IRS tax revenue falls along with taxpayer's income...............

http://content.usatoday.com/community/comments.aspx?id=35160536.story&p=6
A simple article but the comments are awesome........read this one.

Something to consider. . . there are two "green revolutions". One is the petrochemical green revolution coupled with oil that created modern farming. That will eventually end. The second "greening" or use of alternative fuels and renewable technologies is bound to fail, destined to fail. Because it produces only about 1/100th the energy of oil based and fossil fuel based "Stored energy" sources. Oil, coal, and natural gas account for 80% of the energy and thus GNP financial output of the USA, and those are going away. People like Governor Granholm of Michigan touted "clean coal" before Obama got into office and then did an about face to be politically correct with the Democratic party. But in the end, none of these are solutions. Oil, coal and natural gas provide most of the energy for the modern world. Oil provides transportation of all goods, pesticides plastics. Coal sits below base electrical production and creates energy (heat) to refine and produce steel, such as steel in bridges and rebar in buildings. Concrete is created with a heat process using natural gas funaces, natural gas is used to create nitrogen fertilizers for the "green farming revolution". The green revolution displaced natural farming techniques like the Induri farming technique which was organic and recycling of compost in India. Even India now uses fertilizers and fuel to produce food. Indian farmers (15,000 of them) committed suicide because they could not afford to pay for loans to grow crops (Monsanto), and fertilizer and fuel loans. They could not pay back the loans. Signs of unsustainable agriculture.

Green revolutionaries, the next wave of spin, propose to create 50 million organic farmers in the USA, that is the Post Carbon Institutes plan and pushes as a "Peak oil" goal toward the Obama government. This would be a disaster, we cannot move 50 million people to organic farming and break up corporate fossil fuel farming methods, it would result in starvation of a massive scale.

The USA will lose up to 67% of it's energy which is imported if the petro-dollar or dollar dislocation happens. This is bound to happen due to the government printing money and spending money on all sorts of short term bailouts that won't work. Started with Bush and war spending, borrowing from China and moving our factories to the "winners of the economic war" which is China. So China buys all the resources to supply cheap goods, we buy trinkets like fools and cannot buy or produce goods made in the USA because perhaps 9,000 buyers are competitive and buy Chinese junk to fill the shelves. The Clinton plan with Republican blessing to move factories to China has failed. Republicans and democrats have both been guilty of offshoring for profits and of course kickbacks to campaign contributions. This doomed our chance at recovery. Since the dollar is the petro-dollar, backed by oil it dooms other western economies as well. We hung ourselves with a Chinese rope, made in a US factory shipped to China and India. Game over.

What is the solution? We must conserve, get a smaller footprint, reduce debt and go toward sustainabilty. With dollar dislocation, and loss of imported energy, the USA will have to cut back 2 out of the following 4 energy spenders:
1. industrial use.
2. Personal transportation.
3. Home heating and cooling or
4. Farming.

Post Carbon institute says we have to go organic (it's a 20 year plan of course to them). That won't work for shock and awe falling of economy that we'll see. If dollar dislocation happens, the best we'll likely see is maintain exportable goods, meaning energy goes to modern farming and industrial production and we all walk and sleep in unheated houses. Have to cut back to basically communal small room heating and cooling arraingments and house share on massive scales to keep production going. We have to live on 1/5th or 1/10th of a middle class salary and produce more than we consume.

As for property rights, we'll we can either voluntarily contract and share houses communally in some arraignment with relatives and friends or it will happen as the economy forces it via foreclosures and homelessness.

As for the future. Say bye, bye, to Social security, retirement, big government, most everything but the military. Your retirement funds will be GONE. Our economy is dead and a walking dead man, and we don't even realize it. We are dead. Wounded fatally, but unwilling to realize it and still trying to fight. This is my overall gloomy assessment and of course the most negative viewpoint. I'll admit it. There are about 20 things that caused this. Check out the Crash Course by Chris Mattheson for more details do a google search. Some exotic answers, like changing the accounting terms and allow long term mortgages of 40, 50, 60 years, limit interest rates to 5% and all those tranches that had investments in the higher interest go bankrupt, sorry but that's the price to keep the homes, that kind of massive one time reset would be needed to stop the madness of foreclosures, but you still need to cut back. And Americans have been foolish and our cities and culture and archetecture is wasteful. We need to have a 2000 watt house (1000 watts a day per house for heating and cooling) to be sustainable. The Germans know how to build these superinsulated houses.

We need small core housing with passive heated and cooled extra rooms that take zero energy and are for expansion. We need large yards with greenhouses and gardens that produce food. We need to start thinking like those in the Last Great Depression, because this will be the Last Depression and is even more daunting than the other one, because it's unending. It requires a complete change in life, for the planet. Some feel dieoff and doom is the result. (Hard to say.) Possibly more resource wars, leading to Ameggedon.

But our houses are to wasteful, we waste to much gas with only 2% energy from the fuel moving a solo driver around and 3000lbs of steel. We need a 500 watt pancake motor on a bike to be energy sustainable, not a car with 70 or more horsepower. We use 100 humans worth of energy per US citizen, totally unsustainable. We have to cut back tremendously.

Three tidal waves are sweeping the country. The first is Economic Depression. Behind that wave a bigger wave called Peak Oil will hit. Beyond that wave massive immigrant movement from poor countries will arrive at wealthier ones as economic refugees flood what's left of the old middle class empires. Mexico will run out of exportable fuel as it's super giant oil field is losing 30% per year in output. Mexico loses all exports in oil to the USA in 18 months. After that we'll see a flood of Mexicans into the country and the nature of the USA will change forever into a Mexican Catholic Democratic voting country. For better or worse that is the fate of the US nation as far as I can tell. The fundamentals behind this are to big for any policy to stop. What are you going to do, build a great wall of Mexico and shoot them with machine guns? That would be unwise.

People will be pissed, that's for sure. Most are in denial of the reality that is coming. The fundamental forces behind this, be they elite conspiracies or fundamental resource depletion are to great for any political solution to stop. We'll see spin and fake econmies like "carbon credits" that propose to "create value" for doing nothing. These will waste time and resources as a few friends get jobs for each political solution.

Wow! Lousy spelling but pretty hard-hitting.
Here is one story from NYT today:
May 29, 2009
Organic Dairies Watch the Good Times Turn Bad
By KATIE ZEZIMA
RANDOLPH CENTER, Vt. — When Ken Preston went organic on his dairy farm here in 2005, he figured that doing so would guarantee him what had long been elusive: a stable, high price for the milk from his cows.

Sure enough, his income soared 20 percent, and he could finally afford a Chevy Silverado pickup to help out. The dairy conglomerate that distributed his milk wanted everything Mr. Preston could supply. Supermarket orders were skyrocketing.

But soon the price of organic feed shot up. Then the recession hit, and families looking to save on groceries found organic milk easy to do without. Ultimately the conglomerate, with a glut of product, said it would not renew his contract next month, leaving him with nowhere to sell his milk, a victim of trends that are crippling many organic dairy farmers from coast to coast.

For those farmers, the promises of going organic — a steady paycheck and salvation for small family farms — have collapsed in the last six months. As the trend toward organic food consumption slows after years of explosive growth, no sector is in direr shape than the $1.3 billion organic milk industry. Farmers nationwide have been told to cut milk production by as much as 20 percent, and many are talking of shutting down.

“I probably wouldn’t have gone organic if I knew it would end this way,” said Mr. Preston, 53.

Here in New England, where dairy farms are as much a part of the landscape as whitewashed churches and rocky beaches, organic dairy farmers are bearing the brunt of the nationwide slowdown, in part because of the cost of transporting feed from the Midwest. The contracts of 10 of Maine’s 65 organic dairies will not be renewed by HP Hood, one of the region’s three large processors. In Vermont, 32 dairy farms have closed since Dec. 1, significantly altering the face of New England’s dairy industry.

“We expect to lose a lot more farms this year,” said Roger Allbee, Vermont’s secretary of agriculture.

Hood and the two other big processors, Horizon Organic and Organic Valley, say cutting contracts, pay and production are necessary to absorb overproduction and offset softening demand. Organic Valley, a nationwide cooperative, told Maine organic dairy farmers last month that its sales growth had dropped to near zero from about 20 percent six months ago.

“Our inventory is overstocked,” said John B. Cleary, the cooperative’s New England regional pool coordinator.

For many farmers, the changes coincide with crushing debt resulting from the cost of turning organic, which can run hundreds of thousands of dollars. In addition, the price of organic feed has doubled in the last year. Credit has dried up for some, and others say it is nearly impossible to sell cows and so thin their herds.

And while processors project growth of about 6 percent in organic milk sales this year (a decline from the 12.7 percent reported for 2008 by the Organic Trade Association), some analysts say that forecast is far too optimistic. The United States Department of Agriculture says sales of organic whole milk in February were 2.5 percent lower than in February last year, with sales of organic reduced-fat milk 15 percent lower.

“We’re in big trouble,” said Craig Russell, an organic dairy farmer in Brookfield, Vt., who owes $500,000, mostly from converting his farm to organic in 2006.

Mr. Russell quit a day job as an accountant to farm full time last year. “I made more money in six months than in five years of conventional farming,” he said, but his farm is now barely hanging on. The price he receives from the distributor dropped another $1 per hundredweight on May 1, just when he most needed money to prepare for the summer grazing season.

“It’s going to cost me more to make milk than sell milk,” he said.

In an effort to provide a safety net, Vermont last month expanded a low-interest loan program for farmers.

While most conventional farmers are accustomed to withstanding price volatility, “organic hasn’t weathered this kind of storm,” said Mr. Allbee, the state’s agriculture secretary. Farmers are finding that organic food is not for every consumer, he said, “and doesn’t guarantee that you will have a market forever.”

Some farmers are considering selling their organic milk on the conventional market just to make some quick money. Others are looking to sell raw, or unpasteurized, milk directly to the public. The Vermont House of Representatives passed a bill this month to increase the amount of raw milk a farmer can sell that way.

At the annual meeting of the Maine Organic Milk Producers last month in Waterville, farmers debated whether they could tap into the locavore movement, marketing their milk as local food. Russell Libby, the organization’s executive director, wondered, “Is it possible to produce a product with a Maine label on it?”

Right now it is not, because some Maine milk is processed out of state. But farmers like Aaron Bell, whose contract with Hood will not be renewed when it expires, thinks the idea will save their farms.

“We’re so remote, we’re high and dry otherwise,” said Mr. Bell, whose farm is in Maine’s easternmost reaches. “Unless we find our own market.”

Back in 2006, Mr. Bell carried the banner for organic dairy farming, appearing with his wife on Martha Stewart’s show to promote small family farms. He still believes in organic food, but not so much in the business model.

“They say it’s heaven for the small farmer,” he said, “but the small farmer is the one screaming the loudest right now.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/us/29dairy.html?th&emc=th