Japan is already in the planning stages of putting up a Space Solar Power System that it hopes to launch in 2030, ten years after a test system is put into stationary orbit.  It announced the program in November of last year.

So?  Well it turns out that the Obama administration is basically shutting down the space shuttle system by cancelling a $9.4 billion program called Constellation, which would have produced a new series of powerful rockets launched from a mobile tower that’s already built–at a cost of $500 million.   Constellation was to be the successor to the shuttle program, eventually landing once again on the moon.

But what if rocket technology advancement could bring Space Solar Power closer to reality?  Apparently Japan thinks it’s worth a good look.  So do people at NASA and elsewhere.

And Space Solar Power may be worth the effort.  A sizeable base electric plant, powered by gas, can produce as much as 20 megawatts of power.  One SSP can produce up to 100 times that much.

The idea is deceptively simple.  Put a huge solar panel array into space where the sun’s power isn’t diminished by the atmosphere, to say nothing of clouds and all the rest.  Concentrate that power into a microwave or laser beam and then send it down to a receiving power center on earth.  From there it goes into the transmission system.

The idea was first seriously considered in the 1970s after the OPEC embargo.  But gas prices eventually dropped down, and because today’s technologies weren’t yet invented, the idea died.

Today, however, the new technologies make the idea of a SSP far from far fetched.  It could be done.  It would be a massive effort on the scale of the Apollo effort that did put a man on the moon with the old technologies, but it’s no longer unthinkable at all.  One missing piece of the puzzle, however, is that rocket technology needs to produce cheaper rockets.  Sending this system into space would take a fleet of powerful shuttle rockets.

But stopping Constellation is likely to bring the US industry of making such things to a full stop.  Talent and manufacturing would be lost.  Even gearing up for upgrading the existing shuttle rockets would take two years because contracts are finished and plants shuttered.

Writing in the New American, former NASA journalist and author Beverly Eakman responds to the Obama decision, in part, with the following:

“NASA’s research had already produced a whole wave of new technologies people hardly thought about — ball bearings for drill bits in dentists’ tools; wireless, hand-held calculators; remote sensing platforms for measuring pollutants and identifying mineral, water and geological fuel sources; air-bubble wrapping for shipping; instantaneous transmission of voice and picture; and much more, though the increasingly left-leaning news services rarely mentioned them back in January 1976, when my 200-page in-house document, “Space Program Benefits and Applications,” was published.

Moreover, to say that the “sky was the limit” was no mere, casual expression. To say that we owe marvels like cell phones (with all their various “aps”), high-definition televisions, laser-medical devices, nuclear medicine, nuclear power plants, and the Internet in large part to NASA-inspired efforts is an understatement.

Yet, unbelievably, we blew it!

Until now I have remained silent, except to a few movers and shakers in the NASA establishment (who basically agree with me, but say that politics has essentially trumped practicality), but a just-published piece in Sunday’s Washington Post, “NASA’s $9.4 billion mission to nowhere,” (NASA’s $9.4 billion mission to nowhere) was the last straw. Had we pursued what was already on the drawing board in 1978, we would be essentially finished today. The few items in popular use that might still require fossil fuels would not necessitate overseas imports for hundreds of years, and given the rate of technological advance, even those few would probably have yielded alternative methods by now.”

A couple things are certain.  The global population continues to grow and the sources of energy continue to decline.  Re-considering a fantastic solution to future energy needs that is well within the ability of current technologies might be worth keeping America’s rocket industry alive and well. 

There’s a nice 19 minute video about the entire concept at the Future’s Channel. 

And at the National Space Society there’s this:

“Advantages of Space Solar Power

• Unlike oil, gas, ethanol, and coal plants, space solar power does not emit greenhouse gases.
• Unlike coal and nuclear plants, space solar power does not compete for or depend upon increasingly scarce fresh water resources.
• Unlike bio-ethanol or bio-diesel, space solar power does not compete for increasingly valuable farm land or depend on natural-gas-derived fertilizer. Food can continue to be a major export instead of a fuel provider.
• Unlike nuclear power plants, space solar power will not produce hazardous waste, which needs to be stored and guarded for hundreds of years.
• Unlike terrestrial solar and wind power plants, space solar power is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in huge quantities. It works regardless of cloud cover, daylight, or wind speed.
• Unlike nuclear power plants, space solar power does not provide easy targets for terrorists.
• Unlike coal and nuclear fuels, space solar power does not require environmentally problematic mining operations.
• Space solar power will provide true energy independence for the nations that develop it, eliminating a major source of national competition for limited Earth-based energy resources.
• Space solar power will not require dependence on unstable or hostile foreign oil providers to meet energy needs, enabling us to expend resources in other ways.
• Space solar power can be exported to virtually any place in the world, and its energy can be converted for local needs — such as manufacture of methanol for use in places like rural India where there are no electric power grids. Space solar power can also be used for desalination of sea water.
• Space solar power can take advantage of our current and historic investment in aerospace expertise to expand employment opportunities in solving the difficult problems of energy security and climate change.
• Space solar power can provide a market large enough to develop the low-cost space transportation system that is required for its deployment. This, in turn, will also bring the resources of the solar system within economic reach.

Disadvantages of Space Solar Power

• High development cost. Yes, space solar power development costs will be very large, although much smaller than American military presence in the Persian Gulf or the costs of global warming, climate change, or carbon sequestration. The cost of space solar power development always needs to be compared to the cost of not developing space solar power.

Requirements for Space Solar Power

The technologies and infrastructure required to make space solar power feasible include:

• Low-cost, environmentally-friendly launch vehicles. Current launch vehicles are too expensive, and at high launch rates may pose atmospheric pollution problems of their own. Cheaper, cleaner launch vehicles are needed.
• Large scale in-orbit construction and operations. To gather massive quantities of energy, solar power satellites must be large, far larger than the International Space Station (ISS), the largest spacecraft built to date. Fortunately, solar power satellites will be simpler than the ISS as they will consist of many identical parts.
• Power transmission. A relatively small effort is also necessary to assess how to best transmit power from satellites to the Earth’s surface with minimal environmental impact”

Beezer here.   So if you’re tired of thinking about Industrial Ag, Tea Baggers, TBTF Wall Street banks, health care reform or Washington politics in general, here’s something different to ponder.  Space based solar power.

You can get anything that you want, at Alice’s Internet.  (Apologies to Arlo Guthrie’s song entitled Alice’s Restaurant).

Consider the fossil fuel industries’ efforts to build a “straw man” argument that more jobs will be lost than created by clean energy.  If you’re an anti-clean energy person, the internet will give you studies that argue clean energy is bad, dirty energy is good.

The most recent efforts along these lines comes in the form of a Spanish study here, cited by a right wing outfit called the Western Business Roundtable, described here.

The fossil fuel industries are making a concerted effort to point out the obvious: The more we use clean energy, the fewer fossil fuel jobs there will be.  One set of new jobs will replace the other.  The fossil fuel industry points out that, particularly in these times of economic distress, it may be that in the beginning we’ll lose more fossil fuel jobs than we’ll gain in clean energy jobs, and this can make the Great Recession worse for some folks.

There are a number of problems with these arguments.  For one, none of them establish any direct causal relationship with this substitution effect during a Great Recession.  It may be the recession itself created many of these job losses, and any green jobs created kept a bad situation from being worse.   In the long run as fossil fuel energy declines, the jobs are obviously lost.  But that’s the long run, where it may turn out to be that clean energy jobs will match or exceed those lost from fossil fuel industries.

The arguments don’t address the main policy reasons for clean energy in the first place.  The entire idea is to install a sustainable, clean energy system before we’re hit by fossil fuel energy shortages.  Right now such a system is in its infancy and, of course, it will be more expensive to install and use.  As economies of scale are reached the new system will become cheaper, and as clean energy innovations come on line because of the increasing use of clean energy, the price will decrease even more.  In contrast to this positive clean energy cycle, the old, finite fossil fuels present a negative cycle where fossil fuels will always increase in price, no doubt dramatically as recessed global economies begin to recover.

Rather than write myself the rebuttal to these “studies,” I’ll quote from an article here.

“The problem with their entire line of reasoning here is that they are caught in short-term thinking as opposed to long-term thinking. In the short term, coal may well be the best alternative. But in the long term, given the alarming studies that show that man-made global warming is a major problem, we can’t afford not to switch to a carbon neutral economy. So, the solution here is clear — combine antipoverty problems with efforts to become carbon neutral. That would mean supporting the Employee Free Choice Act, universal healthcare, more money for education, as well as other programs that are designed to lift people out of poverty and into the middle class. These are difficulties that can be worked around, not excuses to ignore the long-term threat to our planet.

The report suggests that some of the jobs lost would be from those in conventional utility industries as a result of a loss of competitiveness. But that is not an excuse to ignore the threat to our planet any more than the horse and buggy industry had a right to complain about the rise of the auto industry at the start of the 20th century. When progress is made in science and technology, some jobs are lost — that is a fact of life. When Copernicus discovered that the Sun was the center of the Solar System, that did the Geocentric earth theorists out of jobs over the next 150 years or so. And all of the church bannings and inquisitions could not put the genie back in the bottle again. What we can’t do is refuse to push for more technological progress just because it might make the coal  industry obsolete. What we can do is to help communities that are economically dependent on coal to get back on their feet and help them find other career paths so that we can minimize the displacement as much as possible.

Now, nobody is suggesting that we should close down all the coal mines in this country tomorrow. But what we have to recognize is that resources like coal are finite resources that are not going to be here forever. That is why, as President Zapatero stated when campaigning for President in 2004, we have to diversify our energy resources. That way, when we do run out of coal, we don’t have the kind of panic that set in when gas prices went to $4 per gallon here. There is a big difference between solar and wind and coal — solar and wind are infinite resources; coal is not. Nuclear is better than coal, but there is only a finite amount of space to store left-over waste. And it is getting increasingly less likely that coal can expand, seeing that more and more places are getting used up and there will be more and more NIMBY opposition to any new so-called “clean” coal plants being built.

And the study, which appeals to guilt by bringing up poverty, fails to take into consideration the benefits that would happen when renewable energy is brought into the equation. Utilities are required to purchase renewable energy. Therefore, if we put solar plants or wind farms in every community in this country, then utilities would purchase any left-over electricity. Cities could own these solar and wind utilities and charge customers like they currently do water and sewer and gas, meaning that there would be a much bigger tax base to work with. That way, local authorities would have a lot more money to do public works projects and thus attract new residents and jobs, growing the tax base.

The study then suggests that renewable energy is subject to boom and bust. But the more one reads their analysis, the more it is clear that the problems with Spain’s boom and bust cycles have nothing to do with renewable energy in and of itself, but with the boom and bust mentality that was part of the Bush years. In other words, if the US government creates a sound financial basis for renewable growth that is not based on out of control debt and which rewards people who live within their means, then we can avoid the problems of boom and bust that have plagued previous efforts.

The study then pans previous studies because of what it claims is anecdotal information. But in fact, there have already been studies which contradict the claims of the Western Business Roundtable. For instance, a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists finds that if we are to go to a 25% alternative energy plan by 2025, then we would create a net 200,000 new jobs as well as 200,000 new jobs total. Jeff Deyette explained the reason for the job creation to the New York Times:

The reason, Mr. Deyette said, is that more expenditures go into manufacturing, equipment, installation and maintenance for renewable energy systems than they do for fossil fuels. “Obviously, the mining sector has become incredibly mechanized in recent years,” he said.

When asked about the flip side of this scenario — that renewable energy could be viewed as inefficient because it required more labor per unit of energy than fossil fuels — he said, “Jobs for dollars is essentially the trade-off there.”

So, we can see right away why the UCS study is superior to the Spanish study — it took into account such things as manufacturing, equipment, installation, and maintenance, while the Spanish study did not.

In addition, green collar jobs in Germany expanded from 160,000 to 240,000 in the last three years and could reach 400,000 by 2020. Also, the total number of green collar jobs around the world is forecast to be 40 million by the year 2020. That is several times the number of jobs that are available now. This means that if you are laid off from work, it might be a good idea to consider pursuing a career in green collar jobs, since it is an industry that is growing, unlike many career fields these days.

Next, the Western Business Roundtable-championed study claims that Spain has only created 50,000 jobs through their renewable program. However, a UNEP study says the figure is 188,000. There is a significant difference between the Spanish study and the UNEP study; the latter takes into account jobs indirectly created as the result of Spain’s investment in green collar jobs. The UNEP study breaks down the job creation; they say that 89,000 jobs have been directly created and 99,000 jobs have been indirectly created by the Spanish government’s investment in renewables. The Spainsh study does not take into account jobs indirectly created as the result of their investment in green jobs; however, it does take into account jobs which they say are indirectly lost as a result of Spain’s investment in the green economy. Thus, they are stacking the deck in favor of their side. Finally, even if we take their job losses at face value and accept their figures, Spain’s investment in renewables has still resulted in a net gain of 80,000 jobs.

But the Western Business Roundtable study continues by oozing “concern” over what they call “capital destruction:”

Public investment in renewable energy has job creation as one of its explicit goals, which, given the current economic crisis, suggests an intention of seeding a future recovery with “green job” subsidies. The problem with this plan is that the resources used to create “green jobs” must be obtained from elsewhere in the economy. Therefore, this type of policy tends to create not just a crowding-out effect but also a net destruction of capital insofar as the investment necessary must be subsidized to a great extent and this is carried out by absorbing or destroying capital from the rest of the economy.

The money spent by the government cannot, once committed to “green jobs”, be consumed or invested by private parties and therefore the jobs that would depend on such consumption and investment will disappear or not be created. Investment in green jobs will only prove convenient if the expense by the public sector is more efficient at generating wealth than the private sector. This would only be possible if public investment were able to be self-financing without having to resort to subsidies, i.e., without needing to absorb wealth generated by the rest of the economy in order to support a production that cannot be justified through the incurred incomes and costs. We have calculated that the total public subsidy in Spain, both spent and committed, totals 28,671 million Euros (€28.7 billion or appx. $37 billion USD), and sustains 50,200 jobs.

The study hammers on the guilt trips here, trying to appeal to guilt. This is an attempt to generate some sort of buyer’s remorse over what might have been. But one could use these sorts of appeals to guilt to pan any kind of government spending; therefore, these appeals are pointless. Secondly of all, it is simply not true that money spent on these projects would no longer generate wealth; the fact of the matter is that workers would spend the money that they got and thus generate wealth that way.

Then, they get into the math. They take the amount of money invested in renewables (around 28 billion euros) and divide it for each worker (50,000) and come up with a subsidy of around 571,000 euros per worker. By way of comparison, they estimate, based on average capital per worker, is 259,000 euros. Therefore, they estimate that for every green collar job that they create, they lose 2.2 workers. But all that is dependent on the accuracy of the 50,000 worker figure. And the problem, as noted above, is that study does not take into account jobs indirectly created by green collar jobs; the UNEP study does and comes up with a much higher figure of 188,000 jobs. So, plugging the much more accurate UNEP figures yields a much different figure — the average capital per worker is 152,805 euros per worker, which means that for every two jobs lost through this program, three are created. And that means that their calculations about worker productivity are similarly off.

The authors of the Spanish study then go on to pronounce judgment on themselves:

This case is similar to the one that French economist Frédéric Bastiat denounced in his famous “Petition by the candle-makers,” in which he ridicules the intentions of protectionist entrepreneurs by comparing them to candle-makers clamoring for the state to crowd-out the sun, which was competing with them unfairly when providing light. In their opinion, if the sun was barred from providing light, numerous jobs would be created in the candle manufacturing industry. Obviously, this is not so: precisely by not being able to profit from the sun’s light we would be wasting scarce resources in the production of candles instead of producing other goods and services that would increase our wealth.

And it works the same way here as well — if the government had passed laws against autos on public roads around the turn of the 20th century, the horse and buggy industry would have survived and millions of jobs would have been saved. Not only is the creation of green collar jobs more efficient than the creation of average jobs, the long term future of our planet demands it as well.

And finally, even the authors of the study admit that the numbers of the Spainish experience can’t be directly translated into the American experience. That is why the UCS study is much more reliable than this one in determining the future of our energy policy, because it takes into account American jobs, not someone else’s situation. And the UCS study suggests that we would stand to gain much more than the Spanish would if we were to implement Obama’s plans for renewable energy here in this country.”

Back to Beezer.  Gearing up to make a massive transition in energy to sustainability will obviously cost a lot of money.  In the Great Recession, the downside is that money is tight.  Jobs in all industries are being lost, that is clear.  But the negative cycle presented by finite fossil fuel supplies, and their substantial exogenous costs in environmental degredation and health care, care nothing of economic cycles.

In short, it isn’t going to be easy.  Nothing as important as this challenge will ever be easy.  The quicker we get the job done, the faster we’ll be able to move forward with clean, reliable and sustainable energy.

Pay me now.  There is no later.

Here’s a thought about thinking.  How often have you been an advocate?  Often no doubt.  Everyone has a point of view on many, many issues, particularly if you happen to be an expert in a certain area.

The thought is that you should be asking a question, making an inquiry, instead of making a statement, or advocating.  Call it a little “trick.”  Try it out sometime when you’re having, maybe, just a little argument with someone.

Lawyers have an old admonition “Never ask a question if you don’t already know the answer.”  That’s why lawyers are known as advocates.  Which isn’t saying that they never ask questions.  In point of fact, lawyers always ask questions.  They are trained in this little “trick.”

But outside the courtroom you can use a question in its most basic form, not as a tool to win an argument, but as a tool to legitemately work towards resolving differences.

An example from the real world.  Take the price of gasoline.  The free market competitive structure is one of supply and demand.  The relationship between these two basic concepts is straightforward: Alter either one, up or down, and it moves the price up or down.  Simple.  Reduce demand the price goes down.  Reduce supply, the price goes up.  Opposites.

Now ask the question “Are there any costs of gasoline not considered in the supply demand equation?”

Absolutely there are.  Consider that burning gasoline produces various by products, many of which have been identified as pollutants harmful to human health and the environment.  “What,” you might inquire, “Are the costs of reducing the harm created?  Does anyone know this, exactly?”

Let’s say, just as an example, that an estimate comes out that it costs $2 per gallon of gasoline to treat health problems created by burning gasoline, and to mitigate the environmental problems caused by burning gasoline.  The inquiry then becomes “Should we include this $2 in the price of gasoline?”

You might assume most people would answer “Yes, put the $2 in the price of gasoline.”  Not really.  The way people, and their elected representatives, are behaving is that the real question being asked is “Should we pay for the health and environmental problems separately?”  And the answer has been, so far, “Yes.”  That’s what we do today.  We separate the cost of health and environmental problems created by burning gasoline, and we put them in separate categories of “health costs,” and “environmental costs.”

Why do we end up with this question, and the subsequent answer, when it should be obvious this tact is probably not very efficient?   Maybe we need to ask “Does the free market idea of supply and demand ignore some costs of gasoline?”  Apparently it does, because those costs are not put into the basic supply/demand price.  They are real costs, that’s clear.  But they are paid for in separate categories in the form of insurance premium pricing, and taxes for environmental mitigation.

Another version of the question might be “Are the higher insurance premiums caused, in part, by the failure to pay for them in the price of gasoline?  Are those real gasoline costs simply showing up in the health insurance bills.”  And the same questions, only substitute taxes for health insurance, could be asked regarding environmental cleanup bills created by burning gasoline.

Isn’t this fun?  Beezer believes the real, honest question is this one.  “Should the cost of gasoline be that which produces a clean alternative to gasoline?”  The nice thing about this question is that it avoids the problem of trying to identify exactly what part of the insurance and environmental bills is caused by gasoline because the definition of a clean fuel is one that doesn’t have follow-on health and environmental cost.

The answer to that question is, by definition, precisely the right one.  A nice side benefit to the answer is that the price of the alternative will only go down due to economies of scale and innovation.  Unfortunately, because we apparently aren’t asking the right questions, we will continue to use gasoline until the price gets so high we are forced to suffer the dislocations and will incur the added expense of producing alternatives in a crisis.

President Barack Obama comes to his first term facing what seems like an endless list of failings to address.  We’re in a global recession, at best.  We face growing income disparities in America, and that arouses a corrosive distrust in the country’s institutions, both public and private.  We face what appears certain to be worsening resource shortages in energy, food and raw materials.  More than 40 million Americans, at any given time, are without medical health services and our national ranking in this area among developed countries is so low as to be a national embarrasment.  And our public education system appears to be failing to educate properly to meet today’s challenges.

And finally, despite all these obvious challenges, our elected leadership shows no inclination to unite as one, instead opting to disintegrate into partisan wrangling as though our world hasn’t changed a bit. 

The country and the world needs to prioritize the tasks.

The first priority is developing efficient, sustainable supplies of energy.  This is the basic need that supports all else.  If you don’t comprehend this, just think of what would happen if the sun (the source of all energy) went out. 

The world’s economies have grown using fossil fuel based energy sources.  Oil, coal, and natural gas have fueled the growth in production and incomes worldwide.   For the past 150 years, these energy resources were easily extracted and transported for our use.   But it has become abundantly clear that these energy sources are no longer abundant and ultimately they are finite.   

Moving our productive capacity towards infinite energy sources such as windpower, solar power, or wave power is necessary.  Not only are these resources sustainable but even with our current technology they can be dependable. 

The hurdle is in the transition.  Until these sustainable energy sources can reach economies of scale, they are nominally more expensive.  Initially their “cost” appears too high.  Private markets, which have shown to be the best means of production, will not invest in these energy supplies as long as the legacy fuels appear to be cheaper.  This is where national policy becomes critical.  A national government can level the price differences in various ways and thus encourage private investment, unleashing the innovative, creative energy of entrepreneurs.

And it’s not just about a sustainable supply of energy.  It’s also about the more efficient use of that energy.  Energy unit costs might increase, but energy bills might well decline due to efficiencies in energy use.  As an example, some utility regulators around the world have given utilities incentives to produce less energy, not more.  If the utility can create more efficient methods of production and use, then the regulators increase utility profits.  They are paid to be more efficient.   Some regulators have combined this incentive structure with one that requires utilities to first use clean energy sources and only when those have been fully committed to begin supplying fossil fuel based energy.  Again, the utilities make more money by producing more clean energy, as well as being more efficient.  

There’s another major side benefit by making this transition.  By definition, clean energy use decreases the pollution damage associated with fossil fuel energy use.  This benefit not only makes everyone’s life healthier, but cheaper too.  There are tremendous costs associated with poor health and the mitigation of environmental degredation.  Some studies argue that, when you account for the health and environmental costs of fossil fuel energy, the real cost of a gallon of gasoline is north of $12 per gallon today.   The direction of clean energy costs will decline overtime as economies of scale and efficiences of use are brought to bear.  The direction of fossil fuel energy will only go up.

In the future clean economies will see their prices decline, and their competitive position improve.  Fossil fuel based economies will decline as their energy costs climb inexorably and they lose competitively.

As for health, it is wealth.  America has a dysfunctional and expensive health care system.  We rank 37th in the world, worst among developed countries in almost every metric used to compare health outcomes.  President Obama has stated that financially, our current health care system presents the first order threat to our economy.  It will bankrupt us first if not changed.

Compared to the energy issue(s), health care appears to be a relatively simple problem.  It’s not as though we have to discover how to build a better system because every other developed country has one.  The solutions are right in front of us.  Pick one, for heaven’s sake.

Beezer prefers the French system.  France has a system that not only delivers universal, high quality health care in abundance, but it does so at a lower cost than ours and is popular with citizens.  In France doctors are paid a salary.  A very good salary in the low six figure range.  France also pays for a doctor’s education, which means their doctors don’t graduate with a half million dollar debt to pay off by charging more for their services.  In France, malpractice claims are settled by a board, not in a courtroom.  This avoids the massive penalties that have made American health care costs skyrocket.  In order to keep administrative costs to a minimum, France’s system relies upon regional, not for profit, agencies to provide these services.   And obviously such a system, because of economies of scale for purchasing power, inhibit price increases for drugs and medical equipment.

This very successful system (France has the highest general practitioner per capita ratio in the world) is paid for via payroll taxes.

There are four important benefits for such a system nationally.  First is that more citizens receive health care.  One, this improves health throughout the population, and two, avoids a serious cause of bankruptcy in America due to health problems that result in massive bills that cannot be paid.  Three, this system will cost less overall and will relieve businesses of the increasingly punitive cost of private health insurance, making them more competitive in a global economy.

Private health insurance can survive, but as the universal insurance is implemented and gains traction this private sector is likely to downsize.  As it should because it’s in the process of bankrupting the nation in its current configuration.

Health is wealth.  Clean energy is healthy.  Virtuous outcomes as well as good business outcomes.  President Obama calls upon us all to become more responsible and he is making a good faith effort to lead the way.  It is up to us to put aside our ideologies and instead together push for common goals using all our considerable tools, public and private, to get there.

The underlying problem is that we’re all still focused on chasing non productive assets. Banks are intermediaries. Their basic purpose is to enforce capital standards, and experience, on industry, small businesses, homeowners etc. But that’s it, really. Banks don’t produce anything other than advice and financial tools.

Yet we’ve spent trillions of our capital on banks. Money chasing money.

Banks need to be trimmed down. And they are despite taxpayer subsidies.

The subsidies need to be re-directed at innovating and producing the future, clean, sustainable economy.  Taxpayer money should be chasing clean energy, not banks and the poor investments they’ve made.

I favor a National Bank because it can be a useful tool of government. It can and would lend and subsidize jobs in support of national policy goals.

Free markets and our financial intermediaries have shown that they have a fatal weakness: The inability to articulate and support national policy. They can help. They can be encouraged. But they will not, cannot, form the policies.

That job is government’s. And therein lies the real “black hole” for America. We have forgotten how to have a government with national goals. Right now, it’s moved from a total vacuum to something of some substance. But it is far from being restored to it’s normal place in the economy.

Obama doesn’t lack vision. But to be honest, he lacks experience. And it shows right now. That acknowledged, Obama has proven to be a very quick study. One can only hope he gains more confidence and makes the sometimes tough, and swift decisions he must make to heal America.

Posted by: Beezer | Link to comment | March 09, 2009 at 04:51 AM