The costs don't disappear either. It's not as if, if you give them a tax break, those 25,000 people won't drive on the roads from home to work or take the subway, or send their children to the schools or demand trash pickup or consume other services.
It's amazing the regularity with which people decline to do cost-benefit analysis on things they think they want, and yet know to demand it any time someone proposes things they think they don't want. That is the face of conservatism. I had a guy yesterday afternoon from one of the frothy thinktanks telling me that nobody ever considered the environmental costs of renewable energy, so I asked him if they outweigh the environmental costs of fossil fuels and he said ``What costs?" I asked him about whether hydropower should be considered renewable and he told me the left hates cheap power. He wasn't familiar with Wood Mackenzie. This person has the word ``scholar'' in their job title.
People don't demand cost/benefit analysis, but it's a concept that everybody understands, and should expect out of every basic policy discussion. But I think the country is just too ideological, on both ends, and doesn't connect ideas to reality. Too easy to replace that with labels and smears. Need a balance between being process-oriented and results-oriented.
It's amazing the regularity with which people decline to do cost-benefit analysis on things they think they want, and yet know to demand it any time someone proposes things they think they don't want. That is the face of conservatism. I had a guy yesterday afternoon from one of the frothy thinktanks telling me that nobody ever considered the environmental costs of renewable energy, so I asked him if they outweigh the environmental costs of fossil fuels and he said ``What costs?" I asked him about whether hydropower should be considered renewable and he told me the left hates cheap power. He wasn't familiar with Wood Mackenzie. This person has the word ``scholar'' in their job title.
People don't demand cost/benefit analysis, but it's a concept that everybody understands, and should expect out of every basic policy discussion. But I think the country is just too ideological, on both ends, and doesn't connect ideas to reality. Too easy to replace that with labels and smears. Need a balance between being process-oriented and results-oriented.
Comment