Daily Archives: 19 December 2018

France is Taxing

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The Macron administration utterly failed in its cynical effort to raise its taxes on the French working class and poor with its “climate” tax on transportation fuels, so now it’s going to go after American tech companies with carefully targeted taxes.  And that administration is desperate to get going, and it’s going to do it unilaterally.

In early December, Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire said France would give the EU until March to come up with a deal on taxing US internet giants. But ten days later he announced the tax would be introduced on January 1.

Wait, what?

France said at the start of December it would start taxing Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, the big US technology companies known as GAFA, if European Union finance ministers failed to agree on a bloc-wide digital tax next year.

And here’s the game, as confessed by Le Maire.

The digital giants are the ones who have the money.

So he intends to rip off uniquely tax our American companies for the heinous crime of outcompeting his precious French companies and then of being better tax managers than his precious French government.

Our companies need to think very carefully about the value they get from doing business in France compared with the French government’s imposition of wholly artificial costs for the privilege of doing business there.

Thoughts on Climate

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George Melloan had some in a recent Wall Street Journal, and so do I.

Melloan pointed out that the hoi polloi around the world aren’t sold on the climate funding industry’s panicky wailing about atmospheric CO2 and how we have to do something—anything—give money—and how we have to do it Right Damn Now.

Never mind that

Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist Richard Lindzen posited two immense, complex and turbulent fluids—the oceans and the air in the atmosphere—are in constant reaction with each other and the land, causing what we experience as storms and temperature changes. Variations in the sun’s radiation and the rotation of the planet play parts as well. And yet, he said, climate modelers claim that only one tiny component of this enormous churning mass, CO2, controls the planet’s climate.
This borders on “magical thinking,” he said….

And

According to a NASA satellite survey, the Earth has gotten greener, thanks in large part to a rising concentration of that vital plant food CO2. That means we are able not only to feed an expanded population but give the poorest among us a more nutritious diet.

What the climatistas and their climate funding industry also carefully ignore is the so-what of their claims. Say man-caused effects are potentiating the warming of our planet.  Earth has been warming since it coalesced out of the dust cloud—because the sun has been warming since it ignited. We’re currently a few degrees colder than that geologic warming trend line, courtesy of the just concluded Ice Age; warming will only bring us back to “normal.”  When the planet was warmer than that trend line—including no northern ice cap—life was lush.  As Melloan intimated, when the atmosphere contained more CO2—plant food—than today, life was lush.

All that would happen were the climatistas’ worst panic-mongering to come true is that some humans would be inconvenienced and have to move away from the coasts and off some islands.  Nature doesn’t care very much about our convenience.