Stupid Idea Alert

Have everybody trade in their cars for sunracers like that Australian competition they have every year. You can't drive them during the day. That should lower fatalities. They're light weight and slow, so that should lower fatalities in collisions. They use no gas.

Since this is our country, I say we make the politicians go first! It'll make them easier to identify on the road so we can run over them with our gas guzzlers.

It's not about reducing gas usage or saving the world, it's about religious sacrifice.

"Conservation is a spiritual act".

There is something going on with the Left these days, in that they seem to be determined to reenact all the stupid ideas and policies of the 1970s, as if this time they're gonna magically turn out differently.

What is it about 55mph that some people think is magical? If you are really concerned about getting your optimum gas mileage, you get one of these and actually measure it for your vehicle and driving habits. But that takes time and effort and an ability to do simple arithmetic.

Also, anyone wanna bet that these same people so proud that they drive at 55mph (no matter how below the limit that might be) do it in the left lane and ignore those "slower traffic keep right" signs?

"I have never seen any kind of quantitative analysis that provided a rationale for any particular speed limit (at least one designed to save gas and lives)."

I have, but even if you haven't, don't be stupid. It's obvious that driving even 55 on a narrow, curvy and bumpy country lane is dangerous.

The "safe" speed for a road is determined by considering the visibility and likelihood of obstacles which would be "bad" it hit or run over at a given speed. Basically, the wider, flatter and straighter the road, the higher it's safe speed.

The safe speed for US highways depends on whether your in a flat area (like most of Texas, Kansas and Florida), a hillier one or a mountainous one. In Florida, for instance, the safe speed is usually pretty damn fast.

*******

"Even ignoring the very real fact that there was no significant increase in traffic fatalities after the idiotic law was repealed in the nineties (in fact, I think they went down)"

It did indeed go down. On a wide highway with side barriers the most likely obstacle you'll hit is another car. If both cars are traveling at the same speed, it's pretty damn hard to get in accident. The greater the difference in speed between two cars, the more likely an accident is to occur.

That's why high speed limits are safer than the German Autobahn. Because there's no "official" speed Germans drive at all different speeds, resulting in a less safe highway.

Here's a Jeep Wrangler driving Iraq vet who figured it out for his vehicle. http://www.omninerd.com/articles/Improve_MPG_The_Factors_Affecting_Fuel_Efficiency

It's obvious that driving even 55 on a narrow, curvy and bumpy country lane is dangerous.

Well, duh. I thought it was obvious that we were talking about freeways, and particularly the interstates.

The 55 mph speed limit was repealed in 1987. I got my learner's permit in California that year; I remember it very clearly.

The 55 mph speed limit was repealed in 1987.

Only partially, for rural Interstates, and only to 65. It wasn't fully repealed until 1995, with the new Republican Congress.

I was talking about any "quantitative analysis that provided a rationale for any particular speed limit", not the post as a whole. It was a directed comment only.

This is from people who do not understand economics. As long as the visible cost of something drops, they think the total cost is going down. They are not even aware of the possibility that other costs rise to compensate.

I heard something very like this on the radio recently. It was an ad from a car company. Come on down! We've got great cars you really want to buy! I thought, that's weird, here the cost of driving a car is shooting up, and these folks imagine that people will respond by buying a car, i.e. substantially increasing how much money they spend on driving.

But they're right. They know that people will, indeed, respond to gas going from $2 to $4, hence driving up their typical yearly cost of gas from $1000 to $2000, by going down to the dealership and trading in the paid-for Corolla for a spanking-new Prius, thus taking on extra costs of $6000 or more per year. Economically, they're worse off, as would be apparent if one ran a credit check on them immediately afterward. But they'll save money on gas! Yippee!

Our Presidential candidates are no better. Here's Obama, responding to the high price of gas by proposing to make it more expensive. Let's slap a tax on it, and then use (most) of the proceeds to pay for "helping families pay for the skyrocketing cost of fuel."

Got that? You're paying too much at the pump. So let's take a little bit more out of your wallet at the pump -- but send you a check for most of it later! Wow, so simple! Brilliant! No wonder he did so well at Harvard, huh?

re: the Jeep Wrangler link

Interesting. He basically found that going going 65mph instead of 55mph reduced his fuel consumption from 21 to 19.5. What does this mean?

Let's say I have a 333 mile flat Interstate highway drive. (Say I'm crossing Nebraska on I-80, or I-15 through Idaho and Utah.) At 55mph, that 333 miles takes 6.05 hours and 15.85 gallons, while at 65mph it takes 5.12 hours and 17.07 gallons. That's 0.93 hours less time at a cost of 1.22 gallons more. If gas is $4/gallon, that means I can save less than $5 at a cost of being on the road nearly an hour longer. I don't know about you. but not only do I value my time a lot more than $5/hour, but I find that last hour on the road much harder than the first.

So what we've got is our betters making that choice for me, a choice that may make sense for you, but for me make no economic no sense.

(I'd also like to have seen what his mileage at 45mph would have been. Is 21mph at 55mph an maximum point or just part of a linear trend?)

I'd also like to have seen what his mileage at 45mph would have been. Is 21mph at 55mph an maximum point or just part of a linear trend?

He did address this. Just scroll down (or look again.) It was a pretty comprehensive article.

Rand, you wrote: I have never seen any kind of quantitative analysis that provided a rationale for any particular speed limit (at least one designed to save gas and lives).

I haven't run the numbers yet, but here's a line of thought that seems promising to me:

Gas consumption in an automobile is basically a function of three variables: engine displacement, revolutions per minute, and minutes of operation. In simple terms: a smaller engine burns less gas, a lower RPM setting burns less gas, and less time in operation burns less gas. If all calculations are done using the same car, then engine displacement drops out of the equation, and all you're left with is RPMs and time. OK so far?

Obviously, you get where you're going faster at higher speeds. On the other hand, higher speeds take more RPMs, but the RPMs-vs-speed relationship is not linear. It's a curve of some sort. If it takes X RPMs to go 60mph, and it takes X+Y RPMs to go 65mph, then it will take more than X+2Y RPMs to go 70mph. So increasing speed increases gas burned per unit of time while decreasing transit time per mile. Simple logic then suggests that there's an optimum point somewhere on that curve, a "most economical speed" where you have the best possible balance of gas burned per unit of time vs. distance traveled per unit of time.

I believe, based on my experience with my various cars, that 55mph is well below the typical modern car's most economical speed. My current car, a Civic, seems to do best at somewhere between 60 and 65mph. We would probably gain more in reduced fuel consumption by rigidly enforcing 65mph than by dropping back to the double nickel.

> Gas consumption in an automobile is basically a function of three variables: engine displacement, revolutions per minute, and minutes of operation.

No - it's not. It's also a function of load. If it wasn't, you'd get the same MPG going uphill at speed x that you get going downhill at speed x and that's not true. Moreover, gas consumption is typically expressed in terms of time or distance, that is, value, so it's misleading to include time. (The reason that RPMS stay in there has to do with some complications wrt incomplete cylinder fills and the like.)

> If it takes X RPMs to go 60mph, and it takes X+Y RPMs to go 65mph, then it will take more than X+2Y RPMs to go 70mph.

Again - that's not true. The crankshaft in cars with manual transmissions is effectively (except when skidding) mechanically connected to the road. The only way that the RPMs/MPH change is with gear changes. And, many modern automatic transmissions "lockup" to do the same at speed.

> Gas consumption in an automobile is basically a function of three variables: engine displacement, revolutions per minute, and minutes of operation.

No - it's not. It's also a function of load. If it wasn't, you'd get the same MPG going uphill at speed x that you get going downhill at speed x and that's not true. Moreover, gas consumption is typically expressed in terms of time or distance, that is, value, so it's misleading to include time. (The reason that RPMS stay in there has to do with some complications wrt incomplete cylinder fills and the like.)

> If it takes X RPMs to go 60mph, and it takes X+Y RPMs to go 65mph, then it will take more than X+2Y RPMs to go 70mph.

Again - that's not true. The crankshaft in cars with manual transmissions is effectively (except when skidding) mechanically connected to the road. The only way that the RPMs/MPH change is with gear changes. And, many modern automatic transmissions "lockup" to do the same at speed.

"wolfwalker" is invited to do the relevant experiment with a car that has both a reasonably accurate tachometer and a manual transmission.

Figuring out that a car will use more gas going uphill than downhill at a given speed should be obvious, but that can be tested with a car that has a MPG gauge. The data is available at the engine control access port - one way to get at it is with http://www.scangauge.com/ .

I find the entire idea of a national 55mph limit on speed on US highways amusing - in a grim sort of way. Why? Because fuel consumption is even more influenced by the size (and at higher speeds aerodynamic efficiency) of the car you're driving.

So an American government put a speed limit on the roads that added hours to some Americans' day - while doing nothing at all about the real cause of the problem, which is cheap fuel (encouraging huge, inefficient vehicles). Brilliant - not! (I am defining the problem here as pressure on oil supplies - the problem is now giving money to people who are trying to kill you. Same problem for a different reason.)

Put up automotive fuel by 10% per annum, this to be achieved by taxation, and people will soon get the message and buy smaller cars. Gasoline is now around $8 per US gallon in the UK - we manage.

Incidentally, higher fuel prices might just have another desirable effect; it might just make it more desirable to eat locally (and responsibly, in an environmental sense) produced food. Which would help the health of the nation as well.

Most of you are missing the point. Whether or not the 55mph speed limit actually conserves fuel is not really of all that much interest even to its proponents. What is of interest is the high profile nature of the restriction on otherwise available freedom of action by ordinary individuals. The origical 55MPH speed limit was a highly visible way for the various green fascist organiizations to demonstrate their political muscle. When it was rescinded, they lost face and they want it back. Simple as that.

The environmental movement is not about actual environmental protection to nearly the extent that it, like all other left-wing political projects, is about the acquisition and exercise of power to restrict the choices of others - choices of which the left-wing elite do not approve and, especially, choices usually made by their political enemies, but only rarely by their political friends. In short, the idea is to gratuitously fuck with us because that's what the left is, at the end of the day, pretty much all about. Like Al Queda before the Anbar Awakening, the Green Left pretty much lives to abuse you if you step out of line; "line" being whetever they say it is. These people are relentless and will muscle you whenever they can flog up a plausible rationale and get enabling legislation enacted.

A classic example is mandatory municipal curbside recycling. In pre-recycling times, trash pickup was a genuine service - one could put pretty much any quantity of anything out for pickup on trash day in any kind of container and it would be picked up. Now, in many places, trash pickup has been transformed from a service into a symbol of the power of Green fascists to fuck with the great unwashed.

In my city one can only throw away what will fit into a standard, city-supplied container designed to be snagged by the automated lift fork of a packer truck. No dead TV's, No dead computers, no expired major appliances. The only exception is Christmas trees once a year. If you want to dispose of anything that won't fit in the standard bin, you either have to whack it into small enough pieces so that it will fit, or make other - usually inconvenient and expensive - arrangements.

Where I live, there are three types of such containers and each is separately picked up by a different packer truck at different times on weekly trash day. How exactly the environment is being saved by running three smelly diesel trucks past my address each week instead of one is quite beyond me, even assuming the "recyclables" actually get recycled.

Given that anything that was actually economically sensible to recycle was getting recycled before all this politically correct nonsense was rammed down our throats - especially scrap metal - the main difference is that we are now spending even more tax money to round up and "recycle" things which we would be, overall, better off stuffing in landfills than pretending to reuse. Of course there are now lots of "customers" for the "recyclables" that are, in essence, subsidized marginal industrial concerns that depend entirely upon feedstock sources that are supplied below actual cost by municipal trash collection operations. The subsidy is mainly in the form of all the uncompensated stoop labor squeezed out of ordinary citizens who separate all this stuff and trot it out to the curb once a week. Like ethanol producers, these outfits can be reliably counted upon to vigorously resist any future attempts at economic rationality. I'll leave the question of which party gets the vast majority of the political contributions made by these "industries" as an exercise for the reader.

The key point is that such intrusive inpositions as a 55mph speed limit, draconian anti-smoking laws and curbside recycling are not enacted primarily to save the Earth. They are enacted as demonstrations of political power by people with a seemingly endless need to exert such power over their fellows. These are bad things being done for bad reasons by bad people.

The environmental movement is not about actual environmental protection to nearly the extent that it, like all other left-wing political projects, is about the acquisition and exercise of power to restrict the choices of others - choices of which the left-wing elite do not approve and, especially, choices usually made by their political enemies, but only rarely by their political friends.

I think that Fletcher Christian's comment just above yours is an excellent example.

Andy wrote: "No - it's not. It's also a function of load. "

A matter of semantics. From my POV, load does not directly affect gas consumption. It only does so indirectly, because increased load means the engine has to turn faster (more RPMs) to achieve the same speed.

Me: "If it takes X RPMs to go 60mph, and it takes X+Y RPMs to go 65mph, then it will take more than X+2Y RPMs to go 70mph."

Andy: "Again - that's not true."

Sorry, but empirical data disagrees with you. On a flat dry road in top gear, my car (2001 Civic, automatic) cruises at 50mph at 2000rpm, 65mph at 2500rpm, and 70mph at 27-2800rpm. That's not a linear relationship.

Most people, regardless of what the sign says, tend to drive a speed that is appropriate for a given stretch of road and the present conditions. Most roads in Texas are built to safely traversed at 70-75 mph with many sections of interstate from 80-85. Yet, even when they lifted the federal 55 mph mandates many of the cities still held back a little on the speed limits to insure a continued source of revenue for their law enforcement. Even if the safe speed limits that were indicated by the corp of engineers who built a particular section of road said it was 75 then they would put up a 65 mph sign. Of course, they don't say its all for the police budget instead they say that people tend to drive 10 mph over the post speed limit sign and they just want to keep people safe. However, I know for a fact that there are many sections of twisty farm road that are poorly paved and quite narrow which are barely manageable at 45 mph but have 55 mph signs posted. Guess what, people don't see the 55 mph signs in those parts and instantly start going 65. They go 45 because doing otherwise sends the car into the ditch or bounding over the hedgerow. The person behind the wheel should ultimately decide what is safe and prudent speed to travel.

Law enforcement will say that speed limits and writing tickets is about safety. Well if that were really the case the the speed limit would never be over 45. Nope, they just want their speeding fine money to pay for their new Cadillac Escalade (yes I have seen the Richardson PD rolling in these).

If you ask a coroner they will tell you that the likelihood of dying in a crash goes up exponentially for every mph over 45. Except for the fact that when you look at the actual statistics of fatality crashes across the U.S. the numbers of people that die at speeds greater than 45 mph actually starts to fall instead of rise. The reason being is that vehicles are equipped with much better braking systems then cars of the '60s and '70's. I should know, I had a '66 Plymouth with drum brakes and a single reservoir master cylinder which could give you 4-5 good strong stops in a row before the pedal would start to fade to the floor. Now I have a 2003 350z with a Brembo 4-piston caliper brake system, proportional antilock braking control, and vehicle dynamic stability control. I can go from 0 to 100 mph and back down to 0 in 18 seconds. Yet law makers and law enforcement want to hold us to the worse case standards in vehicle design and bring everybody down to that level. One doesn't need a 350z to appreciate the fact that even the cheesiest of cheap car has made monumental leaps in safety and performance within the last decade. Many of those changes are because of federally mandate design, yet they don't want to let us, the driver fully realize the fruits of those efforts.

From my POV, load does not directly affect gas consumption.

Then you don't understand the meaning of the word "load."

On a flat dry road in top gear, my car (2001 Civic, automatic) cruises at 50mph at 2000rpm, 65mph at 2500rpm, and 70mph at 27-2800rpm. That's not a linear relationship.

Actually, it is pretty close to a linear relationship. 2000/50 = 40. 2500/65 = 38.5. 2800/70 = 40. That's pretty close to linear. The slight degree to which it's not is because it's an automatic, with no direct mechanical connection between wheels and engine.

Sorry, but load is the primary driver of fuel consumption. That's just basic physics. Which do you think will empty your tank faster, to cruise down the highway at 2500 RPM, or to sit in the driveway in neutral at 6000 RPM? If you think the latter, then you really don't understand the basic physics.

Do any of you know about the late Benjamin Oliver Davis, Jr., Air Force General, Ret.? Do the Tuskegee Airmen ring a bell? The P-51 Mustangs with the red-painted tails, the scourge of the Luftwaffe over Italy. The pilots, many of whom made the ultimate sacrifice, but are credited with not losing a bomber they were escorting? The general who did not want his portrait displayed at West Point (the Air Force started as the Army Air Corps) because he was proud of the accomplishments of his men and did not want to be viewed as a racial token?

In case you are interested, President Nixon charged Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. with "doing something" about the oil emergency in 1973, and General Davis came up with the idea of the 55 MPH speed limit. General Davis died 30 years later of Alzheimers, so maybe even then, he had lost his edge to promote what many consider to be a bad idea.

Blame the environmentalists and the social controllers and safety freaks all you want, but at least you now know The Rest of the Story.

Josh Reiter: Richardson, TX? Yeah, well, they all seem to be doing that. I see a LOT of Chargers, and as far as I can tell, Wylie PD has NOTHING but SUVs.

Meanwhile, as I've said before, I've actually measured actual consumption of my own '95 Ford Escort and found that it gets 30-33 MPG between 55 and 75, and the extra speed will save several hours when traveling over a thousand miles (which I don't do all that often, but have done enough to measure it.)

Rand wrote: Which do you think will empty your tank faster, to cruise down the highway at 2500 RPM, or to sit in the driveway in neutral at 6000 RPM? If you think the latter, then you really don't understand the basic physics.

Apparently not, because that claim makes absolutely no sense whatever to me. More than twice as many revolutions per minute, yet it burns less gas per minute? Sorry, I want to see some numbers on that. How much gas is actually burned per engine revolution? Why would that number vary, and by how much, with vehicle speed? Or, for that matter, with vehicle load?

Rand:

I, too, believe in free choice. I also believe in the idea that you should pay, in full, for your own decisions.

Part of the true cost of fuel is environmental degradation (whether or not you believe in AGW, there are always oil spills and the poison gas that passes for air in many cities). Part of the cost is political instability and terrorism - paid for by oil money - and the loss of life and property caused by such. It is possible that neither the first Gulf War, nor 9/11, nor the second Gulf War, would have happened without the oceans of money given to one of the worst dictatorships in the world over the last few decades. Which leads me to another cost; at least part of the titanic defense budget of the USA is attributable to the need for protection of the supply of oil. All of these costs (called external costs by economists, I believe) ought to be attributed to energy use, and they are most decidedly not. Free choice? Sure. But if you make a choice that is bad for everyone else (and yourself, but that's irrelevant) you ought to flaming well pay for it.

One might think of high fuel taxes as a war measure. Would someone who is so keen on the "War on (some) Terror" feel better thinking of it that way?

No other war in history has seen one side actually subsidising the other. The USA is doing just that. And it ought to stop.

More than twice as many revolutions per minute, yet it burns less gas per minute? Sorry, I want to see some numbers on that.

What would be the point? You apparently wouldn't understand them.

How much gas is actually burned per engine revolution? Why would that number vary, and by how much, with vehicle speed? Or, for that matter, with vehicle load?

OK, you apparently are completely ignorant of basic physics. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but you shouldn't be arguing on matters in which you're uneducated.

There is no fixed answer to the question: how much fuel is burned per revolution? It depends on the load. If the engine is just spinning itself, it takes very little fuel to do so, because there is no resistance in the combustion chamber. As the load (resistance to motion of the piston) increases, a bigger explosion is needed to force it down, so you need more fuel. This is completely independent of engine speed.

Think of it this way. Walk up fifty flights of stairs, but do it at the same pace as walking the same distance on level ground. Which activity will make you more tired? Walk quickly with no burden, or pull a heavy cart behind you slowly. Which is harder, and takes more energy?

By your theory, in which fuel consumption correlated only with engine speed, there would be no limit on how fast your car could go, as long as you had a gear for that speed. If you think that you'll use the same gas at 200O RPM, regardless of actual speed, then just set up a gearbox that allows the engine to turn at that rate at 200 MPH. Better yet, gear it down so that the engine only has to turn over at a hundred RPM. You just reduced your fuel consumption by 95%!

It would be nice if the world worked that way, but it doesn't. Moving a car down the highway is work, and the faster you do it the more power you need, which means the more fuel is consumed, regardless of engine speed.

You want numbers? Measure it yourself. Measure how far you have to push the throttle to keep the car going at highway speeds. The throttle determines how much fuel is flowing to the engine. Then sit in your driveway and see how far you have to depress it with the car in neutral to get 5000 RPM. Just a touch in the latter case will do the job, because there's little load on the engine. It's just sipping gas.

> Apparently not, because that claim makes absolutely no sense whatever to me. More than twice as many revolutions per minute, yet it burns less gas per minute? Sorry, I want to see some numbers on that. How much gas is actually burned per engine revolution? Why would that number vary, and by how much, with vehicle speed? Or, for that matter, with vehicle load?

I told wolfwinter where to get a gauge that will tell him how much gas is being used at any moment in time.

Let's restrict the conversation to manual transmissions. Does "wolfwinter" really believe that a car going uphill at 60mph uses exactly the same amount of gas when going down the same hill at 60mph?

Perhaps wolfwinter can take a stab at explaining why each IC engine has an RPM range where the torque is at its maximum, and why the horsepower also reaches a peak.

"wolfwalker" doesn't understand how engines, let alone IC engines, work. At steady rpm, the energy extracted from burning gasoline to turn the motor must equal the energy consumed by the factors that resist said turnage. (If either one is greater, the rpm changes until they are.) Since the resisting factors can change (hills, out of gear, etc) and we can keep the rpms steady, it must be the case that the energy extracted from burning gasoline must change. How does it change at a given rpm? It changes by changing the amount of gas burned.

The amount of gas that goes into the cylinder is not a constant, even at a constant rpm. If the load is only 30hp, only 30hp worth of gas will be consumed, but that can happen at a wide range of rpms.

Fletcher Christian apparently believes that the US is the only country that buys oil from the middle east. He's wrong. The Euro countries get a lot of their oil from the middle east. In fact, the majority of the oil that the US imports comes from elsewhere; Canada and Mexico are the major US suppliers.

In other words, the US is spending its money to defend other people's oil supply. Does he really want us to stop?

However, I will concede that the French and Germans are probably more effective occupiers. They're not any good at building, but they, or at least their parents, are/were great at "discouraging insurgencies".

The Toyota Avalon (my ex-wife has it now) had an in dash
computer that makes it pretty obvious that load, not RPM,
determines fuel usage.

It's unfortunate that congress seems to have the same
lack of physics knowledge.

Andy, oil is fungible. It really doesn't matter where the USA buys its oil; what does matter is that if it buys less then the world price of oil goes down and the Arabs make less money no matter who they sell their oil to.

Also, the less oil America buys the slower it sells its assets on the instalment plan. Which is what you are doing, along with exchanging American capital assets for cheap Chinese junk - but that really is a digression.

What would be the point? You apparently wouldn't understand them.

As expected: abuse rather than answers. I expected better from you, Rand.

Don't know why, but I did.

Rest assured, I won't make that mistake again.

As expected: abuse rather than answers.

We have given you many answers (including an extended one in the comment that you snipped this one little bit out of, without any comment of your own, or thanks). We have tried to explain it to you in as many ways as we can think of. If you still don't get it, what else are we supposed to do? I'd say that, at this point, you're the one who is abusing us, and our time.

> Andy, oil is fungible.

Oil is fungible, but oil suppliers are only fungible because we want them to be. We, meaning the US, could change that. We could make it so that oil produced in the Americas stayed in the Americas.

Note that the fungibility argument doesn't get Europe off the hook - they buy oil and are affected by the middle east prices. And, unlike the US, they actually get an interesting fraction of their oil from there and things will only get worse as the UK and Norway have started to decrease exports.

So, when is Europe going to pay its own way? Heck - when is Europe going to solve any of the world's problems? They keep saying how rich they are, but when money is required, they're all in the toilet. Instead, they do nothing more than complain about what the US does.

Andy:

You're not going to get any argument from me about the excessively small defense budgets of EU nations. I might say just one thing about that; the British are the only ones in Europe, it appears, actually willing to do any fighting. Of course, because of the current and previous British governments having an abiding dislike of spending anything at all on defense, we lose an unnecessarily large number of soldiers doing it. Hey, I didn't vote for them!

The EU has many purposes. It's a way for the French and Germans to rule the rest of Europe by stealth. It's a way to keep the French government in power by subsidising inefficient French farmers, largely with British money. And it's a way for bureaucrats, who would have no hope of ever getting elected, to keep their snouts in the trough.

Similarly, politics as currently practised in the UK is an illustration of some of the worst things about democracy. Quickly stated, the education system in the UK is now so bad that most of the population can't follow the arguments; which means that they are susceptible to being bribed with their own money. Of course, anyone employed by the State would have to be certifiably insane not to vote for the party that wants to keep them in jobs - which is precisely why most of those utterly parasitic jobs were created in the first place.

I don't know, but this one might be original with me; that the economy of Britain (and probably the US as well) would be greatly improved by going down the Government employment roll and firing every third person on it. I doubt that anyone outside the system would notice.

Britain no longer has a choice of government. We used to have a choice of Stalinist Left and mid-right parties. We now have a choice of the old Left (now dressed up in touchy-feely, centre-Left clothes) and a centre party shading towards the Left. There is now no Right wing in British politics that has any chance at all of forming a government - because the manipulations of generations of Leftist "educators" and politicians have succeeded.

Even more simply put; Britain and to a greater extent the rest of Europe can't afford defense because the money is being spent on either paper-shuffling bureaucrats or people whose career is doing nothing at all.

I didn't vote for this shower. Don't blame me.