Because the private sector can’t make money by making people eat better.
For the same reason the government is necessary for environmental legislation.
Nah, my citation would be the numerous print media analyses that were produced at the time, noting, among other things, that the complexity of the programming required to correctly identify and destroy hundreds of incoming weapons with an error rate of less than .001%, (an objective required to actually be effective, given the number of weapons in the Warsaw Pact arsenal), along with the technology to prevent friendly fire accidents and other problems was wholly betond the capacity of the computer systems available at that time.
However, since it was not my intention to hijack this thread, I will not clutter this thread with more commentary, (or with laughing at the absurd notion that Star Wars caused the collapse of the Soviet Union while pretending that launching it would not have triggered, not prevented, WWIII).
We also have a long history of government intervention solving public health problems successfully so it makes sense that the government is looking to solve our current public health problems surrounding nutrition and obesity. This particular initiative is not well-supported by evidence. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to have a pilot program roll out and then carefully track evidence to whatever indicators the project directors are measuring. Certain trendy ideas like food desserts and calorie listing on menus get a lot of fast buy-in because they seem like such a logical, great idea (but yet have little or no supporting evidence). I have no problem requiring that a solid evidence-base exist before large scale-projects are rolled out. That would also require that smaller, pilot studies are permitted to establish or refute the evidence base.
Isn’t this case more an example of bad public policy and rushed decision-making than a particular ideology?
Are you seeking a career as a fantasy writer, since you seem to be unable to cope with the fact that Reagan’s foreign policy actually worked?
Of course you are hardly unique. There are plenty of Republicans that won’t concede that anything good happened during the Clinton administration. We also have President Obama to thank for making assassination a standard instrument of foreign policy. Doing retail murder instead of wholesale murder is a great moral advance in my book.
Uh-huh. Say, how’s that Grenada Memorial coming along? Haven’t heard much about it, lately.
I liked the part where Reagan gave weapons for hostages and everyone just let it slide because he was grandfatherly.
Yeah brilliant foreign policy that.
Are you complaining that he didn’t get enough soldiers killed in Grenada to need a war memorial?
He was trying to clean up a mess that Carter left him. I would like to hear your brilliant solution. I suspect a lot of liberals expected him to nuke Tehran, but the problem was that Reagan wasn’t a warmonger. The bottom line was he got our people back. You don’t like like his solution, then blame Carter.
Thank you again. In turn, I won’t clutter this thread with the observation that my request for a cite produced – not a cite – but a description of the kinds of things you could cite, if you could find a cite.
Uh, Joel, you do realize that the hostages in question were not the ones that were taken at the US Embassy in Tehran, but other hostages held during the Lebanese civil war? If you are going to go around blaming Carter, maybe you should understand the basic facts?
Why is it that only liberals are limited to living within the confines of reality when conservatives just write whatever narrative they want to believe?
Hey, nice try!
Well, care to fuckin’ enlighten us Chief? I read this message board for other reasons than try to guess what is on Bricker’s goddamm mind.
But this isn’t “debate” in the sense of a competition with judges and rules. Sure, if this were a debate, and you were taking the position “programs like this will not be effective” and I was taking the position “programs like this will be effective”, and you produced four reasonable cites and I produced none, and I just said “wah wah his cites might not be good enough”, the judges would correctly give you more points than me. But that’s not what’s going on here. First of all, we’re not in a formalized debate, so simply counting cites doesn’t prove anything. Secondly, I’m not arguing for a position of “programs like this will definitely work”. I’m just arguing for a position of “it is not yet been proven to me beyond doubt that programs like this could NEVER work”. Most importantly, however, is that we’re not really debating that topic at all.
If you started a thread entitled “government programs to introduce fresh food into food deserts are ineffective”, and provided four cites to back that up, I would probably ready that and say “hmm, that’s interesting, and Bricker has made a strong case, but fundamentally that’s a topic I don’t know jack shit about… so I won’t post in the thread at all”, but I would have in the back of my mind the idea that this was a topic that I should have some skepticism about. And changing someone’s mind at least enough to introduce some skepticism is more than SDMB threads normally actually accomplish.
But you didn’t start that thread. Instead you started a thread about liberals being dumb, and you presented “and it is proven that programs like this could not work” as fait accompli… as if we’d already had the previous thread, and a lot of people had argued with you, but you had clearly bested them and in the end people had reached a consensus that, yeah, programs like this are in fact never going to work. And THEN you had started this thread, in which case, your claim might have some validity.
To me, there’s a crucial data point that we don’t have, and are unlikely to ever get, which is how the people who designed the Philadelphia experiment would react to these studies. It could be any of several things:
(1) Huh? I had no idea such studies existed! (demonstrating that these people were lazy and didn’t do their homework first)
(2) Sure, I read those studies, but they just don’t apply because, uhh, they don’t (the stereotypically extreme liberal try-it-even-though-it-has-already-failed approach that Bricker seems to believe in)
(3) Sure, I read those studies, but we have learned from what didn’t work in those situations, here are several factors which make this situation different (actual competence)
I’ve just sent an email to
Giridhar Mallya, MD, MSHP
Director of Policy and Planning
at the “Get Healthy Philly” initiative, asking if she has a moment to answer a few questions about the program. Fingers crossed…
Ah, I see, here it is, Bricker’s explanation. The rebate was too high. Of course it was probably the high rebate that motivated people in the first place. But Bricker thinks it should have been a much lower amount, that way he could point to the much lower number of cars sold in the program and use that as an example of how the program didn’t work. F’in brilliant. The only way to win is not to play the game, we all have to think exactly like Bricker because he is right all of the time. Or perhaps, the program was successful because the rebate amounts were so high and it motivated people to get off their ass and go purchase a new car. The program those removed some amount of old polluting cars from the road, while giving the auto industry as a whole a shot in the arm. Perhaps it also provided a little incentive, other than total bankruptcy, for the three american automakers to get their acts together. (They seem to be doing better these days. All a result of the government remaining hands off, right?)
Oh, the topic of the thread. If you can’t tell the difference between Bloomberg’s idiotic soda ban (when did Bloomberg become an icon of this country’s liberal establishment?) and government plan to incentivize some products, perhaps who aren’t as good at drawing distinctions as you might hope to be. Maybe it works, and maybe it doesn’t, its worth a shot. Not one of you supposed cites has shown any reasonable basis for believing that it is a wholly foolish idea.
I think you’re being unfair to Bricker here… he has a very valid point. Suppose we want as many people as possible to sell gas-guzzlers and buy new cars. And we have a million dollars to fund our program. And we say “hmm, let’s offer a $10,000 incentive”, letting us pay 100 incentives, and those 100 incentives are snapped up within hours of the program starts. It’s pretty clear then that we could have offered $5,000 incentives instead, and gotten twice as many gas-guzzlers upgraded to new cars for the same cost. Ergo, we set the incentive too high, because our program would have been more effective at what it was actually trying to do if we’d set a lower incentive.
I guess the logical thing to do would be to look up, in the big book that lists this stuff, how much incentive we should use to drive sales of cars.
Barring such a book, it would require the best estimation based on the economists working on the project. Obviously they under-estimated the demand. But compare that to the conservative economists who thought it would cause a rain of frogs.
Bold gambit.
Well, it’s true I’m right all the time, and I do appreciate your noticing. Of course, you then vitiate your own observation by continuing to argue with me.
If the rebates had been $20,000 per car, then even more people would have been motivated to participate. But the program would have run out of money even sooner than it did, with fewer overall cars traded.
If the rebates had been $200, we can imagine that fewer people would have participated, and the program would have ended with money unspent.
Remember your days in calculus: if y = f(x) is defined on some set S, then there is a relative maximum value and sometimes an absolute maximum value along the curve. Right?
I am contending that the price for Cash for Clunkers was set too high. A lower price would have still attracted many participants, indeed MORE participants, since the overall supply of money would have lasted longer.
Do you have a rebuttal for that point?
And of course the rebates were not limited to American manufacturers – foreign car manufacturers also benefitted.
Cite?