Conservative Principles Now

The global-warming economics coming out of Washington doesn’t match the global-warming economics of Copenhagen. For instance, according to Senator John Kerry (D-MA) cutting CO2 creates jobs and stimulates the economy. At least that’s what the press release describing his cap-and-tax legislation claims.

But in Copenhagen this view of economics gets turned on its head. In Copenhagen Senator Kerry talks about the need to pay other countries to adopt the CO2-limiting regulations that supposedly create jobs and stimulate an economy.

If the mandates, regulations, and energy taxes needed for carbon caps are so great for the economy, why do we need to promise hundreds of billions of dollars to other countries to get them to adopt the same?

Because the developing world isn’t buying the hype over green stimulus and for good reason—it’s a fiction. Analysis of cap-and-tax proposals by a wide spectrum of analysts (including The Heritage Foundation, the EPA, the Congressional Budget Office, the Energy Information Administration, The Brookings Institution, and the National Black Chamber of Commerce) all show carbon restrictions will reduce national income and reduce employment.

Heritage’s preliminary analysis of the Boxer-Kerry legislation finds national income will drop by over $9 trillion in the first 24 years of the 40-year program and that the legislation will kill over 2 million jobs.

It would be nice if the many American proponents of handing over hundreds of billions of dollars to other countries would come back from Copenhagen with a little bit of the honesty those offers imply—an admission that global warming legislation will be very costly.

The Wall Street Journal draws our attention to a burst of honesty from The New Yorker’s John Cassidy:

The future cost savings that the Administration and its congressional allies are promising to deliver are based on wishful thinking and sleight of hand. Over time, the reform, as proposed, would almost certainly add substantially to the budget deficit, thereby worsening the long-term fiscal crisis that the country faces.
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The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment to help provide health coverage for the vast majority of its citizens. I support this commitment, and I think the federal government’s spending priorities should be altered to make it happen. But let’s not pretend that it isn’t a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won’t.

Many Democratic insiders know all this, or most of it. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration before it (and many other Administrations before that) is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind. At some point in the future, the fiscal consequences of the reform will have to be dealt with in a more meaningful way, but by then the principle of (near) universal coverage will be well established. Even a twenty-first-century Ronald Reagan will have great difficult overturning it.