimulus package of 2009 from MarketWatch.com @chuck karabin Chuck, your numbers are bit off. Infrastructure: $105 Billion Tax incentives for individuals: $237 Billion, you got part of that. Tax incentives for companies: $51 Billion Healthcare: $155 Billion Education: $100 Billion. Welfare etc.: $82 Billion There's more on the stimulus at: Wikipedia.org And the $105 billion was mostly wasted by painting nearly every street and road in America with a thin layer of asphalt, providing a nice market for refinery sludge. Very few bridges or roadbeds were repaired. Remember "shovel ready", George W.'s term adopted by Barach? The only "shovel ready" projects able to "gear up" were unskilled paving projects, all other infrastructure required design and planning. Also remember George W., the republican, said "We HAVE to do this" (massive stimulus), then left the job to Barach as the financial collapse unfolded. It continues today, both the collapse from unsustainable debt, and the stimulus, now at $85 billion per month. This stimulus is about to end, as the market reacts to even its rumors. I read at the IMF site we told the IMF that early next year we would stop "printing money" which, along with zero interest rates, is threating the dollars use as the world currency-exchange medium. IMF is offering SDR's as an alternative and many countries are sig ning bi-lateral and regional agreements to trade using other "exchanges". Oil will increase in price as we continue to open shale deposits where reserves are huge but costs are higher for extraction. "Peak" oil referred historically to liquid petroleum, and that peak has occurred. Much of the "new oil" is from shale or tar sands. Shale and tar sands have extended carbon reserves compatible with refining, but not for "oil" as we tend to think of it. When (and if) the world economy recovers from the 2008 financial crisis (which it has not yet), demand will rise, prices will rise, growth will slow and a "new" cycle of "recession-recovery" will begin. I suspect we in the USA are on a long downward trend driven by ongoing equalization of world production costs, which are strongly related to labor cost ($7/hour MINIMUM wage in US and Europe vrs $0.50/hour in Asia and elsewhere). Our days of living off the "slave" labor of other countries is coming to a rapid end. We now import cheap labor, replacin g the import of commodities for home manufacturing during colonialism. So as the cycles go ever lower, I recommend we just sit back and enjoy the show; it's going to be a doozy. We moralists in the USA and Europe are going to get very nasty as our standards of living decline, as riots in Greece and our spy scandals show. The contribution of oil "depletion" on this coming difficulty could be largely avoided if we use uranium and thorium for energy rather than carbon. The energy required to extract a gallon of gasoline is two to ten times as great as to extract a gallon of hydrogen from seawater using electricity. The energy required to make electricity from coal is ten to one hundred times the energy required to extract the same electricity from uranium in granite (an "inexhaustible" supply at 3 parts per million). Waste? Global warming anyone? Unusable contaminated land? Wyoming strip mines anyone? Anyway, I suggest we enjoy the real show, rather than the made-up ones on TV, both news and en tertainment, a distinction I have trouble making nowadays. |