Jul 5, 2010

Climate Politics: "voter who is down and out and asked to dig a little deeper."

Just some of the depressing truths of our new tax program tilted 'energy bill'
The question, as is usually the case in politics, boils down to the money.

"If there ever was a case where the perfect was the enemy of the good, it's right here," said Sen. Mark R. Warner, D-Va.

"There's tens of billions of dollars waiting for America to send the signal that we're going to be serious about this issue."

"The American people aren't stupid," said Ben Marchi of the conservative anti-tax group Americans for Prosperity. "They understand these decisions, at the end of the day, will affect their pocketbook.

"The fundamental disagreement is whether we can pay for these so-called solutions, and woe to the politician who ignores the constituents who are hurting, the voter who is down and out and asked to dig a little deeper."



Gristy Quotes: President Obama has also listed Spain as the model for his energy policy, noting last year that the Spanish government's investments in green energy "are paying off in good, high-wage jobs – jobs they won't lose to other countries." 

But a study from economics professor Gabriel Calzada of King Juan Carlos University in Spain shows that his country's push for "green jobs" has been a disaster for the economy: Calzada found that each green job created not only costs on average 2.2 jobs in the private sector, but also upward of $800,000 each in government subsidies. Two months ago, Spain's unemployment rate topped 20 percent.

If Spain is the model that President Obama and the left wish to emulate, then America's unemployment rate will also "necessarily skyrocket."

Many other studies have shown, including those from the Brookings Institution and the Congressional Budget Office, that higher energy costs lead directly to fewer American jobs. The CBO adds that the shift toward so-called green technologies, President Obama's biggest selling point for this new cap-and-trade energy tax, would actually reduce economic productivity as each worker in the energy industry would now spend the same amount of time producing less energy.

The European Union sold cap-and-trade to its member countries in 2005 on the basis that it would create jobs and boost their economies. The opposite happened. Since 2005, this policy has cost the EU economy over $7 billion, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office found last year that the EU system did not significantly advance investment in new technologies, which President Obama and his liberal allies in Congress keep pointing to as the source of new jobs that cap-and-trade energy taxes are supposed to deliver.

With that kind of record, what rational policymaker would seek to impose this new energy tax system on his or her own constituents as a way to create net new jobs and net new economic wealth, and not just a massive redistribution of wealth?

Last fall Sen. Kerry tried to sell his cap-and-trade energy tax plan by pointing out that America had effectively reduced its emissions in the past year "because of the downturn in the economy." In order to get to where we need to be, Kerry concluded, we just need to go "another 14 percent."