Barbara Boxer - Thank Goodness for National Poverty!
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Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA, 100%) is of course shepherding the economy-killing energy bill, Cripple and Tax (sorry, I meant Cap and Trade) through the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which she chairs. Her fellow committee member Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT, 80%) — who just recently wrote his own Obamacare bill in the Senate Finance Committee, which he chairs — has decided to write his own energy bill as well; he came out swinging against the Boxer bill… but his objections are all to the specifics; Baucus has no problem with the basic concept of the Obama-Boxer bill:
- Regulate carbon emissions as if they were pollutants (so stop exhaling, you climate traitor!)
- Force industries, farms, utilities, and other businesses to buy “carbon credits” that allow them to pollute the planet — i.e., feed the plants.
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Set a national carbon reduction goal of about 80% by 2050 (!). This is so draconian, it can only be achieved one of two ways: By absolutely crippling American industry to the point where we’d have trouble competing with Albania; or by embarking upon a massive program to build a hundred or more nuclear power plants.
The Democrats have no interest in building a hundred nuclear power plants. Or even one.
- “Fine” businesses and utilities increasingly staggering amounts of money when they’re unable to meet that absurdist goal… thus creating the most massive tax the United States has ever levied — on the evil, unAmerican sin of producing energy.
Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX, 76%) and Kit Bond (R-MO, 75%) conducted a study that found the gasoline tax increase alone would carry a price tag of $3.6 trillion, a cost that would be borne by “families, small businesses, farmers, truckers, & air travelers.” I don’t believe that even includes energy taxes on other forms of fossil fuel besides gasoline, deisel and jet fuel, such as natural gas, ordinary coal, or clean-coal technology.
But all this is prolog; what really caught my eye was this astonishing suggestion from Boxer:
Mrs. Boxer said that Mr. Baucus told her Friday that he could not back the bill in its current form. Still, she expressed hope that recent declines in U.S. emission levels caused by the economic recession of as much as 8 percent since 2005 would make the 2020 target more palatable for Mr. Baucus and other bill critics.
And there you have it, the essential absurdity of Cripple and Tax: A United States senator hopes that the current recession continues plaguing America, because that would reduce emissions (by reducing industrial production, jobs, and GDP) — and “make the 2020 [emissions reduction] target more palatable!”
In other words, we’ll already be so impoverished by the recession, which Barack H. Obama now “owns” via his counter-economic policies that perpetuate it, that we’ll hardly even notice when we become even poorer due to his equally risible energy policy.
At last I understand: It’s not true that the One’s economic plan is failing; it’s succeeding beyond his wildest dreams. We just misunderstand its real goal.
Cross-posted on Hot Air’s rogues’ gallery…
