PeakTrader.com

[administrator]

PeakTrader:

Regulation is a regressive tax. Of the $2 trillion a year of federal regulations, perhaps, the top 50% of income earners pay $1 trillion and the bottom 50% of income earners pay $1 trillion, one way or another, e.g. through lower wages or higher prices.

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Supply-side economics has been effective in raising output and employment, and lowering prices and interest rates.

Unfortunately, government, along with creating good for society, has also created undesirable incentives and disincentives, costly problems that required costly solutions, and massive inefficiencies.

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It’s easy to make false assumptions.

Someone may note states with a higher minimum wage may have a higher unemployment rate. Therefore, a higher minimum wage causes unemployment.

However, controlling for other factors, e.g. systematic differences in environmental standards, other labor standards, tax rates, etc., we may find a higher minimum wage doesn’t cause unemployment or causes employment.

It’s possible, a rise in the minimum wage to $10 may increase employment, or a rise to $12 may decrease employment, etc..

Also, over time, we can seperate inflation from efficiency in revenues and expenses of firms. Generally, when inflation is high, it’s high in both revenue and expenses, or when it’s low, it’s low in both revenue and expenses.

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Chart of Peak Oil plateau:

http://www.theoildrum.com/files/image001_3.png

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Global Oil Risks in the Early 21st Century
March 26, 2012

“Since giant and super giant oil fields dominate current production, they are good indicators for the point of peak production. There is now broad agreement among analysts that the decline in existing production is between 4-8% annually. In terms of capacity, this means that roughly a new North Sea (~5 Mb/d) has to come on stream every year just to keep the present output constant.

The number of giant oil field discoveries peaked in the early ’60s and has been dwindling since then…Only 25 fields account for one quarter of global production and 100 fields account for half of production. Just 500 fields account for two-thirds of all the production.”

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9015

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Conventional oil can be compared to the dodo bird:

“Dodos went extinct in the mid-to-late 17th century and their disappearance is directly attributable to human activity.”

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