Vice President Biden created a stir in a speech in Flint, Michigan by claiming that by opposing the Administration’s latest Stimulus bill, Republicans would force cuts in police and as a consequence rape and murder rates would rise. Biden cited as proof what turned out to be bogus statistics on crime in Flint. Not only were the data faulty, the logic of the argument fails as well. Opposition to a particular program does not logically equate to opposing the goals of the program.

There are a three elements to economic recovery: people must need to buy things, they must have the money to buy them, and they must be believe that that the future is worth investing in. Every economic downturn leads to people postponing purchases of new cars, new homes, and new consumer goods. After a while, we expect people to be compelled to catch up with purchases; the old car cannot be fixed and must be replaced, and so forth. What’s remarkable about the current poor economy is how little of the automatic bounce back we’ve seen. We look to the factors of money and confidence to explain the lack of recovery.

Tax loopholes are not mistakes. Loopholes are incentives designed into the tax code to encourage behaviors that the government prefers. Home ownership is considered a good thing, so the interest on a home mortgage is a tax deduction. That makes owning a home more affordable, so home ownership is encouraged. The mortgage deduction is a loophole. The pattern of all loopholes is that they cause economic decisions to be altered away from some things and towards others. The tax code has over 60,000 pages, with each loophole designed to favor something deemed good, at least by the Congressman who managed to get the loophole included.

The debate over raising the debt ceiling has passed, but the debt crisis will be with us for years to come. Unlike news of celebrity meltdowns and notorious crimes, the debt crisis has some tricky points that the press has not well explained. Everyone needs to know about debt ceilings and default and their consequences, taxing the rich, what the people really want (a miracle, of course), and the balanced budget amendment. There never was a danger of default, but the shape of the real problem has been left ill-defined by the press.

Wind and solar power are expensive, realistically four to six times the cost of conventional energy sources. If we are going to convert to electric cars we will need lots of energy to make the batteries for the cars as well as to charge them. In a separate category, the global warming scare tries to impress upon us the need to avoid fossil fuels immediately for fear we all fry by 2010, or whatever the current date of doom. Underneath these discussions is the question of how much oil is left. When the oil equivalents like oil shale are counted, we have about 300 years.

“Money should not go to Planned Parenthood because money is fungible and can be redirected to support abortion.” No, sorry, money is not fungible and government accounting rules see to that. “If Planned Parenthood is not funded, women will die because there is no other way to get health services.” No, sorry, there are many health service providers. The arguments echo the controversy over faith-based initiatives, in which Liberals argued that money given to churches for any purpose amounted to supporting religion.

Taxes are explicit, so it is easy to sum them up. Total spending by government at all levels in the US is estimated at $6.41 trillion for 2010. [ 1 ] That’s about 44% of the gross domestic product. So that means that the private sector gets to choose how to spend the remaining 56% of the money, right? Not really. The government also requires us to comply with its rules, and the indirect costs are substantial. My partial list of indirect costs amounts to $1.8 trillion, more than 12% of the economy on top of the 46%.

Poe wrote, “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.” I’ve done that too, in my case trying to figure out my electric bill. The cheapest electricity is from hydroelectric power, a couple of cents per kilowatt hour. Electricity from coal is perhaps four cents, from gas or nuclear around five to seven cents. But here in California, a small allotment of electricity is billed at around eleven cents, then rates rise rapidly to over forty cents. How are the astronomical rates achieved? It’s hard to figure, but when all the costs of green energy are included, a picture starts to emerge.

Recently Forbes.com columnist Joel Delman asked, Are Amazon, Netflix, Google Making Too Many Decisions For Us? He complained that “Are Amazon, Netflix, Google Making Too Many Decisions For Us? Mr. Delman observes that Amazon suggests what we products want to buy, Netflix suggests what movies we might like, and Google is developing a car that will drive itself. He suggests that assisting technologies ought to have an “off” switch, or that maybe the default should be “off” until we turn them on. I’m here to suggest the opposite, that we should embrace these technologies and push them hard. We are all at war with the complexity of the modern world, and computers are our ally. We need more help, not less.

Some of the Tea Partiers would like to abolish the Departments of Energy, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture. They don’t have anywhere near the power to do that, but if they were close, the conventional meaning of “compromise” might be to only abolish two of the four. The compromise is getting part of what is desired rather than all of it. Under the conventional definition, if Democrats want to add legislation and Republicans want to repeal legislation, then leaving it all alone is a compromise. Liberals do adhere to the conventional definitions because they believe the purpose of government is to always expand it. Compromise is restricted to what government power is expanded and by how much.