Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Friday, November 11, 2011

The drums of war and the economy

Commentary By Ron Beasley


It used to be that the drums of war would boost the economy.  When that war would involve the Strait of Hormuz not so much.





Why? This:



"every $1 per barrel rise in oil decreases U.S. GDP by $100 billion per year and every 1 cent increase in gasoline decreases U.S. consumer disposable income by about $600 million per year."



The rumors of an attack on Iran's nuclear installations was enough.



3 comments:

  1. I don't think the math works for the $1 increase per barrel costing $100 billion in economic activity as the US "only" spends ~500 billion dollars per year on oil. A 1% to 3% change in price will not have a 6x to 20x economic divisor.
    A $1 per barrel price change is roughly a $6.5 billion dollar change into or out of a hard to substitute for in the short term commodity field.

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  2. When you put this post up I was looking for something else in the archives and came across this, which seems to go with this topic.
    It Takes a Lot of Petrol to Fight a War

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  3. Well, again, it should not be a concern about the price of oil, but about designing an economy that doesn't use oil, or at least essentially doesn't. The price of oil is not going to literally kill us, but continuing to use it in quantity certainly is, between pollution and pumping too much energy into the advancing entropy of the planet.

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