Posts from June 2009

Tyler at Marginal Revolution channels Matt Yglesias one of the more odious portions of the Waxman-Markey bill recently passed in the House, specifically the threat of tariffs on countries who don’t play along with our unserious climate change game. Even Obama says trade protections are a bad idea in this little game.

For those not scoring along at home, a last minute middle of the night amendment was added to the 1000 odd pages of Waxman-Markey that seeks to impose tariffs on countries who don’t battle global warming emissions. Leaving aside the implications of a 1000 page bill having amendments added to it in the middle of the night on Representatives actually reading the bill and leaving aside the fact that it took the NY Times 17 paragraphs to detail that in an article presumably about exactly that, the very fact that we have Representatives so ignorant of history to think that threatening countries like China, India and Brazil with tariffs in order to bully our beliefs onto them shows us the sad, sad state our legislative process is in. The last time we tried a stunt like that, Smoot-Hawley brought about the Great Depression and we all know how that turned out. This will be no different if we try to impose tariffs on China. We are not in a position of power. If China wants to play that game, they can just stop buying Treasuries, in effect preventing indebted America from getting cheap credit and throwing our economy into a tailspin far worse than what we saw last fall.

This bill is a economic and political disaster thrown upon us by short-sighted superficial politicians aiming to get re-elected in 2010 at the expense of our future. It’s the logical result of a political class who once elected do everything in their power to stay elected which in turn focuses their sightlines on the very near horizon and never on the future and well-being of their constituents or the country. Until we do sensible things like ensure that all our politicians read and understand the legislation they are passing, we’ll keep getting ruled by the incompetent and power hungry. None of the Representatives could have possibly read much less understood this bill given that amendments were being added as late as 3 hours before the vote. It’s a disgrace to our democracy.

Rarely does Congress get to do something so sweeping as what they are doing today. It’s usually destruction through evolution as small little things get introduced over time. But not today. Today, they are voting on the Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade bill, better known as The American Clean Energy and Security Act. This bill will mark a black line in the sand where America went from being a leader in the industrialized world to a second tier country. Think that’s hyperbole? Read up on Waxman-Markey any at all and you’ll start to understand.

From the Investors Business Daily:

The Heritage Foundation projects that by 2035 it would reduce aggregate gross domestic product by $7.4 trillion. In an average year, 844,000 jobs would be destroyed, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by almost 2 million. Consumers would pay through the nose as electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, as President Obama once put it, by 90% adjusted for inflation. Inflation-adjusted gasoline prices would rise 74%, residential natural gas prices by 55% and the average family’s annual energy bill by $1,500.

Hit hardest by all this would be the “95% of working families” Obama keeps mentioning as being protected from increased taxation. They are protected, that is, unless they use energy. Then they’ll be hit by this draconian energy tax.

And what would we get for all this pain? According to an analysis by Chip Knappenberger, administrator of the World Climate Report, the reduction of U.S. CO2 emissions to 83% below 2005 levels by 2050 — the goal of the Waxman-Markey bill — would reduce global temperature in 2050 by a mere 0.05 degree Celsius.

Jim Manzi at The American Scene has been writing about this non-stop and has a post chock evidence detailing how horrible this bill will be for America.

This bill would implement draconian regulation in an effort to cripple America, send wealth overseas and all in exchange for a possible lowering of global temperature 41 years from now of .05 degrees Celsius. It’s a disaster. I urge you to contact your Representative in Congress and ask them to vote against this bill.