And write about it, this is about what you’d get.  A profile article in The Washington Post about the family that Dylann Roof crashed with during the weeks immediately preceding his murderous rampage in Charleston.

The home’s occupants are, in no particular order, a twice-abandoned mother who’s working her country ass off at the local Waffle House, her three useless-as-tits-on-a-boar-hog sons, Justin, Joey, and Jacob (how cute! matching names), the slatternly girlfriend of one of them (does it matter which?), and a motley assortment of people who seem to be “staying there,” as the lower orders around here say, for different reasons and periods.

“Home” is a beat-up ol’ single-wide out in the sticks in up-country South Carolina.  It houses Mom, the three boys, the girlfriend (for the time being), and whatever dead-beat loser buddy of whichever of the three brothers feels like imposing himself on whatever the mother can earn down at the Waffle House, together with such cash-under-the-counter scrapings as come in whenever one of the boys feels like getting far enough off his ass to scratch his own fleas.  There is a dog, Daisy, whom the reporter identifies as a “pit bull puppy,” but whom the picture with the article plainly shows to be a beagle or some other hound breed.  [If that’s the standard of the WaPo‘s fact checking you might want to take at least some of the rest of the article with a grain of salt.]

They didn’t always live like this.  At one point they lived in a subdivision, in a clean house, with clean clothes, and predictable patterns to their lives.  Then the mother’s (second) husband just up and walked out.  She lost her job as a medical technician (the article doesn’t say why; it could have been any number of reasons — the medical industry chews people up and spits them out like seeds), then lost the house to foreclosure.  They moved to the trailer.

Among their neighbors back during “normal” was a kid named Dylann Roof.  Another was some kid named Shane who would “stay for weeks” in the family’s house, and later in their trailer “even though he had his own trailer by then.”  He used to get drunk and talk about doing crazy self-destructive things, like drinking rat poison.  Everyone thought he was just stupid drunk and running his mouth.  One evening he swallowed a shotgun; one of the Meek boys stole his cowboy boots from his still-blood-spattered home “as a memento.”  During his pre-homicidal visitation, Roof would get good ‘n’ drunk and talk about doing “something crazy,” and wave around his new .45 ACP (in a really interesting data point, he’d also get good ‘n’ drunk and go sit in his car to listen to . . . opera; the article doesn’t vouchsafe us which composer(s)).  At one point one of the brothers took Roof’s gun away from him and hid it.  Not because they thought he might go and calmly murder nine people in a church, but because they thought he might swallow the gun.  Like their buddy Shane had in fact done.  They gave Roof his gun back.

The article asks, not so subtly, why this family didn’t take Roof’s announcements seriously and call the cops.  I have news for the reporter:  No one takes anything about people in that world seriously.  Not even they do.  When they tell each other they love someone, it’s generally neither meant nor received in earnest; when they announce an intention to turn the page and get themselves straightened out, everyone who hears the statement knows it won’t happen.  When one of them finds Jesus, everyone mentally calculates the date when he’ll backslide and end up with another drunk-and-disorderly on an ever-lengthening rap sheet.  When one of them expresses an ambition, it’s accepted that he’ll never stir from the couch to realize it.  When one of them is drunker than Cooter Brown and allows he’s not going to take that shit from the boss/neighbor/teacher/wife/husband/police or whatever other source of momentary friction has intruded into his world, no one believes for a moment that his statement will turn out to bear any correlation with his actions.

Among the cameos put in by the rotating cast of drifters, scroungers, and layabouts is a heavily-tattooed black kid identified as Christon, who professes even yet to “love” Roof as a friend.  The value of Christon’s love for anyone can be measured by his later quotation, “I have no sympathy for people. Nobody has any sympathy for me. I care for me and me only.”  Spare me your love, Christon old man.

The only person even slightly sympathetic in the whole show is Mom.  She is shown cleaning, “constantly cleaning. She wipes the kitchen counters. She straightens the blinds. She folds up the sofa where Lindsey and Joey sleep, folds the sheet and zebra blanket, and drops them in the corner where Roof often lounged, as Jacob does now.”  She’s shown at work, exhausted and — one suspects — shell-shocked that her existence, once so . . . so . . . normal, has degenerated to the point that now they themselves are the target of an investigation by the feds in connection with this punk Roof’s crimes.  [I’d like to know just what the hell law it’s believed these people broke.  Not listening to a drunk-ass dead-beat is not a crime; it’s called ordinary common sense.]

No details are given on what lead to both marriages to break up in similar fashion, with the husband leaving.  I can imagine the second husband getting good and sick of having some neighbor kid invading his home for weeks on end, drunk, high, or both, to whoop it up with the wife’s layabout children by another man.  Or maybe he was cool with it.  Who knows.

The only knock on Mom which immediately appears from the article is her abysmally poor judgment.  Step One on her Back to Normal project needs to be to kick out everyone but the 15 year-old, change the locks, and tell little junior if he fucks up one more time, even just a little, it’s off to juvie for him and she’ll never have anything more to do with him.  The older two need to go sleep on a park bench or wherever it is until they realize that being able-bodied males and mooching off their mother who’s killing herself by inches at the Waffle House is the kind of public disgrace that no one ought to be able to endure and still hold his head up and call himself a man.  I’m sure Mom loves her boys; she’s their mother.  But hell and blast, lady, your children have got themselves and you on a path to where one or more of you is going to come to a violent end.  Stop it.  Now.  You’ve got to be the adult in this picture.

I ran across the article on a friend’s Facebook page.  His comment:  “I read this story, riveted, from front to back, in the paper this morning and decided it’s the most depressing thing I’ve read in months. These people have a miserable life, and it’s hard to imagine what could be done to help. It really does seem hopeless. And learning that people from this milieu are resorting to random violence should not come as any surprise.”

Oh dear.  Where to start with this sort of non-comprehension?  For starts, the United States is full of families who live in beat-up old single-wides out in the woods.  They’re either momentarily down on their luck or fate has dealt them a bad hand which they’ve played poorly.  But as the mother demonstrates, you don’t have to live like that.  Or as P. J. O’Rourke quotes his dead-broke Irish mother during the depths of the Great Depression, “No one is too poor to clean up his front yard.”  Living like this family does is an active choice, for which they deserve censure, not pity.  And guess what else?  The percentage of people who live like this and who “resort to random violence” is almost incalculably small.  True enough, many of them live like that precisely because they are or have been criminally violent in their pasts, but it’s generally exactly the kind of violence that’s always existed in society:  Violence among one’s own circle of acquaintance.  I can’t recall the precise number just now, but the overwhelming proportion of victims of violence personally know their assailant.  Not “random” at all, in other words.  They’re not “resorting” to it from misery or hopelessness; they’re violent because that’s who and what they are.  It’s how the world works that they live in, a world they are fully participatory in making.

All of which is to say that I know way too many people who either right now live like that, or grew up living in circumstance in comparison to which this family is on Easy Street, and who are decent, law-abiding, hard-working, community-supporting people.  In fact, not a few of them are the most hard-working and financially (for their circumstances) generous supporters of operations like the humane society, the food bank, the help center, and their respective churches.  Need a pull out of a mud-choked ditch?  They’ll be there, with their tow strap or chain and a 25 year-old pick-up truck that has its license plate in the rear window because there isn’t a bumper on it.  Church has a leaky roof?  They’ll be up there with a hammer or holding the ladder.  Dog gets dumped out on a back-country dirt road?  It’ll come home with them.  They are really ordinary folks whom you’d be happy to pass the time of day with, if you found them on a park bench beside you.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Mom in this story was one of those people.  But Jesus Christ and General Jackson! lady.  Get your worthless-ass sons out of your house.  You can’t help them until you get your own life back on track, and that’s not going to happen as long as you’re the pack animal for these thugs.

I do agree with my friend’s characterization of this story as depressing. It is every bit that.  It’s depressing because you know you cannot help these people.  Even Mom, who knows how not to live like this, has more or less chosen to do so, by permitting her useless children to create that world around her.  You cannot stop a person bent on self-destruction.

What’s striking about the newspaper article is the reporter’s tone.  It’s as if he’s gone to the St. Louis Zoo and is reporting from the primate house.  “Zerlinda, the matriarch of the band, plucks lice from the fur of Josephus, the dominant silver-back.  He occasionally gives her a smack on the head, sending her reeling.  She sulks, never for more than a few moments, then tenderly returns to her grooming.  Pluck.  Smack.  Pluck.  Every so often they will stare through the glass at us.  What in the world might be crossing their ape minds?”

The dog dies at the end of the story.

But certainly more than slightly reminiscent of the latter days of the Roman Empire.

The other day I went to a first-run movie, a thing I seldom do.  In fact, I’ll go farther: a thing I pretty much studiously avoid doing.  But my father, who adores movie popcorn and has few other pleasures left in life other than his dog, likes to go and I go with him.  He likes to get the exact middle seats of the very top row, and grouses if there are more than four other people in the theater.  Same thing with restaurants, by the way.  Part of me delights in the magisterial disregard of the basic logic of the thing:  If it’s worth seeing, or worth eating there, people are going to go.  If you want it to yourself you more or less have to confine yourself to places and things that are not desired.  Part of me gets very fatigued with the expression “jammed up” to refer to any crowd in excess of ten.

Be all that as it may, we went to see Spy, a fairly harmless and mindless comedy vehicle for the lead actress, Melissa McCarthy (who came close to stealing the show in Bridesmaids).  If F-bombs tossed about like confetti upset you, it’s probably not a movie for you.  It certainly isn’t for younger children.

Enough of the feature.  Getting there as early as we did — and do, considering my father’s morbid fear of not getting the Right Seats — we got to see the trailers.  Among them was a trailer for what seems to be a television show, which these days is, as I understand, equivalent to saying “reality” television show.

I have very few accomplishments in life I can point to.  Among them is that I’ve never seen an installment of Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo, or Jersey Shore, or Swamp People, or Real Housewives of East Jesus, Arkansas, or even much of Duck Dynasty.  All the Survivors and their interminable spin-offs have also left me serene in my pop-culture ignorance.  I now have another to add to the list.

Gentle Reader, we are about to witness a show identifying itself as Little Women: LA.  This show is about midget and dwarf women, in Los Angeles.  When one is an abnormally small female in Los Angeles, apparently the thing to do is behave trashy.  People will film you, and then (shudder) a country full of people will watch you behaving trashy.

Consider how many ideas for television shows get pitched every day in Hollywood.  Consider how many people in how many roles and with how much money and influence must all sign off on the concept, the financing, the production details and budget, the marketing strategy, and on and on and on.  Consider how few of the ideas pitched ever see so much as a minute of production.  Consider how many of the ones that actually do get so far as having a pilot filmed get canned before ever being shown.  What I’m getting at is that the tripe that makes it onto your television screen on a daily basis, Gentle Reader, is the surviving remnant of not just a mountain, but an entire mountain range of Stuff That Didn’t Make the Cut.

All of which is to say that, while we might not know their names (I’d hope they’d have enough self-respect to give false ones in the credits: “Executive Producer:  Vyacheslav Molotov; Casting Director:  Richard M. “Bingo” Little.  Editing:  Boris Godunov.  And so forth.), we know by the tracks they are about to leave across the smoldering remains of American pop culture that they do exist.  They are all the people who thought this was a Good Idea.  Stop and ponder, Gentle Reader what must have been the ones they thought too silly, too degenerate, too uninteresting to the breadth of the American television consuming public.

Many years ago, while I was stationed in Charleston, South Carolina, the state legislature felt called upon to outlaw a sport, self-explanatorily identified as “dwarf tossing.”  I understand it involved, other than the physical actions which gave it its name, a great deal of beer.  I assume the dwarves were willing participants (never so familiarized myself with it as to know how they were compensated).  Can’t say that I ever saw an evening of dwarf tossing advertised on any venue I drove past (maybe I just wasn’t driving through the right parts of town in the right parts of the state), but I’m not sure how the Scourge of Dwarf Tossing came to be viewed as such a crisis.  Again, this sounds like the sort of function where one gives a false name at the door, just in case there’s a raid and your picture appears on the front page of the local paper.  Caption:  Leon Trotsky, 43, of Spartanburg, is arrested after police raid dwarf tossing den.

Iran is getting the Bomb, the U.S. Supreme Court is re-writing statutes for the express purpose of saving them from the drafters in Congress, Greece has wheedled the EU, which jolly well knows better, into handing over another several billion Euros while they pass empty reform measures they have no intention of ever putting into effect . . . and we’re watching Little Women: LA.  I’ve read several books on the end of the Roman Empire, all the way from Gibbon to more recent re-examinations, but a common theme is that those responsible for keeping Rome shiny side up and rubber side down just finally gave up on it.

As I ponder Little Women: LA, I have to ask myself whether we’ve given up on this peculiar experiment in self-government.

How many legs would a calf have?  This was a rhetorical question put to his cabinet by Abraham Lincoln during a discussion that seemed to be running in circles.  They all answered, “Five,” at which point Lincoln corrected them.  Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.

Nor can you credibly claim that fossil fuels are being “subsidized” by re-defining “subsidy” into meaninglessness, as a several authors affiliated with the International Monetary Fund seems to have done.  According to those sages, world-wide energy costs — by which they overwhelmingly mean fossil fuel energy costs — are being “subsidized” to the tune of $5.3 trillion annually.  The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has the article.  Here’s the blog post.  The blog post relies heavily on an IMF working paper, “How Large are Global Energy Subsidies?,” available in .pdf here. The reader doesn’t get past the headline without tripping across the writers’ leftist bias splashed across the screen:  “Act Local, Solve Global: The $5.3 Trillion Energy Subsidy Problem”.  Isn’t $5.3 trillion a rather large number?  How did they get there?  Did they add up governmental hand-outs, direct or indirect, to energy producers or consumers?  Well no, no they didn’t.  What they did was define a calf’s tail so that now it’s a leg:

“We define energy subsidies as the difference between what consumers pay for energy and its ‘true costs,’ plus a country’s normal value added or sales  tax rate. These ‘true costs’ of energy consumption include its supply costs and the damage that energy consumption inflicts on people and the environment. These damages, in turn, come from carbon emissions and hence global warming; the health effects of air pollution; and the effects on traffic congestion, traffic accidents, and road damage. Most of these externalities are borne by local populations, with the global warming component of energy subsidies  only a fourth of the total.”

“Externalities.”  “True costs.”  And of course, “global warming.” The latter of which hasn’t been occurring for the past 15-plus years, and the extent to which it is anthropogenic is the subject of massive debate, despite what the acolytes of The Economist, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the television talking heads, and the rest of the left-extremist media repeatedly assure us is “consensus” scientific opinion.  Even on the assumption that, long-term, the earth overall is in fact warming up, as of right now there is little robust (in other words, non-manipulated) data to indicate that human activity is the dominant cause of it.  Looked at slightly differently, for the past 15 years, during which time everyone now agrees there has been a “hiatus” in warming, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been steadily climbing.  By every one of the climate alarmists’ models the world should be cooking.  But it’s not.  Why not?  Well, there are a bunch of theories out there, all of which — hardly surprisingly — rely on naturally-occurring phenomena to explain “where the heat is being hidden.”  But what does that tell us?  What it tells us is that naturally-occurring phenomena can very easily overwhelm the anthropogenic component of warming trends, and that assumes that the computer models which are the source of our estimates of the magnitude of that component are accurate in the first place.  Which may or may not be the case.

These IMF writers are perfectly comfortable not only assuming that the world is warming and will continue to warm, but that it’s human carbon emissions that are the cause of it.  And then they pull a number out of thin air to slap a price tag on it, and call it an “externality” which must be accounted for in calculating the “true” cost of energy.

The health effects of air pollution are a genuine external cost of the use of fossil fuels.  And it’s not hard to put some pretty robust numbers on that cost.  Most countries keep pretty good track of mortality and morbidity, and the range of illnesses and diseases reliably connected to ambient air pollution is pretty well-settled.  So when they authors write, “In China alone, the World Health Organization estimates there are over one million premature deaths per year due to outdoor air pollution, caused by the burning of polluting fuels, particularly coal, and other sources,” that’s a number I can take at close to face value (ignoring the extent to which international NGOs have joyfully prostituted themselves to various left-extremist causes).

That million-premature-deaths-per-year data point really doesn’t take full account to the full consequences of China’s fuel consumption, does it?  Let’s look back a few decades to see what life in Red China was like before its economy took off.  China was a land of — in many provinces still is — dirt-poor peasants, without clean drinking water, transportation to keep the villages fed, reliable modern or semi-modern healthcare, or most of the other advantages of modern economies.  They died like flies.  What has happened to overall life expectancy in China as a result of its economic modernization?  Here are the charts: overall life expectancy went from 68.31 years in 1985 to 73.27 years in 2010.  These IMF folks are counting only one side of the equation.  If I increase life expectancy across several hundred million people by five years through generalized, wide-spread economic development — a development which would be utterly impossible without cheap, for which read “fossil” energy — but out of those hundreds of millions, 1 million annually die prematurely, then I’m not only still to the good, I’m massively to the good.  In India, one of the other major “sinners” in fossil fuel consumption, the increase is even more stark.  We see life expectancy going from 62.5 to 67.14 years between 2000 and 2012, five years’ increase over just twelve years.

By the way, despite the obviously Marxist leanings of these IMF wonks, general economic development and prosperity inures to everyone’s advantage.  Everyone’s.  If air pollution is an external cost, then general economic advancement is an external benefit, and it’s asinine — and dishonest — to include the one without accounting for the other.

“The effects on traffic congestion, traffic accidents, and road damage”:  These are likewise “external costs” that amount to “subsidies” of energy.    I’d love to see someone demonstrate that “too-cheap” energy prices result in traffic congestion and accidents.  What produces traffic congestion and road accidents are too many people trying to fit their vehicles onto a given surface of road at the same time.  And what produces that is geographically concentrated economic opportunity that grows faster than government’s ability to respond to it.  Unemployed people don’t drive to work, to put it bluntly.  Businesses that go out of business don’t run their trucks.  So if we just tamped down productive economic activity our roads would be safer and less congested.  Which appears to be the objective of these authors.

The kind of economic advancement which produces crowded (and dangerous) traffic condition arises from, and only from, relatively inexpensive transportation, and that requires relatively inexpensive energy.  By “relatively,” I mean, incidentally, relative to other mechanized and non-mechanized forms of transportation.  When you had to own and maintain a horse and wagon in order to “drive” anywhere, that was both highly inefficient and very restrictive.  As Paul Johnson describes travel in pre-railroad England in The Birth of the Modern, the vast majority of people walked wherever they went, because they couldn’t afford to ride, not because they wanted to stop and smell the flowers.  That’s still true elsewhere in the world.  Despite all the picturesque photographs in The National Geographic of swarms of passengers so covering rail cars that you can’t see the rail car beneath them, most people in the less developed world walk, and not from choice.

Non-mechanized travel is slow, it’s inefficient (how many horse-drawn wagons would it take to deliver the lumber and brick to build a single house? how many guys driving flat-bed trucks?), and it is, relative to fossil-fueled mechanized travel, horribly, horribly expensive.  Among forms of mechanized transportation, railroads are phenomenally inefficient in any sense of how much energy it takes to move X people or weight of objects Y distance, from any given Point A to Point B.  Those who extol the virtues of rail conveniently pay attention to the first component X over Y, forgetting that niggling little issue of where it’s being transported from and to: which Point A to which Point B.  There is not money enough in all the world to build and run railroads to everywhere that needs cheap transportation.  If I’m 30 miles from the nearest railroad point of embarkation (and many, many places, even in the Easter U.S., are), then it doesn’t really do me much good to ponder how much weight a train can pull per unit of energy, does it?

Once more, the “too-cheap energy” hand-wringers need to answer the question of precisely how they account for the overall benefit, in length and quality of life, provided by modern capitalistic economies operating through the inter-connectedness of inter-continental markets for everyday goods (and even services, although to a lesser extent).  These authors’ outlook assumes a pre-lapsarian paradise where an increasing population somehow has jobs that somehow enable its individuals to pay the bills and somehow live long, relatively-healthy lives, without a relatively inexpensive way to move people and goods, to heat, cool, and light houses and businesses, and to operate the machines which make the physical objects that make it all possible.

How do our authors propose to impose on consumers the “true cost” of energy?  Why, through taxation, of course.

“The fiscal gains from subsidy reform are sizeable and could be a game changer for fiscal policy in many countries.  This would give room, for example, for governments to reduce some types of taxes (such as those imposed on labor) that weigh down growth;  raise growth-enhancing public expenditure (e.g. for infrastructure, health  and education); and finance targeted cash transfers for the poor.  Furthermore, there would be appropriate incentives for investment in green technology because dirty energy would no longer be artificially cheap.”

In the working paper linked above you get a better idea of just how purely theoretical all these wonderful “savings” actually are.  Reducing a tax on labor sounds nice, but it really doesn’t answer the question where you are going to replace the money from all the income tax revenue lost from jobs destroyed or more importantly jobs never created.  Moreover, if you just read the above paragraph you’ll notice a curious contradiction:  Increasing energy costs will reduce energy consumption, and we’re going to use all that money flowing in to . . . build and repair more roads and bridges for all the cars and trucks that aren’t being driven any more.  It also assumes an infinitely linear relationship between economic growth and government expenditure on “education” (no such relationship has ever been shown above a certain level; if that were the case the United States would be a nation of Einsteins) or “health” (ditto).  And finally we get to the nub:  more money to hand out to our pet constituencies and “green energy” cronies.

On a more practical level, when has there even been a sustained pattern of government taking one tax revenue source and using it to reduce another?  That is a supposition that defies uniform experience of government since the days of the pharaohs.  For that matter, it seems to me that if most of the externalities of energy consumption are experienced locally, then paying a whacking great chunk of money to a centralized bureaucracy to siphon 40-80% of it off the top in “administration” costs and then dole the balance out to its favored constituents is precisely the wrong way to match externalities with those who must experience them in the actual lives.  I’ll give you a hint:  There aren’t a whole lot of “green energy” mooches in Atlanta, and yet there’s a boat-load of externalities to experience there (as anyone who’s tried to drive further than three blocks around there can tell you).  So the solution is to impose a tax on all those who live and work in Atlanta, so some firm in Silicon Valley can be handed $535 million in taxpayers’ money to get behind the major-political-donors’ equity position when the firm, which was already irretrievably broke when the money was paid, files its bankruptcy petition?  Color me uninterested.

Finally, other than using less energy, what do the authors’ suggested uses of this tax revenue actually do to reduce the externalities of energy consumption?  China could burn 17% less coal and it would still have lousy air quality in its large cities.  New Yorkers could burn 17% less automotive fuels and mid-town would still be a parking lot for most of the day.  Where the change would occur would be at the margin and in truth would largely occur in the form of lack of economic activity.  In any single year that might not be a terribly large number, but once you slice 0.5% off your annual rate of growth over several decades because energy is now so damned expensive, and suddenly the difference in overall societal condition is the difference between the American Midwest and rural India.

Also noteworthy is the authors’ pointing out that the “externalities” of “too-cheap” energy are very predominantly local.  Even assuming all the climate alarmist chatter to be true in every detail [It’s not; all these models and projections trace themselves to data held by the University of East Anglia, data so thoroughly corrupted by manipulation that the man they hired to recreate their original measurements gave up after about three years of trying; the source data has been so monkeyed with that it is unusable for any other than propaganda purposes . . . which coincidentally is what it’s being used for; useful entry points to understand what’s been going on here, here, and especially here.], something like half the total is accounted for by local air pollution.  Local.  All of which is to say that there are enormous swathes of every country on the face of the earth where the air simply isn’t all that bad.  Yet the taxes proposed will hit everyone in the country.  Seems like what they’re proposing is to shift the externalities from one subset of people (residents of dense urban pockets) to another subset (everyone else).  I’d also note that non-residents of dense urban areas tend to use — at least in their personal existence — more energy for things like transportation than their urban cousins.  Ditto businesses.  If you live or work out in the sticks, you’ve got further to move yourself and your stuff than if your customer base all lives within 25 miles of you or your business.

In fairness to the authors of the linked paper, they do come right out and admit that their conclusions rely on enormous assumptions that may or may not be true, especially on the benefit end of things.  This is significant, because we do know a great deal about the cost of suppressing growth.  Take a look at the life expectancies as of 1960 in — China: 43.47 years; India:  41.38 years; Brazil: 54.69 years.  Those truncated lives are the “externality” of allowing a bunch of coastal elites to feel good about themselves by taxing the rest of us into oblivion so they can have more of our money to play with.

I humbly suggest that willfully knocking the creation and aggregation of wealth back to an era when we didn’t have a million Chinese dying “prematurely” each year, but rather hundreds of millions of Chinese with over 20 years’ less life expectancy at birth, all based on pie-in-the-sky assumptions about all this magical government revenue that will roll in from a shrunken economy, is a suggestion that does not deserve to be taken seriously.

And those assumptions sure as hell are no basis to claim that energy is being sold at $5.3 trillion below its “true cost” annually.