Tom Evslin’s Confessions of a Stimulator

 Posted by on December 28, 2010 at 23:24  government  1 Response »
Dec 282010
 

I have my views on government and items such as the Stimulus Bill (hated it). However, it is usually just gut feel, because for most issues I don’t know enough to have much more than principle-based opinions.

However, Tom Evslin is an expert, and is blogging about what he learned as Vermont’s “Stimulus czar” or Chief Recovery Officer. Below are some notes from Tom’s post “Confessions of a Stimulator”, which was also published in the Wall Street Journal. Read Tom’s blog for far more insight.

I highlighted Tom’s thoughts on aspects of Stimulus that I felt (but didn’t know) were problematic, however Tom also points out (in this post and others) that some aspects were beneficial, and that not all the problems were due to the federal government itself.

Tom’s words are in blockquotes; take those as insight from an expert. My summaries introduce each set of quotes; take those as simplified and subjective.

Dangers of high govt spending (including grants, tax credits etc) and why govt spending is often inefficient and comes with opportunity costs:

When government overreaches, both the economy and the fabric of society suffer….during stimulus the government share of the economy grew from 37% to 44%. In 2000, it was only 32.5%. The only time government expenditures have been this high as a percentage of gross national product was at the end of the Second World War. We can and must cut these expenditures in order to grow the economy as a whole.

Although Vermont did better than many other states, too much of the money ended up continuing bloated programs rather than providing a transition to a sustainable future

Moreover, private investment in [broadband and energy], which might have happened even during the recession, dried up as companies waited to see if they (or their competitors) could build with government money. Government grants to business – whether part of Stimulus or not – have turned too much of the creative energy of American business from innovation to grant-grubbing and lobbying.

Dangers of adding regulation to regulation; also an issue with Net Neutrality IMO:

Nothing is “shovel ready” in the United States; we’ve created a wall of regulatory obstacles that make it impossible to do any major project within a reasonable or even predictable period of time…If regulation were made reasonable and predictable, we wouldn’t need government money to have a construction boom. Under the current system, not even all the King’s men with all the people’s money can build anything significant.

Unintended consequences (see also corny ethanol) and/or lack of foresight:

An industrial policy based on government grants and tax credits is an oxymoron at best and a disaster at worst. As an example, tax credits for solar photovoltaic have stimulated the solar industry in China (they don’t install solar panels there; they just sell them to us) AND increased the cost of energy in the US.

    angry birds and happy droids

     Posted by on December 27, 2010 at 12:14  education, energy, government, healthcare and medicine, internet, mobile, science  1 Response »
    Dec 272010
     

    Angry Birds and other games outweigh all other applications combined for iPhones. Yes, games are more important than everything else in the world.

    iTunes apps has 20 total app categories, but the games category has 20 sub-categories. So 20 categories for games, 19 app categories for the rest of the world. Wow.

    If 2011 is the year of Android and smartphones in general, then I hope it also the year that life changing applications start to become as important as Angry Birds. Life changing mobile applications would appear in education, healthcare and fitness, medicine, science, energy (including smart grid etc) and government.

    Of course I’m using the iTunes categories to amplify the point, and most technology transitions are led by applications such as games and high revenue generating apps, but I feel or hope we are near an inflection point in the pervasiveness of broadband Internet connectivity, mobile computers (Android, iPhone etc) and application development (HTML5 etc.) that life changing applications in education, healthcare and energy are on deck.

      Three people say they can regulate the Internet

       Posted by on December 21, 2010 at 20:21  government, internet  No Responses »
      Dec 212010
       

      The FCC, by a 3-2 vote, says they need to regulate the Internet. Of course, under the name of “Network Neutrality”, which sells better than a name like “FCC regulation”. More Network Neutrality details in these posts but the main points:

      1. It is debatable that the most open communications platform in the world (the Internet) is about to be held hostage by the local ISPs. How real is that threat to begin with? Yes, the US monopoly local access providers are a concern, but the best way to address that concern is to promote more competition, not add more regulation.

      2. It is a leap of faith, or something else, to believe that regulation from the FCC, implemented by the access ISPs, will prevent the ISPs from doing what the FCC is telling us those ISPs really want to do. I’m in this business; this isn’t as simple as an FCC member walking into a room and looking for a red net neutrality violation alarm. Enforcement, real enforcement, would be exceptionally costly.

      3. Still with the FCC? You now need to trust that the unintended consequences of the regulation and enforcement won’t be worse than anything accomplished. Nobody knows what those unintended consequences will be, but they always develop.

      4. If you haven’t jumped off the FCC boat yet, you need to believe that it is the boat you want to be on in the future. Once the FCC is in, it will be hard to get them out. Again, we don’t know the future, but do know it won’t look like today. The web will be different, the players will be different, the technology will be different and the FCC itself will be different.