At long last, one writer has seriously addressed the potential problems with more stimulus spending. (I sent Paul Krugman a question about this more than a week ago, via a comment on his blog, but from what I can see he has yet to address it. And Dean Baker too easily dismisses the issue, in my opinion.)

The problem is not the federal budget deficit, not at least in the short term, but the potential political fallout from bad decision making. That way, says Steve Randy Waldman, indeed lay a possible US currency crisis. And this is ultimately where Friedrich Hayek and his associates were coming from in blaming Weimar for the disasters that followed.

As a follow-up to yesterday's rant, I see that investors are applauding the moves of European governments to reduce their budget deficits, as if the answer to deflation is more deflation.

Hasn't anyone ever heard of Keynes and the false dawn of 1937?

The cover story of the latest issue of Harper's takes direct aim at the flaws in the cap and trade system for dealing with climate change and raises the possibility that such flaws will prevent the system from working anywhere nearly as effectively as intended.

The problem isn't so much that the market for trading carbon credits creates an incentive for banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs to mwow, i know she sent that last one to me in a format other than word, so i wonder if the paste from word fnake the system less efficient thanks it should be, thanks to the money that will go to trading profits, as critics like Nasa's James Hansen have claimed.

This piece on how companies are disclosing more information about the size of their carbon footprint and what they're doing to reduce it suggests significant progress is being made.

Certainly companies are disclosing a significant amount of information about their activities in the reports filed with the Carbon Disclosure Project. But more is necessary before any definitive judgments can be made.

Ignore that story in the WSJ today about how nobody wants solar-panel or wind-turbine farms in their neck of the woods.  The article explains how there's a grass-roots resistance to the alternative-energy industry because of fears that great windmills and such would mar America the beautiful.

It doesn't really matter what the neighbors think, however, because it's going to happen - for environmental reasons, for national-security reasons and eventually for economic reasons.  For all the right reasons, really.  And think of the jobs it will create.  Alternative energy sources - wind, solar, geothermal and biofuel - now meet less than 5 percent of our national demand.  The big barrier to the inevitable changeover is the infrastructure costs.   But technology often outpaces expectations, and cap-and-trade legislation, when it comes to pass, will help drive the shift.  So will popular tax-incentive programs and public mandates for developing alternatives.