Jobs, Earth and Humanity

Jobs: Each of us needs work, yet now one of five of us is out of, or short of, work (shadowstats.com). Each willing worker should have a job open to them. This is only fair, since we generally must work for what we need.  
Labor versus Resources: We now use resources to eliminate labor via clever technology, which, in a world empty of people and full of resources, brilliantly complemented limited labor. But now we live in a world full of people eager to work, and running empty of resources. We can use more labor and less resources and thrive more. This will reduce pollution from resource use, as well as provide more equal opportunity to work for the the less fortunate among us.  
Growth versus Maturity: We relied on economic growth to provide more jobs, more opportunity for the less lucky, but now our world is full of us people, and more growth can't fit well. Like a growing child becoming adult, humanity as a species has become mature. Further physical growth of our society is unhealthy, since we must all fit together on this limited planet. We still have enough now for each of our needs, yet not enough for our greeds. And if we grow economically while not growing physically, we produce only needless inflation. Now what?  
Fuller Employment and Tax-Shifting: We can have enough jobs without unhealthy continued growth through inspiring more labor use and less resource use, via different technologies and different incentives. How can we inspire replacing resource use with labor? Now we tax labor use through income taxes, but don't tax resource use. We can switch this, taxing use of resources to cover the revenues from now-eliminated income taxes. Then labor will be cheaper for bosses. This will inspire more hiring and less buying resources, saving rare resources for our children, while reducing subsequent pollution, and inspiring creation of more of the jobs we all need. Furthermore this helps reduce costly resource imports and damaging trade deficits, all while maintaining or increasing governmental revenues.  
In Massachusetts: Not only can we shift our state taxes from income to resource use, but at a state level we can reverse federal income taxation with state rebates, and pay for the rebates out of further resource use taxation. Thus we can lead the US in building a sustainable economy here in Massachusetts, inspiring extensive hiring and resource conservation.  
Worksharing: But tax-shifting will take time to affect employment decisions, and meanwhile one of five of us is short of the labor we need. So we can expand worksharing to levels so successful in Germany and other countries. What is worksharing? Worksharing spreads work among all of us by temporarily shortening the workweek to stimulate hiring unemployed people. Those already working, who's hours are cut, receive some unemployment insurance so that their take-home pay stays nearly level. Worksharing has been done here in Massachusetts on a trial basis, and can be expanded. Worksharing is a temporary measure to make hard times fall more fairly across all our shoulders, to preserve civil society while economies adjust.

One design of solar hot water heater can work right through a power failure. Called 'geyser pumping', the mechanism percolates like a coffee maker, using the sun's power to drive bubbles up through the panels. Bubbles that form in the panels lift the working fluid up out of the panels, where the bubbles are released. This allows the fluid to travel down through a long loop that takes it down through the basement-mounted hot water storage tank, where it gives off its heat to the cold water entering the tank. Then the now-cold fluid continues back up to the panels, where, joined by the bubbles, it enters the panels to be heated again. The fluid in the panels is freeze-proof, and is separated from drinking water by copper heat exchangers, so the system will withstand New England winters without trouble. While a little complex to first explain, these systems are in fact simple in operation, in that they do not depend on electric pumps, motors, valves, switches or any electricity at all. This means sun can heat your water when there's no electricity, providing an additional margin of security in tomorrow's uncertain future. Moreover, this simplicity provides outstanding reliability, and eases diagnosis and repair on the rare occasion of failure. Decades ago I helped install a predecessor to this type of solar hot water system. This newer system shares with it's predecessor the ability to shut itself down once all the tank water is hot, preventing damage and extending reliability. This is also done without switches motors valves or electricity, so this system will not overheat in a power failure. A tank below the panels accepts most of the working fluid when the system's heat fills the panels with vapor, which occurs when the basement tank has been completely heated through. Then when hot water is used, cold water replaces it in the bottom of the storage tank. This cools the working fluid returning to the panels. This cold fluid cools down the panels again, drawing the rest of the fluid back up out of the overflow tank beneath the panels, and returning the system to operation. I am really impressed with the careful thought guiding this system's design, and recommend it for Jamaica Plain residents seeking trouble-free solar hot water. For more information, see Sunnovations' archived site.

Finishing Unemployment for Good

Economists understand that we don't need growth to solve unemployment. We can put more of us to work, getting more work done in the world, at the cost of increasing the money supply. This is said to cause inflation, but there's a cure - reduce the money supply back done again with land and wealth taxes that most affect the one percent. Thus we can have full employment and balanced budgets while acknowledging that infinite growth aboard a finite earth is suicidally cancerous, all while reducing the inequality that makes us all miserable. But won't an increase in employment inevitably cause an increase in pollution? No, because we use polluting resources to substitute for labor, when we have too much labor and pollution and not enough resources. Slowing resource use will lessen pollution, preserve resources and increase employment. Hence the push to tax 'bads' instead of goods, and instead of taxing labor; This tax shift can shift consumption patterns so we'll all be better off. For more, see the 16 minute Joshua Farley video:

Transportation transformation

Joshua Farley explains Money, Debt, and Ecological Economics

Now is the Time to Start Building the Boston Urban Ring Transit Line.

The Urban Ring is a planned public transport service to encircle central Boston, connecting the existing subway line 'grid' so as to allow quicker routes around Boston's center. It is expected to move 40,000 passengers each day in phase I, to about 275,000 per day in phase III in 2025, speeding commutes and relieving central transit congestion.
Because most business doesn't know now what to do with capital, interest rates are near historic lows, so it's a great time to raise building capital via municipal bond sales.
And it is a great time to hire transit builders, amidst this seemingly endless recession, and to thus stimulate the greater Boston economy.
The land-owners of the to-be-connected new stops on the Urban Ring stand to gain tremendously in financial terms from the Ring's connecting these sites right to the existing subway and busway system, and it would thus be fair to partly fund Urban Ring construction by taxing the increase in land value created at and near these new stops with special taxation zones. There’s an annotated bibliography about paying for public transit building with taxes of the increased land value created by the new public transit at: http://www.vtpi.org/smith.pdf
Boston's Urban Ring could be a step forward into a greener future for Boston, replacing private auto traffic, speeding many commutes, reducing air pollution and the resulting health costs for asthma, etc. in Boston, while helping to lessen greater Boston's Carbon footprint.
Here are some links to more information:

http://app1.massdot.state.ma.us/theurbanring/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Ring_Project_(MBTA)

http://www.abettercity.org/transportation/urbanring.html

Fairly applying Mass sales tax to real estate, too.

Here's a graph of current US state and local revenues in this recession compared to recent recessions, from page 8 of http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/82978022 which is 'Housing, Monetary Policy, and the Recovery' by Michael E. Feroli, JP Morgan Chase, Ethan S. Harris, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Amir Sufi, University of Chicago Booth School of Business and NBER, Kenneth D. West, University of Wisconsin and NBER,February 2012

As we can see, state and local tax revenues are plummeting; which is unique in recent recessions.
To maintain Massachusetts civil society, we must currently increase revenues. and one way we could do that is to extend the application of Mass sales tax to land transactions.


It is only fair to tax the sales of the rich as well as the poor.

This could be done simply by clarifying http://www.malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleIX/Chapter64H/Section6 part (g) to specifically tax real estate sales, in addition to the deed excise tax. Indeed, it is not clear to me from the law that real estate sales are currently in fact exempt from Massachusetts sales taxation, so this might be just a policy decision.

This might be expected to generate, at a median price of $293,500, and a count of 34,952 home sales on the MLS in 2011, taxed at 6.25%, yearly revenues of around $641,000,000.

In effect, taxing real estate sales collects some of the location value provided to the seller by the community.

What about also cutting the sales tax?

Expand the scope of the sales tax to include real estate but also cut the sales tax to 2-3%?
patrick

How that might work

[2011] “Receipts from the sales tax totaled $4.905 billion,” /0.0625= $78.48billion + ($293,500 * 34,952 = 10.26billion) = $88.74billion * 0.025 =$2.22 billion

So going from sales tax of 6.25% without real estate to 2.5% on everything loses (4.905 -2.219)billion = a loss in state revenues of $2.687 billion in 2011, of $20.5 billion 2011 state revenues collected.

Building a civil society adds value to real estate via location effects.

We can either let our communities erode further, thus futher eroding the value of our real estate's location, or we can act to have a civil society by creating a means to pay for it, and perhaps add more than $18K of value to a median property by having it be in a place you’d like to live.

If sales tax is bad for the rich, how is OK to charge to the poor who never buy homes? we are paying on average about $750/yr. (=4.905b/6.5million pop'n.) a piece in nickels and dimes on every taxable purchase now, which is a logistic nightmare.
A real estate sales tax would be easy to collect - the property isn't going anywhere, and the number and size of the payments to be taxed would make it easier to keep track of.

Why are Mass homes so pricey?

The idea of raising real estate sales taxes in Massachusetts raises ire as well. Many seem to feel threatened by rising home costs, yet do they feel threatened by degrading education, fire and police protection? Perhaps we feel safe in our homes, until costs rise, yet unsafe in our neighborhoods, as if we're unattached to the events beyond our door. Are our homes certain protection from fire, from increasing crime (due to both worsening unemployment and worsening education)? Of course not. Much of the protection we enjoy in our homes is due to the efforts of the community within which our homes lie, including town, state and national communities.

Why is a median Massachusetts home worth about $350K while in Maine the median price is about $175K? It's mostly location. What about location provides so much value? It is that location is location in regards to community: in other words the difference in value between the median house in MA and ME, or between MA and Bosnia or Korea is to a great extent due to the work of communities of people, often through their governments. And that community-provided-value, while it can taken advantage of by an individual's real estate sale, can not be created by an individual acting alone, or a family acting alone. That value is due to the communities' work, and as the representative of the community, the government has a moral claim to some of that community-provided value.

Would greening the USA reduce jobs, or increase them?

Don Fitz expects US employment should drop in the future, as we use less energy, but didn't we use that energy to reduce the use of labor; to 'increase labor efficiency'?

Won't we be actually be forced, in using less energy to get things done, to use more labor instead?
As one who has been forced to 'use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without', I know the trade-off between buying new stuff and the alternatives, and the alternatives take more labor.

This is a good thing, in a number of ways: 1)We need more jobs, 2)we have plenty of labor, 3) if we don't use the labor now, the chance to work those hours is gone forever, while resources unused can be saved to be used another day, 4) substituting labor for energy and resource use reduces pollution, 5)and creates greater equality of social opportunity, which 6) promotes peace and 7)is more just.

Should Undocumented Get Driver's licences?

The question has been posed whether we should or should not let undocumented people get driver's licences.
Uhh, are there any other multiple choices for this question besides 'yes' or 'no'? File Under: False Dilemma ;-) But seriously, this question is divisive and of little relevance when what we need are so many green jobs that we wouldn't care whether some were worked by an undocumented person. We need these green jobs for several reasons: 1) Environmental protection, including a) stopping climate change from ruining our food production system, and b) shifting from eliminating labor usage to eliminating resource usage, as we have more than enough labor, which is lost when not worked, and not enough resources, like energy and rare earth ores, and 2) Building equality of opportunity for workers by uniting across national boundaries and co-operating globally, as corporations do, as well as 3) dodging the stranglehold Capital has on the mechanisms of production, by reducing some of our 'needs' and meeting them via appropriate technology, so we are in a better negotiating position with Capital, so we can get them to finally 'internalize externalized costs', i.e. pay for and clean up their environmental and social messes. The Good News is that not only can we get these green jobs, we can get them despite the scary fat cats monopolizing the milk bowls - we've got the power! These are 'Long-Spoon'type problems: We just need some of those 'checklist manufesto'/open source type co-ordinating solutions so we can work well as a co-operating group and bypass the middleman while we bypass the gas pump, the gun, the bottle and the needle. There's still enough for all our needs, if not all our greeds, even with the sadly-burgeoning world population. This is an opportunity to reframe the debate by naming this question as purposely politically divisive, in that it either divides US workers from each other, or divides US workers from an environmentally sustainable, socially just and plentiful future, which IS within reach of all of us, together.

Neat interactive book review site

Brian's books

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

by Naomi Oreskes

Traces, through many decades of various political struggles, the actions of a small cadre dedicated to sowing confusion about science despite the data. Names names and follows the money through its laundering and back. An important history ...

World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse

by Lester Russell Brown

This book is very important because of it's first two parts; 1) A Deteriorating Foundation, and 2) the Consequences These first seven chapters are essential to understanding and planning for the near future. I thought I was aware, but this ...

The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

by Richard G. Wilkinson

Unique information on the correlation between state's and nation's financial inequality and a bundle of social well-being indices.

Progress and Poverty

by Henry George

Still insightful today, Henry George's economic classic starts with a central puzzle; why, when unemployment increases, do interest rates drop?
He startlingly sees a natural alliance between the Wage-earner and the Capitalist, and makes...

Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered: 25 Years Later...With Commentaries

by E.F. Schumacher

Still insightful, and wonderfully complemented by leading disciple's commentaries in the margins.
traces the limits of utility of logic and numeracy in planning, and emphasizes the role of common sense and systems thinking in maintaini...

0% unemployment - why not?

Some worry that having a job ready for every willing worker will cause price inflation, but if government reduced the supply of money through increased taxation of UNearned income at the same time, perhaps we could have jobs enough for every willing worker AND stable prices, all with a balanced government budget as well.

So how do we increase the number of jobs offered by private businesses? Simple, bribes. Instead of penalizing employers by forcing them to pay a tax for every hour of work they create, we could pay them instead, or at least not tax them when they do the right thing.

But how would taxes get paid? By taxing other things to the same extent. We can tax carbon-rich fuel purchases, and lessen the destruction of our climate, and the climate-dependent agriculture that feeds us. We can tax financial speculation, which will also slow speculation's price instability. We could apply sales tax to real estate sales. The list goes on.

Too many jobs - it's a situation we'd all like to face - we could pick and choose.

But doesn't onrushing technological change eliminate jobs continually?

What is all this technology FOR? It is for us; who, overall, are basically average people. When technology or Friedman tells us that average is over, it is time to say 'lighten up a little'.

We could cease US tax credits for research and development until that R & D serves humankind. This will increase federal revenues, while slowing job elimination. But what about the U.S.'s global competitiveness?
Nationalism is a poor excuse for surrendering to the technological change of which we should be, and in fact are, masters.
Our recent industrial technological triumph; the global advance in manufacturing method, is in doing more with less, that is more production with less labor, yet as resources run out globally, it will be labor that we have in surplus, and resources that we must strive to use efficiently.

But if we start to tax the rich more, won't they flee to tax havens en mass? Here is where worldwide co-ordination of wealth taxation comes in. Capital Flight isn't leaving earth orbit soon - problem solved.

Humanity, which is mostly pretty average, deserves better than a rat-race to environmental and social, and financial disaster. We've been able to form huge nations, and work together within them, despite different languages and cultures. We, the citizens of the world, can agree to work together so that everyone has a fair, and good, chance of earning a decent living. While the accelerating annual increase in our human numbers will soon make this more difficult, there's no reason to pretend that this desperate individual game of living with ever-increasing unemployment, like some mix of musical chairs and russian roullette, makes sense.

Brian Cady

Let's auction government lobbying liceances, and tax political campaign contributions

Let's slightly restrict the number of lobbying liceances and publically auction that right to lobby legislature, so as to raise government revenue, as well as to pit lobbyist against lobbyist, (for our own enjoyment).

Let's highly tax political contributions beyond $100 per person, to raise revenues for the public good, and to counter and reduce the influence of the few moneyed interests. Let's tax 95% of political contributions to candidates after the first hundred bucks, and have those publically reported.

Let's also require all politicians to publically report lobbyist interactions by a searchable schedule, so as to trace influence back.

Stretched Dory Model Progress #2

Here's a stringer with the frames it will connect somewhat in place.

Stretched Dory Model Progress #1

Here are the templates/molds/patterns for the dory, along with the first side, mostly cut with a hacksaw blade, which chipped off the high sternmost corner; you can see it sitting on top of the cut piece toward the rear. I think I'll use tin snips from now on, which leave a cleaner edge; there's a little piece cut from scrape with snips to the left on the bench beside the first cut side. Now I'll try using snips to finish the bottom edge of the first side...There:

So now I've cut the other side out with shears/snips - the cuts didn't come out as nice when cutting a clockwise turn along the outer plies' grain.

Fixing the Climate Crisis by Re-engineering the Chloroplast

A limited amount of sunlight energy hits earth's plants and a limited percentage of this transforms carbon dioxide to sugar, etc. A limited response is evident by humans to the perception of eminent climatic collapse. Perhaps the easiest of these three to influence is the amount of sunlight energy converted to sugar. While about 0.5-5% of the sunlight energy hitting a leaf converts to sugars, etc., photovoltaic cells regularly convert 15% of their incident sunlight to electricity. If chloroplasts and plants could achieve 10% efficiency, it would increase the potential biomass; the potential amount of life on earth that could live sustainably, including human life.

Perhaps a virus improving the efficiency of the chloroplasts it infected, spread throughout the plant kingdom by an insect vector, could most easily enact this change.

Perhaps engineered phytoplanktons of many common marine species, photosynthesizing tenfold more efficiently, could be spread throughout the world's oceans, and grow and thrive, reducing atmospheric CO2 and increasing sealife, and thus restoring overfished fish stocks as well as marine biomass overall. If these could also fix nitrogen without iron, it would supercede yet another constraint on the biosphere, and perhaps allow earth's humans to dodge climatic collapse.

Some interesting related work.

Above illustration from The Function of the Aerenchyma in Arborescent Lycopsids: Evidence of an Unfamiliar Metabolic Strategy

by

Walton A. Green

from Peace and Permanance by E.F. Schumacher

"In short, we can say today that man is far too clever to be able to survive without wisdom. No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom. The assertion that "foul is useful and fair is not" is the antithesis of wisdom. The hope that the pursuit of goodness and virtue can be postponed until we have attained universal prosperity and that by the single-minded pursuit of wealth, without bothering our heads about spiritual and moral questions, we could establish peace on earth, is an unrealistic, unscientific, and irrational hope. The exclusion of wisdom from economics, science and technology was something we could get away with for a little while, as long as we were relatively unsuccessful; but now that we have become very successful, the problem of spiritual and moral truth moves into the central position.
From an economic point of view, the central concept of wisdom is permanence....Nothing makes economic sense unless its continuance for a long time can be projected without running into absurdities. There can be "growth" toward a limited objective, but there cannot be unlimited, generalized growth...The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase of needs tends to increase one's dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war."

Could seawater-flooded deserts help re-bind CO2 while supplementing fisheries?

We face sea level rise due to the climate crisis and fisheries collapse due to overfishing. Can we can address both at once by diking around coastal deserts, flooding them with the excess seawater and growing mangroves, etc. in the resulting shallow waters?

Perhaps there is an opportunity to reduce atmospheric CO2 while doing something with a lot of seawater that would otherwise flood our coastal regions, in a way that increases coastal fisheries, all while using existing technology.

Coastal deserts could be surrounded by dikes and flooded with excess seawater, like a salt water rice paddy. This would increase photosynthesis, as the shallow oceans created absorb more sunlight photosynthetically than the desert they would partly replace. It would also remove seawater from the sea, and, on a massive scale, could lessen coastal flooding from sea level rise. It could also increase fish catches sustainably, as shallow waters are typically very productive fisheries, and the increased area of shallow water created by this could be fished, and might foster intensive sustainable aquaculture, like mullet and milkfish ponds.

If windmills powered both dike creation and seawater pumping, then perhaps setting this up could be nearly carbon-neutral - once operating, the increased photosynthesis allowed would make this carbon- negative, to the extent that fixed carbon is stored, instead of re-released.

About 70% of earth's surface is ocean: http://www.noaa.gov/ocean.html About 14% of the earth's land surface is 'desert'

'Woodford' Bigflower or Yellow Vetch in June 2011

Let's shorten the work week

It's not right to leave the unlucky jobless to starve on the side of the road, when we can just shorten the work week and spread the pain a bit. We could encourage four-day work weeks by starting time-and-a-quarter overtime after 32 hours in a week, with time-and-a-half overtime after 40 hours as usual. Accompanying this with underemployment insurance from the nation or state could help preserve our society from crimes of desperation by those people otherwise left behind. A similar 'Work-Sharing' approach has been implemented in Germany, and has been widely used.
If, as a result of such a law, a half of workers had their hours shortened by a day a week, this would create jobs for about an additional 7% of us. That alone could almost eliminate official unemployment, currently at 9.1%, and make a dent on actual unemployment, which is calculate to be quite a bit larger.
In addition, this could ease the burden on social service providers, as the newly employed could care for themselves. And it would ease discrimination against minorities, as fuller employment tends to do.

John Maynard Who? Wall Street shoots own foot while wounding Economic Recovery.

What part of 'insufficient demand' doesn't Wall Street greed understand? If stimulated into employing the one of five of us now out or short of work, the US economy could rebound, further enriching fat cats while saving the unluckiest of us from an uncertain fate, which is sure to drag all of society down with us on our way there. It could rebound because so many more of us would be actually producing things that we need - we'd have more goods to share and more pay to spend at Wall Street's businesses. If these jobs are green jobs, we might wisely prepare USA for our certain future of uncertain climate and fierce global economic competition.

Not to mention that tightening banking law to guide capital from speculation into producing real value would actually help people, as opposed to just changing the digits on the GDP.

Nah. Let's just suffer stupidly instead.