George Rebane

Federalization of states is starting to pick up speed (background here).  California is being joined by fourteen other states in the line-up at the Treasury loans window (more here from Reuters).  They too have run out of money to pay for various obligations, and must now start studying the considerable Owner’s Manual of Federal Loans, Dispensations, and Stimuli that comes with every federal dollar.

As ‘Cap n’ Tax’ (HR2454) is rolling through Congress, we see in yesterday’s WSJ –

Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as “deniers.” The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

For more, read ‘The Climate Change Climate Change – The number of skeptics is swelling everywhere.’

[update] The full text of HR2454 can be obtained from here.

Yesterday our Congressman Tom McClintock delivered this speech in House chambers during the HR2454 debate.  Entitled ‘Our Generation’s Smoot-Hawley’, it is short and to the point

Madam Speaker:

When we discuss Herbert Hoover’s mishandling of the recession of 1929, the first thing that economists point to is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that imposed new taxes on over 20,000 imported products.  The Waxman-Markey Bill is our generation’s Smoot-Hawley.  It imposes new taxes on an infinitely larger number of domestic products on a scale that utterly dwarfs Smoot-Hawley.

At least Hoover could argue that Smoot Hawley made domestic products more competitive with imports.  Waxman-Markey disadvantages American products.  When California adopted similar restrictions three years ago, we, too, were promised an explosion of green jobs.  Instead, California’s unemployment rate has skyrocketed to one of the highest in the country.

If this bill becomes law, I believe history guarantees us two things. One: the planet will continue to warm and cool as it has been doing for billions of years. And two: Congress will have just delivered a staggering blow to our nation’s economy just at the moment when it’s the most vulnerable.

In the 26jun09 WSJ we have ‘The Albany-Trenton-Sacramento Disease’ from which –

President Obama has bet the economy on his program to grow the government and finance it with a more progressive tax system. It’s hard to miss the irony that he’s pitching this change in Washington even as the same governance model is imploding in three of the largest American states where it has been dominant for years — California, New Jersey and New York.

Finally, the naïf (confused about small town politics) asked the stately Bonze of Community Conscience, who was sitting in the bliss of self-absorbed meditation, ‘Master, what then is the sound of the One Mouth yapping?’

A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.