Tuition and taxes

A few comments on taxes in the blogosphere:

I followed the link to find out what Bruce Murphy thinks is the "scandal" of college tuition. It turns out that average tuition in Wisconsin for a four year college, while materially less than in surrounding states, is $ 228 (4%) more than the national average. Must have been a slow news day.

Here's a differnent way of looking at it. Maybe the scandal is that we charge that above average tuition in a heavily taxed state.

Speaking of high taxes, MPS wants to raise its tax levy by 16.4%. Jay Bullock anticipates the responsorial growl and is reaching for ... the earplugs. Taxes too high? Talk to the hand. He isn't going to listen because the growlers must not live on MIlwaukee. (But what about, e.g., McIlheran and Harris and Belling?)

I would not want to tell the folks in Milwaukee what to do, but in a city with property taxes that are among the highest in the country, I would want to see a fairly powerful argument for an increase like that. You know, if it were me.

I'm not sure that a school district with the burden rate that MPS has could ever hope to make such an argument. As I have noted before, my daughter-in-law and sister work for MPS. I am happy that they have what they do (and that I don't have to pay for it.) But how can you impose that kind of tax increase on people when you provide the kind of gold plated fringes that MPS does?

Tonight ...

... the Packers run game (the resistable force) meets Denver's rush defense (the movable object). Which will win (or fail to lose)? Watch this space for details.

Update: So Kornheiser says that, if you believe the rules of drama, Farve would do something spectacular to either win or lose the game. O.K.

The resistable force mostly overcame the movable object, but it was the Force of Nature that carried the day.

The sixties are over, ma'am!

Or so said young MU student Brian Collar to an aging hippie protesting the existence of ROTC on the Marquette campus. Shades of the Strawberry Statement. At least he could have called her "miss."

This is what it's come to. You can't trust anyone under 50, man! I have mixed feelings about the sixties. All the protests and drugs and free love were pioneered by our older brothers and sisters. We envied them and there is a sense in which that never goes away. Nor do I have anything against idealism even though I mistrust messianic politics. I like the music. I enjoy some of the cultural references even if, srictly speaking, I was a child and not an adolescent when most of it, as they say, "went down."

But I do feel that the sixties are still a blight on our politics. They established some paradigms - pacificism, relativism and reification of the "other" - which, while they can serve a particular purpose at a particular time - are not as helpful today. Even as we have enjoyed a conservative ascendency, these paradigms still influence the way in which we think and must talk about a host of issues.

So while young squire Collar may have indulged in a few cheap "oldster" cracks, he is right. The sixties are over and we should get over them.

Will Senator Decker face the Monster?

(Warning: I have indulged in a rare vulgarity to make a point here. See if you can find it!)

As I suggested on Wednesday, months of legislative deliberation and negotiation about the size of government and the amount of taxation over the next biennium were materially altered on Friday by the use of the governor's extraordinarily broad veto powers.

Last year,the legislature passed a proposed constitutional amendment to end this silliness and they should do so again during this session. It has already passed the Assembly, but Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker isn't sure that he wants to bring it to a vote.

Why not? This isn't about Governor Doyle or the Democrats. Tommy Thompson fed his Frankenstein too and we will have Republican governors in the future.

If Decker doesn't want to bring this to a vote then he needs to explain why it's good policy to let the Governor turn a law passed by both houses of the legislature into something else entirely by treating it as a puzzle. Even if you think that the Governor should be able to make law subject to veto by a super-majority (and no one does), requiring him to do it by playing word Scrabble is inane.

Of course, he can't defend this. No one can. If this doesn't come to a vote, it's because Doyle has him on a leash. The legislature does many things and I understand that Senator Decker and the other legislators have many balls in the air. But isn't this important?

We don't sit around knitting nooses

There was something of a dustup in the local blogosphere over a comment made in response to a comment to a post on his blog by an anonymous blogger known as Illusory Tenant. (The term refers to someone who leases a rent controlled apartment and then does not occupy it but, rather, sublets it to someone else at a profit.)IT claims to be employed in the law and, based on his (or her, I suppose)facility with the law, is either a lawyer or someone who has studied law. In any event, IT made thinly veiled reference hinting that Jessica McBride could be described by a very bad four letter word beginning with "c."

After a rather weak attempt to deny that the word means what it does (you can find a inoffensive secondary meaning for most slurs), IT apologized. Good enough, but let's remember that the next time someone on the right side of the scrimmage line exercises the same type of misjudgement and then has the good sense to repent.

Why do otherwise intelligent folks get pulled into this type of incivility? A clue comes from a comment posted on the McBride stalking site, Whallah. Someone said:

This fake umbrage is funny. Does anyone doubt that the right-wingers who are expressing such outrage don't routinely slip into gross language when they're letting slip their real feelings about gays or blacks or Jews?

Well, I don't have to speculate because I know the heart of the vast right wing conspiracy. When its dark minions get together to smoke cigars and drink scotch and plot whatever, sometimes I'm there. So the answer to the question is "No, actually, they don't." What we say in the light, we repeat in the dark. The virulent "closet" racism and homophobia that you are so certain must exist doesn't exist. Learn that.

Shark on the air

This afternoon from 4:30 to 6:00 on WMCS-1290 during the Backstory segment of Eric Von's show. We'll talk about Katrina and SoCal, the budget, John Edwards and McGee's plans to seek reelection.

You can now listen on the internet.

More rumination on judging

I doubt the Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court reads this little blog, but I do want to use it to acknowledge my gratitude for her willingness to speak to my class last night. I don't always agree with the Chief, but I have a great deal of respect for her and I hope that students enjoyed the opportunity to hear from her.

As for me, I got to thinking a bit more about judicial philosophy. A couple of law professors have done a study seeking to rank the most and least "activist" justices on the United States Supreme Court by looking at their tendency to set aside federal agency determinations. They also rank them on a liberal/conservative scale.

There are a number of problems with the study, some of which are set forth here, but it seems part of a move on the some to define judicial activism as upsetting the decisions of other branches. I suppose that we can all define these things in different ways, but I don't think that quite captures what we are concerned about when we speak of judicial restraint. Here are three base characteristics of restraint that I called out in a recent article in WI Interest:

1. A judge exercising restraint must act on external and legitimate sources of authority.

2.A judge must believe that rules mean something.

3.Judges practicing restraint will exhibit sensitivity for the role of other branches of government.

Of course, few judges would not claim to endorse these and few do not see themselves as applying them in greater or lesser degree. They are really the beginning of a conversation more than it's culmination. Still, I think that there are a host of interpretive techniques that serve these goals and that judges do differ in the extent to which they adhere to them. (Few do not adhere at all.)

That this can't quite be captured by the extent that courts strike down laws can be illustrated by a tale of three administrations. Let's imagine that the George administration and a quiescent Congress, seeking to fight the war on Terror, consistently pass legislation and take executive actions that violate fourth and fifth amendment rights. Courts during the George era will have to overturn more executive and legislative decisions than normal, but I think it would be a mistake to say they have become activist.

Similarly, let's say that the George administration is replaced by the Hillary administration. That admininistration, again abetted by a compliant legislature, tries to expand federal authority in ways that are clearly unconstitutional and seeks to adopt restrictions on campaign advertising, "hate" speech and public religious expression that are plain violations of the First Amendment. Our courts are still throwing stuff out, but are they activist?

Finally, an exhausted populace turns to the Calvin administration. It advocates a return to "Normalcy" and adopts only the most modest of policies. Our courts - let's assume that we have all the same judges - suddenly start affirming most legislative and executive enactments. What changed?

WPRI and school choice

A few quick points about the WPRI study on public school choice.

1. The Journal Sentinel article reporting on the study seems almost certain to have led readers to think that the study loooked at the voucher program for private schools. It used the term "school choice" and discussed other aspects of the voucher program. It wasn't until we get down to the description of methodology at the bottom of the piece that we learn that the study was focused on public school choice. Indeed, local blogger Jay Bullock to wrote a post arguing that the study vindicates his views of the voucher program.

2. Another blogger, the Public Policy Forums's Anneliese Dickman, picks up on the nature of the study but seems to want to say that it tells us something about private school choice as well. She may be right but there are a few obstacles in the way.

First, the study doesn't really measure what parents in Milwaukee actually do. As the authors say, "the basic approach was to identify the determinants and frequency of parental choice and parental involvement using a national data set, and extrapolate those results to Milwaukee, relying on the particular demographics of the MPS district." In other words, they take national data on how households with particular demographic characteristics act with respect to choosing schools and becoming involved with the schools and then assume that people with those characteristics in Milwaukee would act the same way. They then look at the characteristics of families in MPS and run the numbers.

That's a respectable approach, although it would not catch the effects of any local efforts to improve decision-making or increase parental involvement.

Second, it seems less plausible to extrapolate from these data to families who choose voucher schools. The demographics of that group may be different. In addition, opting out of the public schools may itself reflect a higher degree of involvement with a child's education (it presumably takes more effort) and a population that does that may differ from others with same socioeconomic characteristics. Jay acknowledges this, writing that "many students whose parents are most likely to push them to achieve have left the district, leaving us with students whose parents are more likely to come to school to beat up other kids, if they come at all."

3. Jay makes an interesting point, consistent with what I have heard from other teachers in MPS. He writes "[i]f just a few more of my students in any given class could have the kind of parental backing that is so important to student success, the culture and climate of my classes and the school could change in a positive direction."

I don't doubt that but what are the implications? Should we deny parents the choice of a better educational option for their children so that those kids can be the raw material that makes Jay's classroom a better place? If, in fact, what happens at home is so critical to what happens in the classroom (and I suspect it is), then maybe solutions that believe schools can do for children what their families will not are destined to failure. I shouldn't think WEAC would want that idea to get around.

4. When the WPRI says something that my friends to the left of me don't like, I often hear that it is a right wing think talk paid for by the Bradley Foundation and businesses, yadda yadda. By way of full disclosure, I have done stuff for WPRI in the past and am working on something now, but I am still going to suggest that this is a teachable moment. When WPRI asked me to look at a certain legal hypothesis, the question was not "can you support it" but "is it right?" Obviously the folks associated with it have a more conservative perspective, but that doesn't mean that they subvert professional standards and intellectual integrity to that perspective. The next time, respond to the message and not to the messenger.

More on the Wisconsin Constitution and the Budget

Two years ago, I wrote a column in the Journal Sentinel called Fattening Frogs for Snakes. Go ahead and reread it. We think we know what the new state budget says, but we won't really know until the Governor finishes playing Scrabble with it. Wisconsin governors have extraordinary veto powers when it comes to appropriations bills. They can no longer cross out letters but they can cross out individual words and digits. They can line out numbers and write in smaller ones. They can, if they are clever and the words fall in a way that makes it possible, turn the law into the something that is completely inconsistent with - even the opposite of - what was passed. They can reduce spending and, as my column pointed out, Governor Doyle has managed to veto his way to an increase in spending. (Tommy Thompson was a master at this as well. We live in the time of the Puzzle Masters.)

Two years ago, I wrote:

No one would propose making the governor an elected kaiser who can create a wholly new budget, subject only to veto by two-thirds of both houses of the Legislature. His power is limited only by his ability to read legislation as a type of code. Take every third word on every other page, cross out each number that appeared in last night's Lotto drawing and we have a new law.

The point is not whether we like the effect of Doyle's vetoes. The budget should be determined by our democratically elected representatives subject to a veto by the governor, rather than the cryptology of a Scrabble king and his retinue of bright young geeks who can complete the Sunday Times crossword puzzle in 12 minutes. In pen.

If a future Republican governor figures out how to cut taxes by folding the budget into origami figures, it'd still be wrong.

They don't make community columnists like they used to.

The Wisconsin Constitution and the Budget

Last week, Charlie Sykes commented upon the logrolling that seemed to be an integral part of, if not at the heart of, the state budget process. There is,as he pointed out, a criminal statute that prohibits vote trading among legislators, but there are also a couple of constitutional provisions that are aimed at sneaking special favors into larger bills.

Art. IV, sec 18 of the Wisconsin Constitution, for example provideds that "[n]o private or local bill which may be passed by the legislature shall embrace more than one subject, and that shall be expressed in the title." "Local laws" apply only to particular places and "private laws" apply only to particular persons or things. To get all hammy about it, section 18 says that if we are to hand out the other white meat, the pork must be identified on the label and we can only have one meal at a time. The obvious purpose is to prevent special favors to be stuck in the fine print of a bill and to prevent assembling a majority for a piece of legislation through the passing of the platter.

But there's more. Article IV, section 31 prohibits private and special laws on a variety of subjects, although section 32 permits it to be done by general laws operating by classification.

There have, historically, been two ways around this. One, as section 32 suggests, is to legidlate by classification. This is often done when the legislature wants to do something for or to Milwaukee. Laws are passed that apply only to cities of the first class which is defined in a way that could only apply to Milwaukee.

Another is to argue that the law relates to a state responsibility of statewide dimension and will have a direct and immediate effect on a specific statewide concern or interest. Thus, if the budget bill included funds for a new building to house the DMV in, say, Mazomanie, that'd pass muster.

I have not gone through the budget bill and cannot say whether any provison may run afoul of these constitutional restrictions, but some of the DOT grants to municipalities, the moving of the Mars Cheese sign, etc., raise questions. They may all be fine but keep this in mind as people actually read the thing.

Why a corporate income tax?

Paul Soglin, reading my post called The corporate goose, does not like my suggestion that income should be taxed when it finally reaches someone who can spend it. The context for my comment was the double taxation inherent in the corporate income tax. I don't think it makes sense to tax profit at the corporate level and tax it again when it reaches shareholders.

One solution to this is to eliminate or greatly reduce taxation of dividends and capital gains. This is the route that Congress took in the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003. (I preferred the day when legislative proposals didn't have brand names.)

This is better than complete double taxation but it's not the route I would take. I am not a fan of picking and choosing when it comes to taxation. Whether I earn my income from working for someone else or from long term investment, I ought to be taxed at the same rate (although the latter income needs to be indexed).

Paul thinks that my idea (tax the money when it reaches the shareholders) would mean "that the poorest consumer and wage earner will ultimately pay the tax, resulting in little progressivity."

But that's precisely what it won't do. Much of the corporate income tax is actually borne by labor and consumers. He cites a DOR study that says this is a little less than half which may or may not be so. The point is that much of it is not paid by the plutocrats.

But with my idea, it all is or the savings are passed on to laborers and consumers who will generally pay a lower tax rate and benefit from the additional income or savings. Corporations cannot buy yachts or sip Dom on the Cote d' Azur. The point is to make money for the shareholders and, at some point, they must take it into income. Tax it then but, of course, tax it as little as possible.
We don't want to kill that corporate goose.

Practicalities

Politics is the art of the possible. There is a lot in the state budget compromise that I don't like. I am particularly turned off by the cigarette tax increase because it seems to me to be a prime example of NIMBY taxation. Let's stick it to some other people. But if the revenue that the tax will provide is really needed, shouldn't we all be willing to pay it? I understand the argument that smokers increase health costs but I am also aware that, strictly speaking, the net effect of smoking may be to decrease and not increase health costs. I am aware that a tax increase might make some people quit, but sticking it to people who presumably have an addiction and will find it very difficult not to pay is a tad sleazy.

On the other hand, it's not the fox hole that I want to die over.

I also think that conservatives and the GOP need to think hard about just what our position on health care reform ought to be. HSAs and consumer choice are important but we are kidding ourselves if we think that's going to carry the day.

I have blogged before that we may need to tolerate a certain amount of government control of the market in recognition of the realities of health care. Unfettered markets require allowing people to fail. If you can't sell widgets, you go out of business. If you are employed by a company that makes film for cameras, you are likely to be laid off.

But we aren't going to let you die of an easily treatable disease because your business failed or your employee needed to deploy its resources elsewhere. We can argue about whether Graeme Frost's parents should have made the choices that they did, but, while we talk, we want the kid to see a doctor.

Because we aren't going to let you fail in this way, it may well be that we have to require you to insure yourself. Because everyone won't be able to afford it, we may have to provide subsidies. And because everyone may not be able to qualify for insurance, we may have to prohibit - or limit - individual underwriting.

The key, it seems to me, is to realize that these interferences in the market create inefficiencies and ought to be minimized. Thus, I am skeptical that the health proposal announced today by a group that includes business leaders ought to be considered close kin to Healthy Wisconsin.

If we must have a health care mandate, it seems to me that the minimum plan must have few or minimal mandates (devising a method for evaluation of plans will be a challenge)and high deductibles. Any subsidies ought to be means tested. The government ought not to be setting prices.

But, at the end of the day, conservatives ought to agree that the present system (which is rife with inefficiencies) needs to be changed. We should not allow ourselves to be identified with the status quo.

Irony

On the way home from church, we were listening to TMJ's replay of Brett Favre's first game (other than one play the week before)as a Packer. One of the first things that Max McGee said after Don Majkowski left with an injury and Favre came in was to note that, if Brett Favre went down, Ty Detmer could become active and finish the game. Max McGee had many years ahead of him but he would not live to see Brett Favre go down. (Although Favre has left a few games with what proved to be, in his world any way, "minor" injuries.)

As for Max, I only met him once and very briefly. He was a witness in a case I was involved in up in Minneapolis and did not know a thing. But, given his role on the old Packers and years as a radio guy, I do feel a bit like an aquaintance has passed. R.I.P.

The Beast is holding its own

I've been thinking a bit about the debate over the budget in Wisconsin in particular and the more general debate about taxes and the size of government. I responded a bit to Paul Soglin's suggestion that we treat government like a business and "invest." I should not think his friends at AFSME would want to go there.

I do not consider myself a business person. I just turned a pretty sweet job at a great company into a consulting gig because my heart and mind laid elsewhere. But I did spend almost ten years as part of senior management, dealing with business issues at more general, "high perspective" level.

And I learned a lot. The business people that I worked with were whip smart. They know their stuff and have the bottom line to prove it.

One of the things I learned is that we do not assume that our costs must go up. In fact, we work very hard to reduce them. When business is down and we don't have the revenue that we used to have, we don't call our customers and tell them that they must dig deeper. We compare our costs to industry benchmarks and, if they are higher than our competitors, we try to address that.

The debate around taxes and government spending is often reduced to one side claiming that government ("the beast") is being starved while the other suggests that the beast is still feeding. Who's right?

Last night I saw some interesting numbers in an essay by William Voegeli in the Claremont Review of Books (sorry, it's only available on processed pulp). He points out that, in the period from 1956 to 1981, real (adjusted for inflation) per capita spending increased 94%.

Did Reagan reverse that trend? No. Did he stop it? No. From 1981 through 2006, real per capita federal spending increased 41%. He slowed it.

Is this more recent spending largely in the area of defense? It looks like it isn't. As a percentage of the budget and gross domestic product, military spending increased until 1987 and then decreased until 2001. Today, it is 20% of the federal budget and 4% of GDP. Both figures are lower than at any point in the Carter administration.

If you want to put this in the best light for conservatives, you could point out that federal spending as a percentage of GDP was 22.2% of GDP in 1081 and 20.3% in 2006. Spending at all levels of government was 31.6% in 1981 and 31.8% in 2006. So the best that the right can claim is that it has fought the Beast to a draw.

So let's keep things in perspective when we hear the words "slash," "starve" and "decimate" in connection with our budget debates.

The market for taxes

I spent the day in Fargo testifying in an asbestos case. I was the corporate representative for a defendant who never made or sold anything with asbestos but such are the vagaries of litigation. I had never been in Fargo and certainly did not have a comprehensive tour. But the part that I saw seems to have been oddly frozen in about 1959. I couldn't decide whether I liked that or not.

But back home, I see that Paul Soglin wasn't much impressed with the AFP rally in Madison and thinks that those who oppose more and more taxation in Wisconsin are penny wise and pound foolish. He notes that private firms certainly invest in the future, even when the return on that investment is not immediate and he is, of course, right about that.

But there are problems with the analogy. First, they invest in the hope of a return and the market will eventually tell them whether those hopes were realized. Government is not as readily disciplined.

Second, they do not simply decide what revenue is required to go out and do what they think is wise. They can't repeatedly raise prices. They can't charge more than their competitors without providing something that is worth the difference.

In other words, there is no market to tell them that their decisions are good or bad. You may say that, with government, it is the voters who impose this discipline.
Probably so, but that is what the AFP rally was about. People opposing taxes are the faces of discipline.

It seems to me that in a high tax state, the notion that citizens might believe that their government ought to be able to do what it needs to do without new revenue is hardly outrageous.

Businesses make that kind of decision every day.

Guns and lawyers

There was a very nice turnout (over 100) for the Marquette Federalist Society's debate between John Lott and Richard Withers on gun control. John McAdams liveblogged the event.

I didn't do much but introduce the speakers and ask a few questions.

So I sat back and was surprised at how little conflict there was between Lott, who is the bete noire of the gun control movement, and Withers who, although he now works for the Milwaukee Common Council, was formerly co-director of the Medical College of Wisconsin's Firearm Injury Center. He has some street cred on that side of the issue and is a bright and personable guy.

What surprised me were his concessions on Lott's big issues. While Withers argued that it was possible that there might be some places and circumstances where a gun ban would be appropriate, he also agreed that he knew of no place on Earth where a ban had resulted in a reduction in gun crime. He also stated that my impression of the social science research, i.e., that it either shows no increase in gun crime as a result of concealed carry laws or, as Lott argues (and Withers would probably dispute) a reduction in gun crime following the adoption of such laws. (Withers explanation is that few people actually get concealed carry permits.)

Mostly, Withers did not want to talk about gun bans or concealed carry. He did not really want to talk about crime at all, but about "public health." His focus tended to be on "defects" in guns that could be fixed to make them safer like combination locks, etc.

Is this potential common ground or is it politics? Does it represent a recognition that gun bans are not possible so that the route for those who want to restrict gun ownership ought to be to make them as expensive as possible?

Withers recited some interesting stats about guns and suicides on dairy farms. Although he did not make it, some of his numbers could support an argument that we ought to ban handguns in rural areas where they are not likely to be needed for self defense and permit concealed carry in the inner city where they are. That's not likely to be common ground.

The Corporate Goose

As our budget impasse meanders along, there is renewed energy behind the notion that the problem in Wisconsin is not that we tax too much, but that corporations are taxed too little. Paul Soglin is on board with that and cites to a Wisconsin's Future study that says that the percentage that business pays of all state taxes and local property taxes is a five percentage points below the national norm. Jack that up (why shouldn't we lead the pack on all sorts of taxes?) and there would be that much more love for all manner of governmenty goodness.

Maybe, but isn't the problem here the difficulty in double taxation ? If I tax a rich man and forget about the disincentives to income generating activity, it may well be that he'll just buy a smaller yacht, hoard less gold, cop a few less carbon credits, etc. In other words, he may cut his overconsumption and stop building his already obscene net worth. That may suck if you work for a yacht company or are looking to borrow money for a new business, but, you know, cry me a river.

But what happens when I tax that mysterious vehicle of modern evil - the corporation. It can't reduce its consumption because it can't consume. (Yeah, I know about business perks but that's not enough to be material here.) It can hold cash but this just deprives the shareholder.

So it must either short employees or shareholders or pass the cost on to customers. There will be a variety of effects of that, but, to the extent that employees and shareholders take the hit, won't one be to reduce individual income and, as a result, individual taxes? Although I can imagine that some kinds of taxes - those that closely correspond to the services provided to an entity - might be imposed at the corporate level, can't you make an argument that the best place to tax income or wealth is where it comes to rest?

Shark in the middle

I will be moderating a debate between John Lott and Richard Withers on District of Columbia v. Heller,(captioned as Parker v. D.C. there) a decision of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals invalidating Washington's gun ban. The debate will be at noon on Tuesday at Marquette University Law School and is sponsored by the MULS Federalist Society.

Wherein I do what Al Gore will not

Admit that I (inadvertently) overstated something.

Jay Bullock points out that the news reports of the decison of the Queen's Bench in Dimmock v. Secretary State for Education and Skills are inaccurate in that the court was not charged with identifying errors per se. Having now looked at the opinion (as opposed to reading the news reports), I think it was wrong to say that the court required fixing "inaccuracies." The film may be rife with inaccuracies, but that wasn't the question before the court. Thanks to Jay for pointing that out. I know that news reports often get court decisons wrong and almost always read the primary source before referring to them in this blog. I should have done that this time as well.

But the larger point stands. What the judge did do was test the film against scientific consensus as measured by the report of Gore's co-recipient, the IPCC. He found areas where Gore departed from the report. Now you can say that there were "only" 9 but, as I said in my earlier post, these tend to be the money points; the ones that claim an impending apocalypse. For example, here's what the judges said about a claim regarding coastal flooding:

This is distinctly alarmist, and part of Mr Gore's 'wake-up call'. It is common ground that if indeed Greenland melted, it would release this amount of water, but only after, and over, millennia, so that the Armageddon scenario he predicts, insofar as it suggests that sea level rises of 7 metres might occur in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus.

This is, as I have blogged in the past, reflective of a problem with the "global warming movement" generally. Having made the dubious point that challenging scientific consensus amounts to some type of irrational "denial," it engages in a game of bait and switch by trying to extend that consensus to include these alarmist claims that supposedly justify more extreme policy repsonses.

I am not in the "global warming is a non-issue" camp, but I do keep reading these very well reasoned treatments of the issue which suggest that trying to project climate is extremely difficult and that the net effect of greenhouse gases is far from clear. There seem to be powerful arguments that policy responses that supress global prosperity will cause more harm than climate change and may even interfere with what may be the most effective responses to technological advances that may be the most effective response to climate change. I blogged about one here.

But this is a conversation that Al Gore does not want to have. The earth has a fever and while he cannot be bothered to give up even one of his houses, the rest of us better hunker down. Nice champion you have there.

Will he use the prize money to buy another house?

I understand that the people who hand out the Nobel Peace Prize don't necessarily place a great deal of value on the truth. They did give one to Rigoberta Menchu. But, in that case, no one really knew that she had lied in order to serve the truth until after she won the prize.

Al Gore's most prominent contribution to the issue of global warming was to put out a feature length power point called An Inconvenient Truth. Even if you believe that human contribution to climate change is a serious problem that requires a response, it is hard to deny that most inconvenient thing about his movie is that it contains an awful lot of stuff that's not true. An English court recently held that it could not be shown to school children without the correction of multiple inaccuracies. In one of the tastier ironies of contemporary politics, Gore's film which (unscientifically)urges us to shut up about the fact or extent of global warming because of "scientific consensus" departs from that consensus when necessary to make the threat of global warming appear to be more dire than most scientists believe it to be. Gore himself may have admitted this when he said it was appropriate to have an "overrepresentation of factual presentations on how dangerous" global warming is. (Although, in fairness, who know that that means?)

I have a hard time taking people who gave Yassir Arafat a peace prize seriously, but there is still some value in the Nobel brand. Is the committee endorsing truthiness? Is it telling us that exaggeration in a "good cause" is to be commended? Is it saying that, yes, Virginia there really is a ManBearPig.