Cap-and-Trade War

March 30, 2009

From today’s Wall Street Journal editorial page:

One of President Obama’s applause lines is that his climate tax policies will create new green jobs “that can’t be outsourced.” But if that’s true, why is his main energy adviser floating a new carbon tariff on imports? Welcome to the coming cap and trade war.

Click here for the full column.

One Response to “Cap-and-Trade War”

  1. michaelwsmith Says:

    “Cap and trade” is just another assault on American businesses that will drive more manufacturing overseas and decrease employment here in the U.S. Obama is utterly delusional if he thinks this will “create jobs”.

    The economic fallacy of which he is guilty in this case is that of confusing “need” and “demand”. He believes cap and trade will create a “need” for green jobs, i.e. a “need” to build all sorts of alternative power generation technologies — and it might very well.

    But “need” and “demand” are two different things. After WWII, for instance, there was a great “need” for replacement construction in bombed-out Europe, and many economists predicted this “need” would lead to a construction boom. But the Europeans didn’t have billions of extra dollars sitting around to pay for new construction, so no boom occurred.

    So even if the “need” for green jobs is created, the spare money to pay for them doesn’t exist — whatever is spent on creating new “green jobs” will come at the expense of spending that supports other jobs. Any new jobs created will be cancelled by existing jobs that are lost.

    Obama is a fool advised by fools. He is going down in flames — and he’s taking us with him.


Leave a Reply

Please log in using one of these methods to post your comment:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: