Posts by Idiot Savant
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Meanwhile, Mission Bay is to be declared an "entertainment zone" with late licences. WTF?
A councillor or crony owns something there?
(This is local government we're talking about...)
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Or that the Regulatory Responsibility Bill is presently just a press release
No its not - I have a copy. And I blogged about it here.
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Laws is the Comte Saint Germain. That much is obvious. Sue Bradford is an instrument for measuring the Earth's telluric currents. And the anti-smacking legislation was necessary because all that good parental discipline was causing the planet to oscillate too much on its axis. With that quelled, the PC brigade can use Sue B efficiently enough to ... locate the earth's spiritual pole ... and create a doomsday device devastating enough to ... put an "h" in "Whanganui". Permanently.
Sounds good. But where do the goldfish come into it?
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Perhaps by appealing to a fear that many conservatives share: that there really is a PC conspiracy.
Should we start one, just to mock them?
(And obviously, it would have to have Templars in it. You can't have a proper conspiracy without them)
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Wow. Quite apart from the redneckery, the sheer stupidity on display is frightening.
How did someone so stupid get to be mayor?
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As predicted, parliament is in urgency again, simply so the government can better manage spin around the Auckland supercity and have it all settled this week rather than a divisive debate lasting for the next two or three.
Hamstring the bastards, I say!
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Umm, was there any good news in it?
That depends on whether you think that this ETS is better than none.
I don't, I really don't.
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Yeah I get that. But the average of $3/person/week. Does that include the vast taxpayer subsidies, or is that just increased prices for power, transport etc, the taxpayer subsidies are on top of that?
The latter.
Wait, so we're subsidising agriculture almost fully past 2015?
Yup. Though to be fair, even Labour had signed up to that atrocity - but at least they capped it rather than making it a straight production subsidy.
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Whatever happened to the sacrosanct "user pays" "principle" when you need it
It only applies to poor people. If you want to incentivise rich people, you have to give them money.
I might be a simple person, but it seems to me that what you've just described provides virtually no incentives for changing behaviour etc.
Pretty much. By insulating polluters from the fullmarginal cost of emissions through massive subsidies and price caps, National and the Maori Party have removed the financial incentives which will make the scheme work. Polluters won't face higher costs, so have no need to reduce them; those thinking about making reductions won't get a high price for doign so, and so will be less likely to make them. It is a textbook case of how to take a good idea - an ETS - and make it into a bad one. And it brings the whole idea of market mechanisms into disrepute. If they're just about wealth transfer rather than doing anything, then we might as well go for regulation instead. It's the only way we can ensure that we won't be out of pocket for it.
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Kyle: different costs to different people. Key is looking at the overall cost to the economy, based on macroeconomic models, or at the expected effect on power and petrol prices. George and I are looking at how much these direct subsidies cost the government.
The key idea underlying an ETS or any market mechanism is "polluter pays". National and the Maori Party have reversed that to "pay polluters".