Daily Archives: 17 September 2015

The Democrat in the Socialist

Posted on by
Reply

Or is it the other way around? At any rate, here’s the Bernie’s Bill for what he wants his fellow Democrats to help him do once he’s elected President.

His agenda includes an estimated $15 trillion for a government-run health-care program that covers every American….

He wants, also, $1.2 trillion to expand Social Security and its benefit payouts, so as to increase the dependence of Americans on government for our well-being.

He wants $750 billion for tuition-free public schools and easier “refinancing” of student debt. With the cynicism typical of today’s Democrats, he knows full well the tuition won’t be free, it’ll be paid for by the rest of us in higher taxes and greater Federal debt—which is higher taxes tomorrow. What he carefully elides, too, is that his easier “refinancing” amounts to converting student debt to taxpayer-funded grants. Behind our backs.

And on, and on.

The full Bernie’s Bill runs to $18 trillion over the next 10 years, a sum for which he’ll pay over those same 10 years with tax increases of $6.5 trillion and…debt: an additional $11.5 trillion in higher taxes later on.

The bottom line, and the carefully shrunken fine print, of all this is the enormous expansion of the Federal government. This is the Democratic Party. This is the Progressive Party of Herb Croly, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama…and Bernie Sanders. The Party holds that the

average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

We need our betters, these Democrats, these Obama/Clinton/Progressives, to tell us what we must do, what our moral and intellectual responsibilities are. And as Clinton herself put it, they’re going to take things away from us on behalf of their common good.

Tax Pollution

Posted on by
1

That’s what Richard Revesz thinks we should do, instead of subsidizing this or that energy company or industry. In his Wall Street Journal piece, Revesz thinks that “greenhouse gases, smog precursors and other pollutants” should be taxed and all those subsidies done away with.

He’s half right. Subsidies have no place in American economics. To the Democrats who say “green” energy companies need the subsidies in order to grow (quickly or at all), they’ve answered the claim themselves, although they’re loathe to admit it: if a company needs a government subsidy to exist or to grow in our competitive economy, it isn’t ready for our economy. To others who say the oil and gas companies need the subsidies (a relative pittance, anyway, compared to green’s subsidies), the answer also is no they don’t. They can compete.

Revesz would be fully right if we could arrive at an accurate definition of “pollution.” Consider the current en vogue “pollutant,” atmospheric carbon dioxide. Pseudo-climatologists and other “environmentalists” like to fear-monger over CO2 in our air. They carefully ignore the fact that increases in atmospheric CO2 come after planetary warming by some 800-1,300 years. Far from being a pollutant, it’s the ordinary output of respiring life and with those lagging increases it confirms the increasing health of the planet and its burgeoning life.

Until facts stop getting in the way of the money flow, there’s no possibility of accurately defining “pollutant,” and so there’s no reasonable way to tax it.