Analysis – Page 2 – Dead River Journal

Hi folks:

I copied below a column from tomorrows NYT by Bob Herbert. This is the story I was yelling about in Sonal’s campaign and you guys were wondering if I was nuts and were full of denial respecting the troubles brewing here and on everybody’s mind. My specific charge was limousine liberals.

Reading the stuff you two are batting back and forth I wonder if you two are on the same planet as I live on. The health care legislation is dead. Cap and trade or any variations of carbon restrictions are dead. President Nero fiddled while the economy was burning, hostage as he is to environmental interests as hostile to progress as the republican cabal is to co-operation. The cart was placed before the donkey. You can accomplish nothing until the private economy gets back on its feet. With a robust economy, with unemployment dropping all these other things could be considered rationally. Until then nothing will get done. Continue reading “The Democrats Still Don’t Get It”

A couple of years ago I suggested to Frank Felder, Director of Rutgers’ Center for Energy, Environmental, and Economic Policy (CEEEP), that we co-sponsor a debate on the relative merits of cap-and-trade vs. a carbon tax. The idea went nowhere, because the conventional wisdom, then as now, is that anything with the word “tax” in it is a political nonstarter.

I thought this was shortsighted then, and think it is still short-sighted now. If we fail to discuss what may be better alternatives because they are not politically popular, they will never get the chance to become widely considered, and we will have allowed a self-fulfilling prophecy to dictate our fate. Political acceptability is an important factor in choosing a course of action. But it is not the only one. If a carbon tax (or, as some prefer to call it, a “fee”) is a better approach, then we need to figure out how to make it palatable. And if cap-and-trade will, as others claim, do more harm than good, then we need to consider how to de-legitimize it. Continue reading “Will Cap and Trade Work?”