First, to the nature of some ridiculous premises in the report prepared for the IMF
It's time to end the federal porn subsidy.There's some useful links to more information further into the Real Clear Science article.
You might be asking, What federal porn subsidy? Fair question. Technically, there isn't a federal porn subsidy. However, if we borrow some of the logic commonly used by politically driven economists, we can redefine the word subsidy to mean whatever we want.
Pornography is enjoyed by many people, but it comes with a very real social cost: it can break up families and perhaps even become an addiction, which are profound losses of productivity. Economists refer to these as negative externalities -- i.e., bad side effects that affect people other than the person making the decision. One way to deal with such decisions is to tax them. This should, in theory, reduce the negative side effects, while simultaneously forcing the decision maker to bear the "true cost" of his actions. Clearly, if anyone should have to pay for this societal cost, it should be porn watchers, in the form of a porn tax. If they don't pay such a tax, they are getting an indirect subsidy.
As it turns out, we don't have a federal porn tax. Thus, we could say that the American government has issued a federal porn subsidy.
Obviously, that reasoning is absurd. Not only does it dubiously redefine the word subsidy, but it unconvincingly claims to be able to accurately place a price tag on every conceivable externality created by watching porn. Accepting that argument would require a nearly complete suspension of disbelief.
Yet, that is essentially the argument that a group of economists at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) just made about fossil fuel subsidies. (See PDF.)
VOX has a useful explainer on the topic, by Brad Plumer, The IMF says we spend $5.3 trillion a year on fossil fuel subsidies. How is that possible?
I'll point out the IMF is closely related to the World Bank, and the World Bank is positioning itself in preparation for China's creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).
“China feels it can’t get anything done in the World Bank or the IMF so it wants to set up its own World Bank that it can control itself” -June 2014Americans have a veto at the World Bank; their efforts to discourage countries from signing on with the new AIIB have largely failed.
World Bank chief endorses rival AIIB | ft.com
The World Bank’s US-appointed president has vowed to find “innovative” ways to work with a new Chinese-led Asian infrastructure bank, welcoming it as a “major new player” in the world of development....The AIIB promises to be active in financing coal-fired (and possibly nuclear and large hydro) power plants:
It also marks a split with the administration of US President Barack Obama which nominated the medical doctor and former university president to head the World Bank in 2012.
With geopolitical imperatives and its competition with China for influence in the Pacific Rim firmly in mind the US unsuccessfully lobbied allies such as Australia, Japan and the UK not to join the nascent Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
...Washington argues that with big questions still lingering over its governance structures there is a risk that the AIIB’s eventual forays into developing countries will look much like China’s sometimes destructive and protest-inducing pushes into Africa and developing countries in Asia such as Myanmar in the recent past.
A senior Indian official told Reuters the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), sponsored by China, is expected to allow funding of coal-fired power plants that the World Bank has almost totally blocked.The World Bank document is likely an argument for its policies restricting lending - which competition may be sweeping aside.
"When you have 1.3 billion people starved of electricity access and the rest of the world has created a carbon space, at this point denying funding is denying access to cheap energy”
No comments:
Post a Comment