6/06/2008

Robert Samuelson gets it right "Cap-and-Tax"

This piece by Samuelson is well worth reading (all his pieces are worth reading):

We'll have to discard the old adage "Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it." It is inoperative in this era of global warming, because the whole point of controlling greenhouse gas emissions is to do something about the weather. This promises to be hard and perhaps futile, but there are good and bad ways of attempting it. One of the bad ways is cap-and-trade. Unfortunately, it's the darling of environmental groups and their political allies.

The chief political virtue of cap-and-trade -- a complex scheme to reduce greenhouse gases -- is its complexity. This allows its environmental supporters to shape public perceptions in essentially deceptive ways. Cap-and-trade would act as a tax, but it's not described as a tax. It would regulate economic activity, but it's promoted as a "free market" mechanism. Finally, it would trigger a tidal wave of influence-peddling, as lobbyists scrambled to exploit the system for different industries and localities. This would undermine whatever abstract advantages the system has. . . .

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1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mr. Samuelson is correct in his analysis, but too kind in the process. The U.S. government has failed, cosistently, to control spending, administer social programs in a fidcucially responsible manner (ie social security and medicare/medicaid), or have a negative budget or reduce the deficit in my lifetime (I'm 38). Now, they want to "tax" my generation more, to allegedly save the planet. There are 30,000 plus degreed scientists that have declared AGW to be without scientific merit. Socialism, as the dominant economic model, has been tried and failed, over and over again, and I can't believe so few in the media are willing to stand up and label this so called cap and trade system for what it really is, the largest socialist program ever attempted in U.S. history, that has abolutely nothing to do with saving the planet and everything to do with massively expanding a bloated, self serving bureaucracy.
Mr. Lott, please keep posting every article you can discouraging changing our capitalist system (what's left of it) in favor of European socialist policies.

6/06/2008 2:16 PM  

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