Quotulatiousness

February 25, 2010

“Ontario will have the highest electricity rates in North America”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:32

Parker Gallant is quite disturbed by the most recent annual report from Hydro One, Ontario’s government-owned electrical transmission corporation:

No major media reported on Hydro One’s annual statement to “investors,” as the company puts it, even though the report is a dog’s breakfast of warning signs and bizarre trends that spell trouble.

[. . .]

As debt rises, Hydro One’s debt-to-equity ratio weakened from 1.71:1 to 1.91:1. It borrows money to pay for capital costs surrounding the province’s Green Energy Act and puts the company at risk of a debt ratings downgrade, which will drive borrowing costs up.

Return on equity is down to 8.7% from 9.7% in 2008, indicating an overall decline in the value of the company. Return on assets fell to 3% from 3.5%. As a result, the dividend payment to the province was $188-million, down 27.4%. But the CEO says the company is “on target.”

Even though revenues and costs are rising, and profit falling, Hydro One handles less electricity — 139.2 terawatts, a decline of 6.4%. The cost of distribution per terawatt was up by 14.9%. Operations and maintenance costs keep rising as power transmitted declines. The number of employees rose 7.7%. Since 2002, when the company had 3,933 employees to distribute 153.2 terawatts, total employment has jumped 38% to 4,400 to distribute 9% less power. Are these additional 1500 staff working in the field or at head office working on rate increase applications?

February 20, 2010

QotD: He talked his way in . . . is he now talking his way out again?

Filed under: Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:51

Barack Obama has done everything possible to destroy the glowing reputation he brought to the White House after his triumphs in the Democratic primaries and the general election of 2008. The most striking fact about the cloud of failure now surrounding him is that it’s entirely self-generated.

No credible Republican has been harassing him, leaping on his every mistake. Journalists of the liberal persuasion remain admirers. His most vocal detractors are loudmouthed commentators, unlikely to influence the independent voters who made Obama President. He has no one to blame.

[. . .]

He didn’t become President for his accomplishments; he did it mainly on oratory. But in office his tone has changed. He doesn’t seem to care whether he makes an impact or not and rarely suggests that something crucial is at stake. You can listen to him for 20 minutes and realize an hour later that you can’t remember anything he said.

He performs a sort of dance with the cameras, turning first to the right, then to the left, then back again. It seemed spontaneous for a while but it’s now pure ritual. He’s developed a manner that’s so cool it can’t be distinguished from indifference.

He demonstrates the titanic gulf between an election, however daunting, and the biggest job in the world. Given all the hurdles in the path of blacks, his original decision to run was a brave and breathtaking leap of the imagination. His campaign was brilliant. But serving as President requires even more audacity. Perhaps his many stumbles, and his misguided attempt to do all the serious work of the presidency more or less on his own, indicate that he hasn’t yet learned to see himself in the role of leader. Perhaps he’s become the star of a drama for which he has no script.

Robert Fulford, “Why is Obama failing?”, National Post, 2010-02-20

February 11, 2010

Nobody knows how many died in the Haiti earthquake

Filed under: Americas, Government, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:22

I can only assume it’s a slow news day for this to be a headline: “Differing death tolls raise suspicions that no one really knows how many died in Haiti quake“. Of course nobody knows: the Haitian government was barely functioning even before the quake hit, and not at all afterwards. They had no accurate idea of how many people lived in the area beforehand, and they still haven’t been able to recover all the bodies. Any death toll estimates will be inaccurate, almost by definition:

Wildly conflicting death tolls from Haitian officials have raised suspicions that no one really knows how many people died in the Jan. 12 earthquake.

The only thing that seems certain is the death toll is one of the highest in a modern disaster.

A day after Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue raised the official death toll to 230,000, her office put out a statement Wednesday quoting President Rene Preval as saying 270,000 bodies had been hastily buried by the government following the earthquake.

A press officer withdrew the statement, saying there was an error, but then reissued it within minutes. Later Wednesday, the ministry said there was a typo in the figure — the number should have read 170,000.

Even that didn’t clear things up. In the late afternoon, Preval and Lassegue appeared together at the government’s temporary headquarters.

Preval, speaking English, told journalists there were 170,000 dead, apparently referring to the number of bodies contained in mass graves.

Lassegue interrupted him in French, giving a number lower than she had given the previous day: “No, no, the official number is 210,000.”

Preval dismissed her. “Oh, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” he said, again in English.

What is not in dispute is that the death toll was very high, and that even with all the disaster relief efforts from other countries, there will still be many more deaths in the quake’s aftermath. Food, water, and medical aid is still not reaching everyone. That fact reduces the importance of the squabble over macabre numbers to a little bit of political theatre.

Update, 24 February: Radio Netherlands is claiming that the death toll has been vastly over-estimated and thinks the number of casualties will be under 100,000:

Haiti has buried an estimated 52,000 victims since the earthquake on 12 January 2010. More bodies still lie under the rubble, but the total number of casualties will not surpass 100,000 — that’s according to observation and research on the ground in Haiti, carried out by Radio Netherlands Worldwide.

This number is considerably smaller than the number of 217,000 victims the Haitian government claims to have counted so far, and far fewer than the estimated final count of 300,000 mentioned by President René Préval just last Sunday.

February 4, 2010

Unemployment insurance systems can deter hiring

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:31

Jay Goltz discusses how some state-level unemployment insurance systems actually deter firms from hiring new employees:

The unemployment insurance tax may be the most confusing and misunderstood tax there is. It is run by the states, and the rules can vary as much as the weather from one state to another.

Here’s how it works in Illinois. The important point for business owners to know is that when the state pays out claims to a company’s former employees, that company’s unemployment tax rate goes up. For each business, the state calculates how many dollars have been paid in compensation over the previous three years and adds on about 48 percent through various calculations. The result is that in Illinois, you end up paying for incremental compensation claims at a rate of $1.48 for every dollar that a former employee collects.

If you lay off or fire someone without “cause,” that person is eligible for unemployment compensation. “Cause” means that the employee violated a company policy, like coming in late or threatening a co-worker. “Cause” does not include doing a bad job, being very slow, or having a bad attitude.

I’d always assumed that the Canadian system (which is run by the federal government) was more generous than the various state-level systems in the US, but there appears to be more variation state-to-state so that may not be true. Certainly the Illinois system’s top payment of $531 per week is well above the Canadian EI top payment ($457 before taxes, according to the servicecanada.gc.ca website). If the Illinois amount is after tax, that’s significantly more than a Canadian claimant would get.

February 3, 2010

Canada’s economy judged (marginally) more free than the US

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

H/T to Power Line blog for the image.

January 29, 2010

High taxes/low taxes, it’s all relative

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:27

Lorne Gunter finds that what were once considered “intolerable” rates of taxation are microscopic compared to what we pay today:

The American colonists, by comparison, felt they were groaning under a crippling tax burden. Many of their staples, they felt, were onerously taxed while they received little from England in return and had no say in how large the levies against them would be.

[. . .]

So out of curiosity, I asked the historian what the level of taxation was in 1776 that caused the U.S. to declare its independence.

I will always recall his answer: “the equivalent today of about 5% to 7% of their income.”

What?

Today, in Canada, all levels of government, through all their taxes, can confiscate as much as half or more of a taxpayer’s income, in total. Income taxes, pension claw-backs, the GST, gasoline excise taxes, import duties and tariffs, estate taxes, property taxes, capital gains and on and on and on.

And yet, like the abused spouse rushing back to an abuser, many Canadians continue to sing the praises of ever bigger and bigger government. They rush to it in any crisis looking to be saved, whether through “free” health care during times of personal crisis or through auto company bailouts that demonstrate solidarity with distant workers in distant communities during times of global crisis.

The problem has been that Canadians expect the government (at all levels) to do something any time there’s a real or perceived crisis. Governments are happy to oblige by (at least appearing) to do something. Inevitably, the scope of what the government does increases every year. As “Steve the Pundit” wrote in the comments to the original article:

It’s true that Canadians have become far too dependent on government to save us from any crisis, large or small, much in the same way that the citizens of Metropolis continually looked to “Superman” to save them from all of their ills, whether it be an irradiated mutant bent on mass destruction … or a purse snatcher. Any crisis, it seems, “… look(ed) like a job for Superman!”

Exactly.

Short (political and economic) memories

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:20

David Harsanyi looks at the “lost decade” of the last 10 years and finds not so much of a disaster:

Of the many tall tales spun by President Barack Obama during the State of the Union address this week, there is one, and perhaps only one, that most Americans believe to be true.

The old yarn goes something like this: A long time ago, the United States was an economic powerhouse. We built things with our hands and worked in factories and we loved it.

Our recent prosperity, on the other hand, was built on a house of cards — intellectual innovation, risk, free-wheeling markets and international trade — and nothing more than an illusion.

“We can’t afford another so- called economic expansion like the one from the last decade — what some call the ‘lost decade,’ ” Obama explained. The president went on to promise he would do all he could to stop any pesky so-called expansions in the future. And I believe him.

A recent poll shows that Obama is not alone in his aversion to the 2000s. According to a Pew Research Center poll, over 50 percent of American hold a negative view of the decade. Yet, the 2000s, like decades before it, are by nearly any measure — be it health, standard of living, the environment or technology — a success.

The average unemployment rate during this “lost decade” — including one of those unfortunate man-made disasters to the country’s financial center — was at 5.6 percent. One would think that the president — a man who believes a “jobs” bills that only saw unemployment go from nearly 8 percent to over 10 percent was a wild success — would be sort of impressed.

It may be a factor in any given decade, but it’s surprising how deep the short-term memories seem to be coloured by the recession at the end of the decade (the one we’re still struggling out of).

January 28, 2010

Have aliens stolen the Prime Minister’s brain?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:41

Kevin Libin points out just how little today’s Stephen Harper resembles the young Reform Party MP when he first went to Ottawa:

Who’s that Prime Minister in Ottawa preparing to appoint a string of partisan senators tomorrow, and dreaming of converting the G8 from an economic focus to one of promoting health care for mothers and children in the developing world — and what’s he done with Stephen Harper? The man who first came to Ottawa as a Reform MP in 1993 with an agenda to privatize social services, restrict immigration and end Upper Chamber patronage would likely not recognize the Conservative leader of today, and not just because of the greyer hair.

Mr. Harper has come a vast distance in his approach to policy in the four years he’s been running the federal government, rather than sniping at it from inside a regionally focused rump party. “How much of that is the natural evolution, or maturity and wisdom or prudence that comes with age,” says Faron Ellis, a Lethbridge College political scientist and author of a book on the Reform party’s history, as opposed to a “political learning curve,” is hard to say. Whatever the reasons, there’s no question, things look much different in Stephen Harper’s mirror than they did 17 years ago.

January 26, 2010

When politicians get too close to the sharp end, militarily speaking

Filed under: Government, Military, Politics, USA, Weapons — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:42

This is a good example of why it’s a bad idea to allow politicians to get too deeply involved in military acquisition and logistics:

The U.S. Army wants to use more precision “smart” weapons. To that end they have replaced unguided MLRS (227mm) rockets with a GPS guided one. There is now a very popular GPS guided 155mm artillery shell in use. Laser guided Hellfire missiles are widely used by helicopter gunships. But there’s still one unguided “dumb” weapon that the army just can’t seem to get away from; their unguided 70mm (2.75 inch) rockets. Back in 2003, the army planned to begin phasing out these rockets. But, instead, during the last five years, the army has purchased nearly a billion dollars worth of 70mm rockets. Not because they wanted to, but because the politicians from Vermont, where the rocket is manufactured, had enough clout to force the army buy over 100,000 70mm rockets they don’t want, won’t use, and will eventually have to dispose of. That last step will cost more money, unless they can find some foreign country that wants to buy them, cheap.

I guess the plant that produces them is in a district represented by a member of a powerful committee in Washington.

January 21, 2010

Obama’s move to throttle the big banks

Filed under: Economics, Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:18

Megan McArdle takes a first look at the Obama administration’s new initiative to control the big banks:

The administration’s new proposal has two core pieces, both of which are at least somewhat novel. First, banks that have access to the discount window will not be able to trade for their own account. That means no prop trading desk. No owning hedge funds or private equity funds. No investments of any kind to make profits for your shareholders. Financial institutions can make profits by servicing clients, or they can make profits by investing for their own book. But they can’t do both.

Senior administration officials I spoke to made it clear that this would not include market making activity, which the administration views as something you do for your clients. But while that may partially reassure banks, that seems to mean that market makers — i.e. Goldman Sachs — are very definitely included. That impression was reinforced by the way Indeed, if they pass this thing, they should probably call it the Hey Goldman Sachs! You’re Not Going to Be So Profitable Any More Act of 2010.

January 11, 2010

Dystopia, here we come!

Filed under: Environment, Government, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:06

The State of the World 2010 report published by the Worldwatch Institute will find a large audience among the postlapsarian Left:

Ditch the dog; throw away (sorry, recycle) those takeaway menus; bin bottled water; get rid of that gas-guzzling car and forget flying to far-flung places. These are just some of the sacrifices we in the West will need to make if we are to survive climate change.

The stark warning comes from the renowned Worldwatch Institute, a Washington-based organisation regarded as the world’s pre-eminent environmental think tank.

[. . .]

“Habits that are firmly set – from where people live to what they eat — will all need to be altered and in many cases simplified or minimised… From Earth’s perspective, the American or even the European way of life is simply not viable.”

Of course, to enforce this new “way of life”, we’ll also have to give up our quaint, out-dated notions of liberty, civil rights, democracy, representative government and other relics of the Enlightenment. To save humanity, we’ll have to give up individuality: there’s no other way to eliminate the “wasteful” American or European lifestyle without massive employment of force. You can almost hear the hearts-a-flutter among the ranks of those who want to run your life for you (assuming you’re considered valuable enough to keep alive, of course . . . to save the human race, individual lives can’t be spared, comrade).

First to go would be the tourism industry: can’t have all those passenger jets flying to and fro, spewing all that evil carbon dioxide into the air. But don’t plan on driving anywhere . . . personal vehicles will be next. Mass transit will be the only allowable transportation. What’s that, comrade? Don’t live near a transit line? Get used to walking.

Oh, and better bone up on subsistence farming . . . that’s also in the blueprint. You’ll be expected to grow your own food as part of living the new “sustainable” lifestyle, along with only using “completely recyclable” goods.

Our would-be rulers appear not to have observed what happened the last time someone implemented this sort of radical policy. Or perhaps they have . . .

January 6, 2010

Behold the awesome power of Facebook groups

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

The editors at the National Post poke some fun at their opposite numbers over at the Toronto Star:

We know about the Star editors’ foray onto the big exciting Interweb because of the newspaper’s front-page headline on Monday: “Grassroots fury greets shuttered Parliament.” The breathless story suggests Canada is on the verge of some kind of violent 1917-style revolution — a “growing public uprising” no less, complete with “protest rallies” from coast to coast, and young activists full of unhinged, wild-eyed rage. The evidence for all this: 20,000 people joined a Facebook page called “Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament,” which urges Parliament to “Get back to work.”

[. . .]

For all we know, that 20,000 figure is up to 50,000 now, thanks to the Star publicity. Or maybe even 100,000. Who knows? But for the sake of context, let’s look at some other causes that also got a six-digit response: Almost 300,000 people have joined a group encouraging rocker John Mellencamp to quit smoking. Another hundred thousand people have joined a group encouraging random people to move to Finland. A whopping half-million people have used the power of Facebook to declare that they enjoy the television program 90210.

And then there’s our personal favourite: A group called “If 100,000 people join this group, Laura will name her son Megatron” recently met its goal. Congratulations, Laura, on the birth of your Transformer. We bet you didn’t know that he’d become the subject of — what does the Star call it? — oh yes, a “growing public uprising”!

January 2, 2010

This isn’t the way it was supposed to go

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:39

Over at Ace of Spades HQ, “Purple Avenger” tries to decipher the inscrutable Obama administration policy on information classification:

Here’s what I’ve found so far that I’m 100% sure of:

— There’s a 10 year “default” on declassifying classified info unless a longer time frame was specified and justified.

— Unclassified information may BECOME classified upon submission of a FOIA request for it . . . thus allowing for a public veneer of openness while reserving the right to clam up if said openness should prove inconvenient when someone actually learns of a document’s existence and has the nerve to request it.

Its a very lengthy and tortuously worded EO and people will be analyzing its ramifications for quite a while I suspect. I don’t imagine the professional intelligence community is terribly happy about the Byzantine procedures outlined here. Their jobs just got a lot harder.

December 31, 2009

Government moves quickly on TSA . . . to silence critics

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:11

In a bold move in the wake of the latest terrorist bomb attempt, the government has pounced . . . on the bloggers who reported on the TSA’s response:

As the government reviews how an alleged terrorist was able to bring a bomb onto a U.S.-bound plane and try to blow it up on Christmas Day, the Transportation Security Administration is going after bloggers who wrote about a directive to increase security after the incident.

TSA special agents served subpoenas to travel bloggers Steve Frischling and Chris Elliott, demanding that they reveal who leaked the security directive to them. The government says the directive was not supposed to be disclosed to the public.

Frischling said he met with two TSA special agents Tuesday night at his Connecticut home for about three hours and again on Wednesday morning when he was forced to hand over his lap top computer. Frischling said the agents threatened to interfere with his contract to write a blog for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines if he didn’t cooperate and provide the name of the person who leaked the memo.

December 29, 2009

Worst. Decade. Ever.

Filed under: Government, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 18:30

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