How do you figure? :dubious: Broken-window fallacy (BWF) involves breaking perfectly-good windows just so they can be replaced. Cash for clunkers involved taking higher-polluting, lower-gas-mileage vehicles off the road to be replaced with lower-polluting, higher-mileage vehicles.
Or, to quote one of the links in your followup:
(emphasis added)
If that’s BWF, then any and every program to fix, replace, or improve ailing infrastructure is also BWF. :rolleyes: Fixing a crappy road puts people to work, but, surprise, surprise, it also means the road isn’t (so) crappy anymore. :smack:
It’s another example of good intentions, not enough facts.
People flocked to the deal. It was so popular that it ran out of money early.
Which tells me that a much smaller rebate amount would have still attracted buyers, and been able to get even more cars sold and clunkers off the road.
No, I think it ought to be regarded as a cost – and goal – borne by individuals.
Because I skip over his posts without reading them. His brand of gotcha-style “humor” grates on my nerves and I quit paying attention to him some time ago.
I wonder if they just wouldn’t change their ingredients.
Well, the state of PA has spent millions on health care and proper eating projects aimed at the poor. Well, fat people in general. This $900k grant was just part of it.
That being said, Bricker’s objection seems to be that a) it’s not for the Federal government to do (or perhaps the government, period) and b) these programs don’t work.
If it can be demonstrated that society in general (and not just obese individuals) suffers as a result of the obesity epidemic, would you then agree that it is appropriate for the public sector to attempt to address the issue?
By that I mean that if the “cost” borne by society is itself assumed in error – say, health care costs, which I counted are ALSO individual costs – then it’s not an argument for the public to tackle obesity costs.
This article cites a study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine which claims the cost of lost worker productivity due to obesity is around $73billion.
Also, why discount the medical cost of obesity? Obesity is causing insurance premiums to rise, and increases the cost of social medical care programs like medicare, which is helping to push the cost of health care up for everyone. It’s not the only factor causing health care costs to rise, of course, but it is a significant one. Can you make a good argument that society doesn’t share the cost of obesity through higher health care costs? The argument that the cost of increased healthcare is also borne by the individual isn’t strong enough to just dismiss the negative effect it has on society through more expensive health care. That would be like arguing that driving recklessly is not a risk borne by society and shouldn’t be addressed by the government, because it’s also an individual risk.
Very weak analogy. A reckless driver directly injures other people, by crashing into them.
Here, the impact is attentuated. The obese individual costs more health care, which causes his premiums to rise, which may affect others in his risk group, which may cause their costs to rise.
Your argument rests on an assumption I don’t accept: that society has a responsibility for everyone’s health care costs, period, or everyone’s productivity. If an obese worker is unable to amass (ha!) sufficient productivity, fire 'em!
For a proposition that seems rather obvious – the $900,000 Philadelphia throwaway of tax money – I find it interesting that there have been heartfelt attempts to tug this thread in various directions away from that admission, and, unless I have miscounted, only two posters have even come close to acknowledging that the $900,000 was wasted.
Why is that, do you think? I mean, given how Liberals’ brains readily accept scientific data while conservatives’ brains do not, and all.
You would be on safe enough ground to criticize the program in question. But your effort to inflate this into a critique of liberal thought (or your caricature of it) is like trying to inflate a Japanese condom to the Hindenburg.
By that reasoning, the disastrous clusterfuck of the Iraq War is definitive, dispositive, we need know nothing more about Republican “thought”. Comparatively speaking, this is a butterfly fart.
Further, any effort to draw sweeping conclusions from one rather minor, rather obscure program is doomed to stupid. I would find such a prospect daunting, others are made of sterner stuff.
I don’t really understand what you’re getting at, here. Your OP doesn’t say that the Philadelphia experiment was a failure, just that similar experiments have failed in the past. Even if it did fail, I don’t see how the money is a “throwaway”.
Bricker: I think you are vastly overstating our ability to predict how such programs will work based on the limited studies done in the past. Understanding complex patterns of human behavior is not like measuring the distance to the moon, where a few simple measurements gets us all we need. I certainly agree that, intuitively, such programs are fraught with problems and I would be very surprised if they worked. But that’s not how science works. And, even good science consists of repeating experiments to make sure the results are, well, repeatable. You cannot dismiss this study as a waste of money simply because some similar studies have been done elsewhere without positive results.
Sweeping conclusions about the efficacy of similar programs? No – I cited multiple studies from similar programs and am arguing that this program, being similar, is doomed to produce similar results. So I am not resting my conclusions on one rather minor, obscure program.
I am sure my tying this into a bigger picture of liberal though has something to do with the reaction, yes.