[A carbon tax is] like making one right turn instead of three left turns. You end up going in the same direction, but without going around in a circle first — Michael Bloomberg
I’m sorry to see Bloomberg withdraw — he was the only candidate to get serious about carbon pricing:
In a highly publicized speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors last November, Bloomberg proclaimed his strong preference for a carbon tax over a carbon cap-and-trade scheme:
[T]he certainty of a pollution fee — coupled with a tax cut for all Americans — is a much better deal. It would be better for the economy, better for taxpayers and — given the experiences so far in Europe — it would be better for the environment… [W]hy not simplify matters … by charging a direct pollution fee? … a direct fee will generate more long-term savings for consumers, and greater carbon reductions for the environment.
Bloomberg made similar remarks favoring carbon taxes over cap-and-trade at the UN Framework Conference on Climate Change in Bali in December.
Mayor Bloomberg is also on the side of the angels by backing congesting pricing:
For carbon tax advocates, the potential silver lining is that Bloomberg might now refocus on gaining city and state legislative approval for his plan to cut traffic and fund transit through a congestion fee to drive into Manhattan.
…”[ethanol] is clearly not sustainable,” says Jerald Schnoor, a professor of engineering at the University of Iowa and co-chairman of an October 2007 National Research Council study for Congress that was critical of ethanol. “Production will have serious impacts in water-stressed regions.”
I’ve been talking about the stress that the liquid pork ethanol subsidies were imposing on water — here are some reports from the war zone…
“Trying to solve problems by using the same old techniques doesn’t solve the problem,” Adamson says. “We’re going to make the area a desert. It’s going to be uninhabitable.” And that would be a high price to pay.
I don’t know what this means, beyond reminding us that temperature is very noisy. Glenn Reynolds linked to the following post at the Daily Tech blog:
…All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here.
Which links to the Anthony Watts site, where you’ll find correlations of all four feeds, such as the following chart:
But economic liberty doesn’t count as liberty because . . . well, because if it did it might stand in the way of policies that some people like. Read the whole thing. — Glenn Reynolds
Glenn is referring to this post by James Lileks
As for the NRA logo, it’s a reminder of the happy days of FDR’s attempts to revive the economy by pouring a bowl of alphabet soup over its face. The NRA, among other things, was intended to prevent the depredations of competition, and “allowed industry heads to collectively set minimum prices,” as this rather scant wikipedia entry notes. (The same page relates the story of the tailor who was arrested for charging 35 cents to press a suit; the NRA rules specified the price at 40 cents. So he was arrested. Consider that the next time someone complains that liberty and civil rights have been eliminated in the last 7 years.)
I strongly recommend the Econtalk interview “Amity Shlaes on the Great Depression“. What FDR did to the U.S. is very different than the romantic recollection.
Technorati Tags: FDR
Foreign editor for The Australian Greg Sheridan argues cogently that McCain is the best, safest pick, then Clinton and last Obama.
…Iraq has faded as an issue because the US strategy there is now working. There is a real chance the US could prevail in Iraq. This is what Clinton was worried about when she earlier hedged her bets on Iraq. But Obama, playing not least for the Hollywood Bush haters, has left little room to manoeuvre as president on Iraq. A sudden US withdrawal from Iraq could be catastrophic for the Middle East, and for US standing generally. Obama is all over the place on foreign policy. He has threatened to bomb Pakistan to kill terrorists (imagine if Bush or McCain had said such a thing) but also to journey to Tehran to fix a grand bargain with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His rhetoric on foreign policy, apart from Iraq, is scattered, which is a sure sign that he’s never given the matter any serious thought.
…In my view the best candidate from Australia’s point of view is McCain. Like his close friend former deputy secretary of state Rich Armitage, McCain has a national security outlook which elevates allies to a central position. He knows Asia very intimately. Like almost all US Vietnam veterans he has close Australian friends and has visited Australia on numerous occasions. He has spoken to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue.
Because he has been such a fierce critic of the way the Bush administration initially mismanaged Iraq, and the war on terror more generally, he can plausibly represent significant brand change from Bush, while still being from the same party. Though he cannot compete with Obama in the celebrity stakes, he has a sincerity which many people internationally might well respond to.
One of the reasons he just may win the presidency is that he will motivate the vast military constituency (including serving personnel, their families, veterans and their families, defence contractors and so on), a critically important cohort that the Republicans were in some danger of losing while the military seemed to be bleeding pointlessly in Iraq. One reason McCain would be good for Australia is that he would stay strong in Iraq. He would not let the Middle East spin out of control.
So why do I think an Obama ascendancy could cause war in the Middle East? It’s a simple calculation. Despite the recently released US National Intelligence Estimate that Iran is not working on nuclear weaponisation, no one seriously doubts that Iran is moving towards nuclear weapons. The NIE confirms it is continuing to pursue uranium enrichment and missile capabilities. Weaponisation is the easiest bit of the process.
Many Israeli leaders say that a nuclear armed Iran represents an existential threat to Israel. If they really believe this, they have no alternative but to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. If they believe McCain will win, they will have faith that the Americans, one way or another, will try to handle the Iranians. If they believe Obama will win, they not only believe he definitely won’t handle Iran effectively, but he might even stop them from doing so.
The same calculations in a way apply to the Bush administration. Almost no one in the Bush administration favoured the troop surge in Iraq except Bush. Yet he went ahead and did it, and it worked.
One of Bush’s greatest criticisms of Bill Clinton is that he didn’t confront problems but kicked them down the road and left them for his successor. If Bush believes Iran will go nuclear, he might have faith that McCain could handle it. He will have absolutely no faith that Obama would handle it.
The odds are against a US strike on Iran under any circumstances, and I would say the odds are even against an Israeli strike. But either or both are much more likely if it looks like Obama will win.
A gold star for McCain — honesty on ethanol subsidies — thanks to Greg Mankiw for the link to David Brooks
In 2000, McCain ran for president and reiterated his longstanding opposition to ethanol subsidies. Though it crippled his chances in Iowa, he argued that ethanol was a wasteful giveaway. A recent study in the journal Science has shown that when you take all impacts into consideration, ethanol consumption increases greenhouse gas emissions compared with regular gasoline. Unlike, say, Barack Obama, McCain still opposes ethanol subsidies.
Off the ethanol topic, Brooks reminds us of McCain’s honesty in his long term fight against special interests;
You wouldn’t know it to look at them, but political consultants are as faddish as anyone else. And the current vogueish advice among the backroom set is: Go after your opponent’s strengths. So in the first volley of what feels like the general election campaign, Barack Obama has attacked John McCain for being too close to lobbyists. His assault is part of this week’s Democratic chorus: McCain isn’t really the anti-special interest reformer he pretends to be. He’s more tainted than his reputation suggests.
Well, anything is worth trying, I suppose, but there is the little problem of his record. McCain has fought one battle after another against lobbyists and special interests. And while I don’t have space to describe all his tussles, or even the lesser ones like his fight with the agricultural lobby against sugar subsidies, I thought that, amidst all these charges, it might be worth noting some of the McCain highlights from the past dozen years.
RTWT — I had forgotten some of these courageous stands.
…Over the course of his career, McCain has tried to do the impossible. He has challenged the winds of the money gale. He has sometimes failed and fallen short. And there have always been critics who cherry-pick his compromises, ignore his larger efforts and accuse him of being a hypocrite.
This is, of course, the gospel of the mediocre man: to ridicule somebody who tries something difficult on the grounds that the effort was not a total success. But any decent person who looks at the McCain record sees that while he has certainly faltered at times, he has also battled concentrated power more doggedly than any other legislator. If this is the record of a candidate with lobbyists on his campaign bus, then every candidate should have lobbyists on the bus.
And here’s the larger point: We’re going to have two extraordinary nominees for president this year. This could be one of the great general election campaigns in American history. The only thing that could ruin it is if the candidates become demagogues and hurl accusations at each other that are an insult to reality and common sense.
Maybe Obama can start this campaign over.
As CONTENTIONS readers know, the American intelligence community, in an NIE released last December, stated that it had “high confidence” that Iran shelved its nuclear weapons program in fall 2003. As Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell testified at the Senate Intelligence Committee this month, weapons design is “the least significant” portion of a nuclear weapons program. The most important is obtaining fissile material. In Iran’s case that would be enriched uranium.
The NIE talked about that issue too. It said that Tehran would probably be able to produce enough uranium for a single bomb sometime “during the 2010-2015 time frame.” Yet not everyone agrees with this view. “New simulations carried out by European Union experts come to an alarming conclusion: Iran could have enough highly enriched uranium to build an atomic bomb by the end of this year,” reports Spiegel Online.
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Michael McConnell raises the point that has been obvious to all observers paying the least bit of attention to Iran’s nuke program. Isn’t it astonishing that media outlets endlessly parrot the words of the unclassified summary of the NIE — without ever thinking about what it means? One has to conclude that the reporters are rather dim bulbs, or that they have a party line to defend.
The answer is that Obama’s tax increases have a bigger effect on your income than a law firm cutting New York salaries by $34,000.
That is, for lawyers making some $280,000 or more before the tax increases become effective. Here’s Ted Frank explaining at AboveTheLaw.com/legal tabloid.
BigLaw lawyers love Obama. If one searches by law firm various databases on-line for campaign contributions, one sees an overwhelming sea of blue, and most of it to Obama.
But how will Obama affect BigLaw wallets? On Above the Law, we regularly see commenters threaten to abandon law firms for falling $5,000/year short of market. I therefore thought it worthwhile to examine the effects of Obama’s tax and spending plans on take-home pay.
We all know that Obama wants to end the Bush tax cuts. That is a 3% bump across the board to the bad old days when associates faced a marginal federal tax rate of 36%.
But the real hidden tax is that Obama plans to end the social-security tax cap. Right now, you may notice, sometime during the summer or early fall, your take-home pay suddenly goes up because they stop deducting FICA. Current law caps social security taxes: in 2008, the cap is at $102,000. Obama proposes to abolish this. That mid-summer bump will be no more: add about several thousand dollars to your annual tax bill.
But social-security taxes are not only on employees. The government also charges 6.2% to employers that you never see on your W-2s. But rest assured the partners see this, and will notice that the expense of keeping an associate has risen several thousand dollars a year when FICA taxes double and triple. Will they swallow that additional expense, or take it out of your bonus?
Ted provides a spreadsheet so you can calculate what these policies will cost you personally.
I rather liked this comment:
I come from a blue collar immigrant family so I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth and worked very hard to get to where I am today. This is exactly why I WON’T be voting for the Democratic nominee for president in Nov. Why exactly should I be funding the rest of the country’s po-dunk citizens who can’t get their act together? The majority of the money that I earn should go into my pocket not some welfare mother with 15 children. Flame away I don’t care. The truth hurts. Deal with it.
On the ADA’s voting records for 2006, the most recent data, Barack Obama scores 19 out of 20 pluses, or 95% — identical to Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, almost making it to Ted Kennedy’s perfect far-left score. John McCain’s 2006 score is 3 of 20 pluses, or 15% — a bit closer to the center.
The average American voter is about 51% on the ADA’s historical scorecard [measured 1995-1999]. The average Democrat is about 85%, and the average Republican about 18%. So on the ADA scale Clinton and Obama are at the left end of the Democratic party; McCain is near the center of the Republican party.
On the AFL-CIO Pro-Labor voting scores, Obama = 96%, Clinton = 93%, McCain = 17% [data through 2006]. We have no data on where the average voter scores on the AFL-CIO scale, but I infer from the simple correlation with the ADA scores that it must be near 50%.
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