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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (324336)	2/2/2007 7:35:24 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1575980

Sometimes you have to protect industries with subsidies or taxes on competing materials until such time as the industry is able to stand on its own two feet. I don't agree with that as a good general plan. Maybe just maybe at the very beginning; you pay for basic research, and give enough to the new industry to do some development and get the first actual sales, but even that I'm skeptical about. I don't think governments have a particularly good record of picking winners, or of efficiently allocating investment in new ideas to get beneficial results. To the extent that there is some sort of solid consensus that we have to reduce the use of oil, and that the reasons why don't get reflected in the price of oil, it would be better to tax the oil (discouraging its use, and encouraging alternatives) rather then to trying to pick out different alternatives and subsidize them directly. Even the higher oil tax would be problematic, but its a more reasonable solution that a string of subsidies and special tax credits. Had we taxed oil much like the Europeans did back in the 1980s, we might not be in the dependent position we are in today,fighting an expensive war in the ME. Its unlikely that it would have changed things much, except perhaps very indirectly. Any change in policy can later change the political situation which can later change who gets elected president, but there is no easy way to predict such indirect changes. If you could go back in time and impose such levels of taxation, we might have winded up getting involved in a bigger war. Such what ifs are highly speculative even if you are talking about relatively direct effects, and in this case there really isn't a direct effect that would have prevented the war.