Why Its Pointless To Argue With Global Warming Believers 2064

Look, you're being absurd here. This data is really basic, simple stuff, coming from objective sources. You can't just dismiss it all out of hand because it doesn't agree with your belief system.

Postage stamps are not a useful measure of inflation, because for a very long time the Post Office was subsidized.

I don't understand why you keep bringing up specific individual items to make your case, when the consumer price index represents the actual cost of living *far* more accurately than any one specific product or commodity.

Well, I do understand. It's because the CPI doesn't back up what you're saying. But you've offered no *legitimate* reason for ignoring it.

Err... huh? Hunter-gatherers don't farm, by definition. The United States *did* in fact move from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy, and is now arguably moving to an information economy.

Yes, better farming techniques, industrialized farming, a couple hundred more years of selective breeding (and now genetic modification), neat things like weather forecasts, etc.

It was moving in that direction. At the start of the Civil war, only about 1-3 of GDP was generated by industry, and 84% of the population was still rural.

Once again, your personal experience is not a valid benchmark for the performance of the US economy.

Could you please try to make some kind of actual argument, one of these days?

If you lived at 1950s standards, this wouldn't be the case. Food is *cheaper* after adjusting for inflation than it was 50 years ago. 1950s-level medical care you can probably get for free (just don't get cancer or something, because you'll die). A car of the quality available in the 1950s, if you could still buy one new, would be dirt cheap. But of course you can't buy one new, because it would horribly flunk modern emissions and safety tests. There are a lot of other consumer goods where advances in quality have been just as large; there's a reason "TV repairman" was once a viable profession, but no longer is.

And, of course, in the 1950s, nobody had iPods, computers, Internet access, flat screen TVs (or, usually, more than one TV, if any), cable service, cell phones (or, usually, more than one phone line), DVD players, and so on.

Housing is probably more expensive in real terms, but in general, people can afford a lot more stuff than they could 50 years ago. They just don't feel like they can, because there's so much more stuff that everyone is expected to have.

The middle-clbutt has lost out to the upper-clbutt over the last 30 years *in relative terms*. In absolute terms, people across the entire income spectrum are doing better.

You're still not making an argument.

Sorry, I guess I'm part of that special-interest political group they're calling the "reality-based community" these days.

-- "Those who enter the country illegally violate the law." -- George W. Bush in Tucson, Ariz., Nov. 28, 2005