RealCurrents

Anyone interested in really understanding electric power ought to read this article. It’s a real eye-opener:

http://daniellefong.com/2010/02/11/how-law-shapes-the-business-landscape-and-a-patent-puzzle

The first part of the article is about skin cancer detection (someone in Britain actually introduced a detector recently, btw), but most of it is about the electrical grid, and how messed-up policy has, well, messed up electric power in the U.S. Government policy focuses largely on generating electricity, but it turns out power generation is almost the easy part.

The harder parts are ’smart’ (efficient) & secure (against cyber-attack, electromagnetic pulse (EMP), etc) transmission, and especially energy storage, which gets almost no attention at all.

The grid, as it exists today, has almost no capacity to store energy. This means that at every instant in time, the amount of energy going on to the grid must almost exactly equal the amount of energy coming off. Otherwise, the grid rapidly fails in its operation, rising too high or too low in voltage, or shifting frequency, or succumbing to noise, spelling disaster to everything dependent upon a smooth, steady stream of power for its operation. That is to say, nearly every device of the modern world.

And while we have some provisions to redirect power on the grid… our ability to throttle the amount of power we put onto the grid is slow and expensive. Gas turbines are the power plants that can be controlled most readily, however their power must be throttled over a period of nearly 15 minutes. When they do this, however, they operate away from their most efficient operating point, meaning that lots of fuel is burned, power is expensive, and more CO2 goes out the stack into the air. Hydropower stations can be throttled nearly as readily as gas turbines, but they can operate in a wider range before they lose most of their efficiency. Coal, petroleum, and nuclear plants, on the other hand require periods on the order of days to speed up and slow down — it takes about that long for them to relax to a thermal equilibrium, keeping thermal stresses within safe bounds.

However, the electrical demand is quite unpredictable, and it can vary significantly in a period much shorter than the 15 minutes it takes for our fastest power plants to significantly alter their power output. So to respond in faster timescales, power plants must run as ‘spinning reserves.’ This is where fuel is burning and the turbine is spinning, constantly, in expectation of a fluctuation. There are now massive power plants, burning fuel this very second, for no purpose other than to smooth out the rapid fluctuations on the grid. I hope I don’t need to point out how crazy this is.

What’s more, electrical supply from renewables is very unpredictable, especially whatever’s coming from distributed power. Wind power is the least expensive…, but in terms of supplying controllable, usable power, wind is terrible! Wind power varies rapidly and widely, is extremely difficult to predict, is quite correlated over large regions, and, what’s probably the worst, wind power comes mostly in the dead of night, when nobody needs it.

Now, consider in all you’ve heard/read about electrical energy and electric vehicles, have you ever heard any of that?? Just another example of how the mainstream media is failing us, once again not bringing to light some of the key issues.

We did our insurance renewal last night. It will go up $100/month next year (not as bad as some, I know). Still, the added FLEXIBILITY will likely end up saving us much more than that. So, even though it looks bad at first glance, the healthcare reform isn’t all bad news. Hardly. So why didn’t the Democrats make a better case for that in the election?

The problem, it seems with many Democrats, is they don’t even THINK about whether their new laws & regulations are increasing (or decreasing) the size of the pie.

Their obliviousness to the pains of small business the past two years has been nothing short of amazing. Daniel Henninger wrote a good piece about that this week in the Wall Street Journal: The 1099 Democrats. The moniker comes from the crazy-insane new 1099 reporting rules that Democrats inserted - seemingly with no thought to the impact on business costs - into the healthcare reform bill. Small business groups, especially, have been calling this a huge and costly new regulatory burden.

The American people have voted and said “Enough!!” when it comes to runaway federal spending. Yet clearly we need reforms in many areas. The only way we’re likely to get them, though, is if lawmakers can find ways to give businesses and individuals more flexibility and reduced regulations that offset at least some of the increased monetary costs.

Our laws are way too rigid for the way the world economy works nowadays. People can’t change jobs, go to school, watch their kids, etc. because of so many outdated laws. There’s an opportunity to make things BETTER if both parties would stop acting like spoiled kids and work together.

Frank Rich really nails it in this December 19th New York Times op-ed. He says the defining event of the past decade wasn’t 9/11, but the collapse of Enron, which happened that same summer.

As bad as 9/11 was, I think he has a valid point, sadly. Read the whole article. In any case, he’s right that a lot of the blame must be placed on journalists and media who have been way too happy to parrot the outward image cultivated by these hypocrites rather than do their job & ask hard questions:

“If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far. That’s why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods. His sham beatific image, questioned by almost no one until it collapsed, is nothing if not the farcical reductio ad absurdum of the decade’s flimflams, from the cancerous (the subprime mortgage) to the inane (balloon boy).

… Enron is the template for the decade of successful ruses that followed, Tiger’s included.

What makes the golfing superstar’s tale compelling, after all, is not that he’s another celebrity in trouble or another fallen athletic “role model” in a decade lousy with them. His scandal has nothing to tell us about race, and nothing new to say about hypocrisy. The conflict between Tiger’s picture-perfect family life and his marathon womanizing is the oldest of morality tales.

What’s striking instead is the exceptional, Enron-sized gap between this golfer’s public image as a paragon of businesslike discipline and focus and the maniacally reckless life we now know he led. What’s equally striking, if not shocking, is that the American establishment and news media — all of it, not just golf writers or celebrity tabloids — fell for the Woods myth as hard as any fan and actively helped sustain and enhance it. …”

I hope this isn’t 1965 all over again. But once again we are escalating our involvement in a war that it’s not clear how we can win.

“Gates noted that while progress in Iraq will lead to a reduction in the number of troops there, more troops are needed in Afghanistan because of the worsening violence in that conflict. He said the persistent pace of operations in the two wars over several years has meant a steady increase in the number of troops who are wounded, stressed or otherwise unable to deploy with their units.”

Many people think the Vietnam War was unwinnable, at least in the context in which it was fought. Afghanistan is arguably more difficult, with a long history of invasions which went poorly for the invaders. Now the U.S. is rapidly escalating the war there, though most Americans probably remain largely unaware.

Thus we are in danger of repeating many of the same mistakes of 1965 and 2003, rushing into an escalation of conflict in an area we don’t well understand, with goals we can’t clearly articulate.

There are certainly good reasons to be over there. It is not my intent to argue that we shouldn’t be involved in that part of the world, but that we need to have a vigorous public debate about what are our long-term goals for this war.

As in 1965, we see an escalation occurring without the public really engaged. I suspect most Americans still have the idea that as a result of the 2006 Congressional and 2008 Presidential elections, we were assured a drawdown of our military forces. While this is occurring to some extent in Iraq, Dept. of Defense figures from the end of March (pdf) show total troop deployments were down less than 7,000 (233,800 vs. 240,600) from the end of 2007 (pdf), when the surge in Iraq was beginning to wind down and the presidential primaries were about to start. And now we are seeing substantial increases in both deployments and casualties, sadly, in Afghanistan.

The danger, as in 1965, is that it’s convenient for the military if the public isn’t paying too much attention to an escalation. There’s less scrutiny or criticism in the short run. And once again we’ve got a Democrat-controlled administration and Congress that is looking at massive new social spending programs. In the long run, though, it will be our soldiers and our society that suffers if we don’t get our goals right.

Most important, our military must be given a mission in which it can succeed. 22,000 more troops for the Army will help in the short run, but what is the end game? Just gaining and holding territory in Afghanistan and Pakistan isn’t likely to work anywhere near as well as it’s (hah) worked in Iraq.

Another little detail: after nearly eight years in Afghanistan, and this new escalation, is it not yet time for a formal Congressional declaration of war? Is that too much to ask? The accompanying debate might do a lot to help clarify our goals, because it would force Washington to state clearly who precisely are our enemies.

Certainly, whatever we do in Afghanistan and/or Pakistan is going to continue to be challenging. The culture there has worked out many adaptations for dealing with invaders. Recently, an Army base was expanded into an area filled with Karez, ancient networks of tunnels used both for irrigation and secret movement. A sewer plant was planned right on top of the waterways. By the time the U.S. military realized the error, the Taliban had farmers and other locals in an uproar. How are we supposed to control an area like that?

Like Vietnam, this effort will ultimately require some sort of political and diplomatic solution worked out far from the battlefield. And I really doubt it’s an accident that this announcement has come out the same day:

“U.S. officials “firmly believe” that al-Qaida leaders who planned and carried out the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are hiding in Pakistan near its border with Afghanistan, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday.”

This is a pretty obvious indication that we shouldn’t be surprised if operations in Afghanistan are again expanded, at least to these parts of Pakistan.

I’ve been intending to write something here about the upcoming presidential election. I can’t help but notice how many folks over 35 are really frustrated with their choices this time. The United States is desperately in need of strong, conservative leadership, yet the Republican Party seems about as bankrupt of ideas as the mortgage lenders are of money.

It’s pointless to try to record all my thoughts here, it would go far too long. Let me just state the obvious, the Republican Party has gone terribly astray, to the point that it’s hardly recognizable as a party for true conservatives, and nowhere is this most apparent than in the recent campaign strategy of the McCain-Palin camp. True leadership brings creativity to bear on difficult problems, getting people to work together in innovative ways to solve them. I’ve written a little about the need for such creativity in the pro-life movement, for example.

Sadly, the Republican Party, at least at the national level, instead keeps retreating to worn-out slogans that stifle real discussion of the serious problems we face. This isn’t any news to liberal Democrats or even independents. Rather, the point I’m trying to make is that it’s not working with Republican voters either, yet the Republican leadership remains so frustratingly out of touch, unable to grasp that THEY are going to have to hold themselves to a higher standard, or else the Party itself is in danger of collapsing. Let me just repeat the comment I left earlier today on Carmen Van Kerckhove’s blog Racialicious, in response to “An Open Letter to White Voters“:

Hi Carmen, perhaps you will find my perspective interesting. Whites are such a huge voting block that it’s difficult to generalize, but I will say that as far as Republican demographics go, I should be right in the middle of their voter bloc. I’m a WASP from Texas who has voted a straight Republican ticket several times, & a Christian conservative.

Nevertheless, I’m very unhappy with the Republican congress, in particular, and was never very enthusiastic about voting for McCain, either. The Palin choice is kind of a wash, in my view, she has a lot of qualities I admire, but at the same time doesn’t seem ready to fill McCain’s shoes if something happened to him.

I had just about convinced myself to go ahead and vote for McCain-Palin before they started what’s been about a month of the most bone-headed campaigning I can remember. First they kept Palin off-limits from interviews for the most part (hardly a vote of confidence), then they started the ridiculous attacks on Obama that just seem to keep getting worse.

It’s disturbing to think that Palin may end up destroying her reputation and a promising political future. McCain should have never hired the campaign “experts” that have ruined a campaign that was really starting to connect with voters. We’ve all seen the worst of Republican rhetoric over and over in recent years, and I’m as tired of it as anyone. BTW, it really turns me off when they say “Barack *Hussein* Obama”, as if that’s supposed to imply something. THAT seems pretty racist to me, anyway.

Yes, it’s an insult to all voters to think this sort of campaigning will sway opinion. Barack Obama’s voting record is far too liberal for me to support him, but now I’m really having second thoughts about voting for McCain as well.

It’s sad to see the Republican Party basically falling apart from a lack of leadership. A true leader would never allow that kind of stuff to happen. The only slight hope Republicans have in capturing the White House is if Palin finally says enough, gives the McCain folks an earful, and strikes out on a different course. America is starving for leadership. Can’t any of these “experts” see it obviously isn’t working?!!

As long as the Republican Party sends folks to Washington who then start acting more or less like everyone else in D.C. politics-as-usual, Republicans will continue to fail at being a conservative influence. We need a Republican Party - or some replacement for it - that has an activist bent throughout the ranks and understands it’s fighting a battle and that sacrifices must be made. This is what all true leaders embody, and this is the only solution to America’s many problems: true leadership.

Congressman John Culberson, from Bill Archer’s (and George H.W. Bush’s) old District 7 in Houston, is getting a bit of a backlash for daring to say something critical of NASA. Here’s the comments page from yesterday’s Houston Chronicle article, Culberson weighing legislation for NASA overhaul.

Now Culberson has gotten a reputation as one of the most tech-savvy Congressmen, which seems well-deserved. In May, he did a live video, using his cell phone and the Qik service, of the Mars Phoenix landing from JPL. Culberson’s enthusiasm for space, science and discovery is obvious there. He’s also very active on the fast-growing Twitter social network (@johnculberson), to the point that last week he became embroiled in a flap with Democrat congressional leaders over proposed rule changes that would severely restrict congressional internet video and blog posts.

Asking a question like “What’s wrong with NASA?” is so complex that a long answer is probably of little practical usefulness. I will say that it was a little disturbing how quickly folks who obviously knew far less about NASA than Culberson, including some politicians, turned on him as if he’d blasphemed or something. It’s also frustrating how many immediately viewed this as some sort of attack on the personal integrity of NASA employees.

As someone who once worked, long ago, both for NASA and a contractor, these sorts of arguments seem pretty much pointless. Let me just repeat what I wrote at the Chronicle page:

This has nothing to do with whether NASA has good employees or not. Of course there are many very motivated and dedicated folks at NASA and among the contractors. The real question is whether they’re being used effectively.

Rep. Culberson is right in certain respects. NASA has made great strides in many areas, but two areas, manned spaceflight and propulsion technology, are greatly lagging. We need a concerted effort in advanced propulsion because this drives everything else, and we desperately need strong leadership for a sustained manned spaceflight program.

As far as NASA taking credit for a “growing commercial space industry”, that’s ridiculous. Maybe the agency is finally seeing the light about commercial space, but it’s visionary entrepreneurs and private investors who have long been the driving force.

As to how we should invest funds to best create a vigorous manned space program, I wrote about the basic technical strategy here on my blog AeroGo. Congressmen, responsible for determining NASA’s budget and priorities, at least need to understand the root problem behind our frustrating lack of progress in manned spaceflight, which I noted in this discussion of SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan’s criticisms of NASA:

Because its R&D isn’t properly divided between technology development and operations, NASA remains prone to starving technology development whenever funds are tight (i.e. nearly always), which is much of the root problem. I suspect this is a lot of what is upsetting to Rutan about the program, “that you are not going to learn anything new here that is useful for you to go on to the other moons.”

The reality of NASA budgeting over the last 30 years or more has been that of operational manned space projects - Shuttle and ISS - crowding out most everything else, which leads to a very risk-averse R&D environment where breakthroughs are unlikely to occur

NASA will never be a perfectly efficient organization, but it still could accomplish a lot more if its budgeting were realigned to reflect the strategy needed to make steady progress. Manned flight operations cannot be allowed to crowd out space technology research, especially propulsion, anymore than they can be allowed to displace space probes, space science, or aeronautics research.

Because manned spaceflight is so expensive, however, the reality is that it will end up crowding out the others unless Congress imposes budgetary guidelines to protect these other areas that provide so much technological return on investment. Rep. Culberson is right in calling for an overhaul of NASA, but the budgeting process is key. Even without multi-year appropriations, a lot can be accomplished just by making sure NASA isn’t eating its own seed corn, particularly in the area of space technology R&D.

I was reading Jessica Mah’s post on how a lot of her high-school and college-age friends are really scared about global warming. Here in the U.S., it’s often reported that folks in other countries are more concerned than the average American, but little attention has been given to how the issue is impacting younger Americans.

It occurred to me that they need a little perspective on this. I grew up in the 1970s, and for those of us Americans who went through this period when the U.S. was in a severe technophobic angst, and there were constant pronouncements about all the terrible things that were going to happen, I suppose we’re just not so quick to be convinced the world is coming to an end every time scientists start preaching doom and gloom.

This was a very long list of crises that 1960s-70s experts insisted were soon to befall us, most of which I’ve probably (thankfully) forgotten, but which included such calamities as pollution, endangered species, population, overcrowded skies, the San Andreas and yes, even a looming ice age. I guess being terrified of nuclear armageddon just wasn’t enough anymore. The funny thing was, very few of these scientists were talking about an energy crisis.

Of course, even the “energy crisis” didn’t last long, once investors started pouring hundreds of billions into oil, which was $35 when I got out of high school but less than $10 when I got out of college. Jessica titled her post “Scared of Global Warming? Bring in the entrepreneurs!” and so yes, I think she’s right that entrepreneurs and the free market are a lot of the answer to global warming.

In general, though, I think we ought to stop and notice something. It sure seems to me that scientists can get into a negative funk about stuff, and end up focussing too much on the problems rather than the solutions. In fact, I can’t help wondering if it’s sort of the same dynamic as with investment newsletters - negativity and fear apparently sell a lot more newsletters, and a crisis may, sadly, be the only thing that will finally garner a research project any funding.

Now, this is certainly not all the scientists’ fault, nor is the business world off the hook. Just look at the American car industry, one of the most pitiful examples of research budgeting in modern history. Perhaps GM, Ford and Chrysler may be excused for being caught unprepared on fuel economy in the early 70s, since they were already struggling with new emissions restrictions. On the other hand, here we are again thirty years later and, sadly, it seems that only the recent combination of high oil prices, a dropping dollar, and concerns over carbon emissions was finally enough to get them serious again about improving fuel economy.

Amidst all the prognostications, it’s still not clear how global warming is going to play out. Besides the many questions of specific effects in specific places, there’s at least three basic questions involved. First is the question of how fast temperatures will go up. Second, how much will they rise long-term (or is it a runaway increase with no end in sight)? Third, if temperatures can be stabilized, will (can?) they then head back down?

We hear virtually nothing of potentially beneficial effects, but clearly there’s going to be some winners among the many losers from effects of global warming. Interestingly, so far the Russians seem to be the only ones thinking ahead about any positive outcomes from it. As Jessica suggests, entrepreneurs ought to be also. Again, though, we must keep a proper perspective - a long-term perspective.

While there’s a lot we don’t know, we can say that at least for practical purposes, whatever we can do will take place over decades. Realistically, it’s far too late to do anything about changes that may take place within the next decade or so. In other words, whatever research and changes - technological or political - that are to be made must be done consistently over a decades-long time frame.

This is, for example, why I strongly disagree with the basic Kyoto (Treaty) framework. Already China is producing as much carbon emissions as the U.S., and will likely continue to increase. Kyoto might be effective in reducing the emissions of Western industrialized nations, but given these reductions and the continued growth of China, India and other large industrializing countries, within a few years this extremely costly plan will prove ineffective in reducing the bulk of emissions.

We’ve heard from the scientists on global warming, but have yet to hear from the engineers, who are going to be the folks who have to make reductions in carbon emissions actually happen. We need to think about cost/benefit ratios. We also need to think about sustaining research investments over decades, which as the history of NASA indicates, is awfully difficult to do when you start out with crash-program type overbudgeting.

I think it’s a good bet that a lot of these new technologies are going to come from both big American businesses (such as Boeing with its new 787) and American entrepreneurs. This realization may not play well overseas, but any approach such as Kyoto that hobbles the American economy is going to be counterproductive.

Like it or not, the U.S. is still a (if not the) major innovation engine in the world. Companies in Silicon Valley (1, 2, 3) and elsewhere in the U.S. are working on hundreds of different technologies, everything from emission controls to cheap solar to electric cars to wind power and so on. Here in Texas, it’s become common to see the giant parts of wind turbines rolling down the highway on their way west, where hundreds are being put up.

We must remember that innovation, not political decrees, is the only way to solve the problems from global warming, and while we’re at it, let’s not forget to also think about taking advantage of the benefits.

With all the criticism of George W. Bush and Republicans in general, I think we need to sort out a few basic aspects of our current mess so we can then, hopefully, make intelligent changes.

In my view, Republicans (in which I include myself, since I generally vote that way) have two basic problems:

1. Bush’s administration has been hijacked by war-hawk NeoCons, the first evidence of which appeared to be his picking Dick Cheney (seemingly out of nowhere, considering Wyoming isn’t a big state) to be his running mate.

As a result, early philosophical drivers of Bush policy, such as Marvin Olasky’s notion of “compassionate conservatism“, a foreign policy that refrained from “nation building”, and in general a more limited federal government, gradually gave in to the NeoCon urge to use power whenever possible, wherever possible.

Of course, the dam broke after 9/11, an event which may well have been given too much import in re-shaping U.S. foreign and domestic policy. In any case, the war-hawk NeoCons were firmly behind the wheel after that, and within a year were openly maneuvering to invade Iraq.

2. The near-complete failure of the rest of Republicans to make a serious effort to reclaim their party from the war-hawk NeoCons.

As I wrote before, despite Bush’s obvious failings, I put more blame on the Congress, for largely abdicating its responsibilities: “the Republican Congress … has failed to fulfill two of its primary duties: providing a check on the Executive Branch and controlling spending.”

So, two basic problems: the NeoCon takeover of the Bush administration, and the failure of the rest of us Republicans to counter it. With these in mind, it’s time for someone to finally state what’s plainly obvious, at least to any non-NeoCon in the Republican camp:

War-hawk NeoConservatives do NOT represent the views of all or anywhere near a majority of Republicans, nor are they legitimate heirs of Ronald Reagan’s legacy.

Through most of my teen years, I would hear Ronald Reagan in the morning, giving his radio address outlining his views, and no one’s going to convince me that his vision of personal responsibility and freedom, with limited government, has anything in common with the imperialist, police-state policies promoted by the war-hawk NeoCons.

The Republicans lost control of Congress for the simple reason that they failed to do their job. They completely failed to control spending, they failed to rein in government, and one by one those opposed to the invasion of Iraq knuckled under, I guess swayed by the argument, “We’re in a ‘war on terror‘, you just have to trust us.” Well, it’s amazing that the Bush administration still seems to be trying to use that argument. It shows how out of touch they really are.

As far as Bush’s failings go, I think Lee Iacocca hits the nail on the head in his new book, Where Have All the Leaders Gone?. Iacocca gives 9 “C’s” of leadership, and notes that Bush dismally fails on the very first one: Curiosity.

George W. Bush has a lot of good, even great, qualities, and I’m sure most Republicans, including myself, want to continue supporting him, but he has GOT to develop both a much greater interest in what is going on, and multiple alternative channels of information. As someone once said, a leader must use the chain of command to issue orders, but can NEVER depend on the chain of command for information.

As for other Republican politicians and candidates, I hope they will not abandon Bush, but will finally begin to demand accountability (and fiscal responsibility) from his administration.

Obviously, the folks Republicans DO need to be abandoning, and driving from the party, are the war-hawk NeoCons, who haven’t got a clue what terms like “limited government”, “Constitution”, “separation of powers”, and “conservative” really mean.

Sadly, if this mess continues much longer, us conservatives will have to come up with a new name for ourselves, lest people think we’re in favor of torture, abolishing the Geneva Convention, pre-emptive war, and all the other nonsense (evil) that’s been foisted upon us by these “Neo-Conservatives”, who seem to think the solution to every problem is the exercise of more government power.

Raymond’s lament about how CNN has degenerated into the “Celebrity News Network” got me thinking about media and journalism again. I realize how important the media folks are, how much they influence the conversation, and I know it’s essential to keep pushing for improvements in that industry. I, for one, am certainly a fairly dissatisfied customer.

Raymond’s complaint brought up at least two things that particularly annoy me about the media:

1. Journalists seem to be really BAD at ever covering stuff that would actually be useful to know about. We hear about disasters all over the world and, of course, whatever mess (or island resort) Paris Hilton may be in at the moment. Nevertheless, there’s all kinds of practical stuff that we hardly ever hear about. I wrote about one such example, changes in credit card minimum payment rules, back in 2005.

I encountered another example this afternoon, when I was picking up one of my kids from work, and the subject of the minimum wage hike came up. He was wondering when the first increase would go into effect and how much it would be (i.e. whether he’d get a raise). I really don’t know. I think it’s sometime next winter, but I guess information like that is just too practical for the media to bother with.

There’s a lot of examples like that, of missed opportunities to be helpful, across most all the media, and I’ll try to point out more in the future (see the Journalism category).

2. It used to be there were 3 TV networks, only AM radio, etc., but now that we’ve got a zillion channels, they STILL can’t seem to focus on a specific topic. In other words, an awful lot of media channels are all chasing the entire market, rather than specializing.

CNN isn’t the only channel that’s lost its focus, but what’s more frustrating is that with so many more channels available (and so many owned by major media players), they still won’t specialize.

Radio provides perhaps the best test case, at least here in the Houston area, where we still don’t seem to have a dedicated news station, even though ClearChannel has bought several of the top AM stations. In fact, it’s gotten worse, as long-dominant KTRH 740AM lost a lot of its news coverage (and apparently its staff) after the 2004 election, and is just a shell of its former self.

Why can’t a huge media company like ClearChannel have at least one 24 hour news station in a big market like Houston? The obvious answer is they think they can make more money by changing formats all day long, from morning news to Rush Limbaugh to local talk to sports to UFOs, etc. That may work for them, but the longer this goes on, the more I just lose interest.

I wrote recently on All Things about how most of society STILL isn’t taking information overload seriously, and the major media are prime culprits. It’s not just broadcast media, either. It never ceases to amaze me, for example, how many ads I get for print magazines. Don’t they realize I’ve already got a pile of magazines I can never find time to read?

For years Americans have seemed to be relentless consumers of more and more media output, whether TV shows or sporting events or newspapers, books, etc., but I can’t help but think we’re nearing a limit, and that the winners in the media are going to be the ones who help us to find the right information, and package it for us in easy-to-swallow bites.

Google is perhaps the best example of this currently, of a business that helps us to overcome information overload, to cut a swath through the jungle to just what we’re looking for. In other words, Google is actually helpful, and they’ve been richly rewarded for it.

What I’d like to see are broadcast channels that are actually oriented toward my needs, to where my needs are placed first, and advertising comes second. This will seem ridiculous to traditional media types, but in my view, there’s an incredible amount of media out there, and I’ll just go somewhere else. Who knows, maybe I’ll get my weather updates from Twitter before long. After all, I can’t hardly find them on KTRH anymore.

First of all, in case anyone’s looking for it, here’s the official details on the IRS’ reasons for making April 17th the national deadline for filing your personal income taxes this year. It’s certainly also a good time to be thinking about how we could improve the system, something we all agree needs to be done, but can’t seem to agree how.

Of course, when you really get down to details, I’m not sure any of us quite knows quite what kind of tax system we’d prefer, but there are some basic qualities we could probably agree on. We need a system that no longer penalizes American business competitiveness, we need a simpler system (need I say more?), and we need a system that encourages - or at least doesn’t penalize - savings and various forms of investment and capital formation.

While a lot of conservatives might not agree on this last point, I think we also need a system that is modestly progressive, i.e. that gives a break to the poorest members of society. Even if you don’t agree with this philosophically, there is certainly a public interest in seeing these folks succeed financially, rather than linger on welfare rolls.

I don’t know all the specifics of the FairTax Plan, but this morning Houston City Councilman Michael Berry had Americans for Fair Taxation’s David C. Polyansky on, discussing this proposal. Here’s a summary taken from their website:

“The FairTax plan is a comprehensive proposal that replaces all federal income and payroll based taxes with an integrated approach including a progressive national retail sales tax, a prebate to ensure no American pays federal taxes on spending up to the poverty level, dollar-for-dollar federal revenue neutrality, and, through companion legislation, the repeal of the 16th Amendment.

The FairTax Act (HR 25, S 1025) is nonpartisan legislation. It abolishes all federal personal and corporate income taxes, gift, estate, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare, and self-employment taxes and replaces them with one simple, visible, federal retail sales tax administered primarily by existing state sales tax authorities.

The FairTax taxes us only on what we choose to spend on new goods or services, not on what we earn. …”

In other words, the FairTax plan would be based on consumption, not income or savings, so if you made a lot of money but lived frugally, saving and investing what you made - and so creating jobs and wealth - then you wouldn’t get taxed that badly. On the other hand, if you wanted to live like the robber barons, then you’d pay considerable tax - 23% (plus state sales tax, I presume) - but you wouldn’t have to hire an army of accountants and lawyers, nor would you need to worry about estate taxes. That last part alone would probably save wealthy folks enough to where many would gladly pay the 23% on consumption in order to have more financial flexibility.

Of course, I don’t know how they come up with these numbers, but that 23% would apparently include all Social Security and Medicare taxes, and since it’s a straight number, it would be easy to predict the tax impact of any transaction and, like sales taxes, the amount would apparently only be levied on the final purchase, so there wouldn’t be a bunch of “built-in” taxes that add to the cost of goods. While the combined federal and state tax would be about 30%, twice the European VAT, if it had a downward impact on inflation - and interest rates - it might prove a bargain for these reasons as well, without having the regressive characteristics for which value-added taxes have been criticized.

The FairTax Plan, which currently has about 60 mostly Republican co-sponsors in Congress, including Texas Sen. John Cornyn, is reportedly most strongly opposed by Washington lobbyists and some Congressmen in powerful committees, who would lose a lot of influence were it to pass. Perhaps this is the best reason of all for supporting it.

The FairTax would basically be a 23% federal sales tax on everything, that would be balanced by a “prebate” that would rebate the tax burden that would be paid by a family living at the poverty level. So as I understand it, you’d only be paying this consumption tax on purchases above the poverty level.

Moving to a consumption tax is key, because this would put our industries on a much more competitive basis with those of other countries. Right now, in Texas at least (I know some states are different), if you buy a $100,000 home, you have to pay property tax, on the order of 2.5%, every year on that home, which is made in America, of course. On the other hand, if you buy a $100,000 car imported from Germany, England, or wherever, you generally don’t have to pay this tax every year. But if you you buy a $100,000 aircraft made in Wichita, Kansas, you do!

Of course, this is property, not income tax, but it’s just one glaring example of how our system in some many subtle ways (double taxation of overseas earnings is another) rewards importers over domestic industries. A consumption tax would lower the effective cost of our goods overseas and make our manufacturing, agricultural, and other industries more competitive, while at the same time likely doing more to improve conservation of resources and protection of the environment than a lot of other measures would.