Bills in the NH legislative hopper.

There is a good one in there. HB1485 will allow construction of new houses withOUT fire suppression sprinkler systems.
Some back ground. Firemen and fire departments nation wide have been pushing for years to make home sprinkler systems mandatory in new construction. They have managed to get the national fire and building code to require home sprinklers. They are now pushing to make the newly stiffened national code binding upon New Hampshire.
Home sprinklers are expensive, $5000 to $7000 when installed during construction. If the firemen get their way, all new homes in New Hampshire will cost $5000 to $7000 more. For all that money, the home buyer gets those tasteful chrome sprinkler heads sticking out of his new living room ceiling. Good homey atmosphere, just like at the office.
The fire insurance companies are neutral on the issue. They figure extra claims from accidental sprinkler activations will cost them as much as the sprinklers save them by putting out fires.
Me, I've lived all my life in wood houses without sprinklers. I've never experienced a house fire. I have experienced an accidental sprinkler activation at work. Damn things came on in the middle of the day and filled the company computer room with water. That was costly.
We ought to pass HB1485. We shouldn't raise the cost of all new homes to mitigate a not very likely danger. Compared to the number of fatalities in auto accidents, few people perish in house fires.
It used to be a free country. Which means freedom to install, or not install a home sprinkler system.

Things I learn from NHPR

Salvia, a readily availible and legal herb, gives a rocketship high and out of this world hallucinations. The on-the-air piece raved on and on about the quality of the high, the clarity of the hallucinations. Miley Cyrus uses it the radio went on to say.
Damn, this is the first I ever heard of the stuff. Must be getting old.
The NHPR piece was allegedly about new wonder drugs that might be developed from salvia, but it really was a three minute advertisement for the joys of smoking the stuff.
Should NHPR be hyping a new "substance"? There might have been some teenagers out there who haven't heard of salvia.

Sunday TV Pundit Whoppers

Discussion of last weekend's snow storm, and its political repercussions. Lots of pix of snowy car clogged streets. NO discussion of the NY sanitation worker's job action, a slowdown on snow removal. That story has been all over the blogs and Fox, but NBC didn't mention it once. Could it be the sanitation workers threatened retailiation if the story was aired?
Then I heard NH state rep Terrie Norelli (sp?) claim that last year's state budget was only $60 million in the red. In actual fact, the deficit was far worse, and the Feds gave NH $400 million of Porkulus money to fill the gap.

So how to end Great Depression 2.0? Pt 5

Stop wasting money on windmills, solar cells, ethanol, and battery powered cars. Jobs are occupations that produce something of economic value, that can be sold, to pay the wages. The green's pet "alternate energy" projects just consume money, they don't make any. Heavy taxpayer subsidies are used to entice people into buying "alternate energy", gasohol, and battery cars. These projects do not create wealth, they consume it. The money would be better spent on real economic development.

So how to end Great Depression 2.0? Pt 4

Spend less on health care. The United States spends 19% of GNP on health care. That's twice what every other country on the globe spends. We cannot afford to divert that much money from economic development. Every dollar spent on health care could have built new factories, new products, schools, roads, bridges, airports, and contributed to real economic growth.
Every US made product costs 19% more just to pay the worker's health care. Our international competitors pay half that.
Much of the health care money goes to trial lawyers, over priced drugs, expensive procedures of limited benefit, insurance company bean counters and other undesirables.

So how to end Great Depression 2.0? Pt 3

Drill baby Drill. Economies run on energy. Right now the US sends better than $1 trillion dollars abroad for oil every year. Much of the money goes to countries that don't like us very much. For instance Saudi money pays for madrassahs in Pakistan that turn out Al Quada and Taliban fighters.
The Pacific coast has huge oil reserves that have been untouched since the Santa Barbara blowout in the 1960's. The Atlantic coast hasn't even been surveyed. There is a huge field in Alaska that got designated "Alaska National Wild Life Refuge" and closed to oil drilling. We have vast tar sand reserves in Colorado. We have gigantic newly discovered domestic natural gas fields.
Developing these reserves would put a lot of people back to work. The oceans of money we send overseas would be better spent employing our own citizens to develop our own resources.
Right now an aggressive US Green movement is doing all it can to block energy development of all kinds. They point to the BP spill and claim that possible environmental damage is too great a price to pay.
I beg to differ. We have 10% of the population out of work. That's 30 million people. Being out of work is really miserable for the workers, the spouses and the children. Getting laid off is about the worst thing that can happen to a worker.
I'm willing to accept a BP sized spill every ten years or so in order to put 30 million hard pressed citizens back to work.
The oil industry is going to be super careful after the BP spill. That spill cost BP everything the company will earn over the next ten years. We have a herd of tort lawyers currently harrassing doctors. They could be retrained to sue oil companies over every spilled bucket of fuel or lube. That will learn 'em.

So how to end Great Depression 2.0? Pt 2

Gotta get the housing market running again. The banks, egged on by Fannie and Freddie, have completely screwed up the housing market to the point where no one is building new houses, no one can sell their old houses, no one can sell their new houses, and zillions of people (and their lenders) are taking a bath when they cannot pay their mortgages. Construction workers, and building tradesmen are out of work, building supply firms cannot sell their products, and appliance makers cannot sell appliances. This is a big slice of the economy, and it's flat on its back. Banks and the investors have lost so much money on home mortgages that they aren't lending to anyone.
The key to housing is credit. Nobody has enough cash to buy a house, they have to get a mortgage. The market is a disaster today because lenders gave credit to people who could not afford the house. These people are defaulting on mortgages they never should have signed. Each defaulted mortgage means another house put on the market at firesale prices, driving down the price of houses. For the average Joe, whose savings are mostly in his house, each price drop comes right out of his hide. Price drops in housing hurt more than a drop of the Dow Jones.
To tame this monster, we gotta have rules limiting mortgages to those who have the income to pay them off. To insure the rules are enforced, lenders who break the rules need to loose their money.
Right now, that doesn't happen. The mortgage market has Fannie and Freddie, who buy shaky mortgages from lenders. If the lender can sell the mortgage before the borrower stops paying on it, he is home free. And that is the major cause of Great Depression 2.0. We need to shut down Fannie and Freddie, cause they encourage disasterous loans, loans that hurt the borrower and hurt the housing market as a whole.