Liberals Were Very Wrong About Tax Cuts. Again.

By David Harsanyi
https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/03/as-usual-liberals-were-very-wrong-about-tax-cuts/
May 3, 2019



For those of you who survived the Great GOP Tax Cut Massacre, things are finally looking up. The unemployment rate fell to 3.6 percent last month, the lowest level since 1969. We’ve now experienced over a full year of unemployment at 4 percent or lower. The economy beat projections, adding another 263,000 jobs in April. Wages are rising.

It was Larry Summers, Bill Clinton’s former Treasury Secretary and Barack Obama’s White House economic adviser, who warned that tax reform would lead to over 10,000 dead Americans every year in December of 2017. Summers, considered a reasonable moderate by today’s political standards, was just one of the many fearmongers.

The same month, after cautioning that passage of tax cuts would portend “Armageddon,” then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi explained that the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), a reform of corporate tax codes and a wide-ranging relief, was “the worst bill in the history of the United States Congress.” Worse than the Fugitive Slave Act? Worse than the Espionage Act? Worse than congressional approval of the internment of Japanese Americans? That’s a really bad bill.

The tenor of left-wing cable news and punditry was predictably panic-stricken. After asserting that the cuts wouldn’t help create a single job, Bruce Bartlett told MSNBC that tax relief was “really akin to rape.” Kurt Eichenwald tweeted that “America died tonight … Millenials [sic]: move away if you can. USA is over. We killed it.” “I’m a Depression historian,” read the headline on a Washington Post op-ed. “The GOP tax bill is straight out of 1929,” proclaimed the same writer. And so on.

None of this is even getting into the MSM’s straight news coverage, which persistently (and falsely) painted the bill as a tax cut for the wealthy. “One-Third of Middle Class Families Could End up Paying More Under the GOP Tax Plan” noted Money magazine. An Associated Press headline read, “House Passes First Rewrite of Nation’s Tax Laws in Three Decades, Providing Steep Tax Cuts for Businesses, the Wealthy.” “Poor Americans Would Lose Billions Under Senate GOP Tax Bill” reported CNN. Yahoo News ran one piece after the next predicting doom.

The GOP tax cut’s “unstated goal is to leave the poor and vulnerable in America without the support of their government,” ABC News pretend centrist claimed. “It’s not enough to give money to rich people. Apparently, Republicans want to kick the poor and middle class in the face, too,” a columnist at Washington Post noted, leaning hard into two of the stalest canards about tax policy.

Of course, the notion that allowing Americans to keep more of their own money is tantamount to “giving” them something is just transparently specious. Does any liberal really maintain that government owns all your income, and anything you keep is a gift? Tax rates were not handed to us on Mount Sinai, they were cooked up by economists. In truth, you only “give” taxes, you never keep. And the government only spends.

In any event, the idea that the poor or middle class are being shaken down by the cuts was even more of a dishonest claim. As Chris Edwards has pointed out, the TCJA’s largest percentage tax cuts went to the middle class. Even the liberal Tax Policy Center estimated that 65 percent Americans paid less last year (6 percent paid more) due to tax reform. More than 44 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax. (Though corporate taxes are also a tax on consumers, so cuts benefitted nearly everyone.)

That hasn’t stopped former vice president Joe Biden. “There’s a $2 trillion tax cut last year. Did you feel it? Did you get anything from it? Of course not. Of course not. All of it went to folks at the top and corporations,” the presidential hopeful claimed the other day. It’s a fabrication.

Whenever you hear people bellowing about the wealthy benefitting most from across-the-board tax cuts, they always leave out the fact that wealthy pay the vast majority of income taxes: the top 20 percent of income earners paid over 95 percent of individual income taxes in 2017, the top 10 percent paid 81 percent and the top 0.1 percent paid nearly a quarter of all federal income taxes.

Now, I realize it’s unfashionable to mention that Ronald Reagan’s 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act, an across-the-board 25 percent cut in tax rates, helped spur a 40-plus year boom after a decade of stagnation. Since that time, the Left has been dependably wrong about tax relief and deregulation. Because once again, tax relief has spurred economic growth. It’s stimulated higher productivity, and it’s created jobs.

In 2010, Barack Obama warned that a “new normal” had gripped the economy; that businesses would have fewer employees and the job market wouldn’t regain its footing. The same people who supported and presided over the slowest economic recovery in US history—despite having the most room for growth and despite throwing unprecedented amounts of money at the problem—are the nation’s biggest Chicken Littles.

“So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight,” The New York Times’ Paul Krugman told us after the election of Donald Trump. This is the same Krugman who has spent the past few weeks mocking and belittling now-former Fed nominee Stephen Moore, who happened to be mostly right about tax reform.

Supply-side economics isn’t a panacea. We’re racking up debt and continuing spending as if it doesn’t matter. Not all the underlying numbers are positive. There are thousands of economic unknowns that can’t be quantified or computed by economists, which is why the central planners and technocrats are almost always wrong. And yes, when the recession finally comes, as it always does, liberals will once again blame tax cuts and deregulation. But to be this wrong this often deserves recognition.

David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist. He is the author of the book, First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun, From the Revolution to Today. Follow him on Twitter.

America Finally Admits Recycling Doesn’t Work

Jon Miltimore
https://fee.org/articles/america-finally-admits-recycling-doesn-t-work/?fbclid=IwAR3kkJ8Ouh8iiQ0lsGaOWGlE0Yv74ksou10TvYK4qyDwB4pvZUGxsIjrk5c
March 21, 2019

A couple of years ago, after sending my five-year-old daughter off to school, she came home reciting the same cheerful environmental mantra I was taught in elementary school.

“Reduce, reuse, recycle,” she beamed, proud to show off a bit of rote learning.

The moral virtue of recycling is rarely questioned in the United States. It has been ingrained into the American psyche over several decades. On a recent trip to the Caribbean, my friend’s wife exhibited nervous guilt while collecting empty soda, water, and beer bottles destined for the trash since our resort offered no recycling bins.

“I feel terrible throwing these into garbage,” she said, wearing a pained look on her face.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that there was a good chance the bottles she was recycling back in the States were ending up just like the ones on the Caribbean island we were visiting.

Difficult Implementation

As Discover magazine pointed out a decade ago, recycling is tricky business. A 2010 Columbia University study found that just 16.5 percent of the plastic collected by the New York Department of Sanitation was “recyclable.”

“This results in nearly half of the plastics collected being landfilled,” researchers concluded.

Since that time, things have only gotten worse. Over the weekend, The New York Times ran a story detailing how hundreds of cities across the country are abandoning recycling efforts.

Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy. In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. And last month, officials in the central Florida city of Deltona faced the reality that, despite their best efforts to recycle, their curbside program was not working and suspended it. Those are just three of the hundreds of towns and cities across the country that have canceled recycling programs, limited the types of material they accepted or agreed to huge price increases.

One reason for this is that China, perhaps the largest buyer of US recyclables, stopped accepting them in 2018. Other countries, such as Thailand and India, have increased imports, but not in sufficient tonnage to alleviate the mounting costs cities are facing.

“We are in a crisis moment in the recycling movement right now,” Fiona Ma, the treasurer of California, told the Times.

Cost is the key word. Like any activity or service, recycling is an economic activity. The dirty little secret is that the benefits of recycling have been dubious for some time.

“Recycling has been dysfunctional for a long time,” Mitch Hedlund, executive director of Recycle Across America, told The Times.

Has Recycling Always Been An Illusion?

How long? Perhaps from the very beginning. Nearly a quarter century ago, Lawrence Reed wrote about the growing fad of recycling, which state and local governments were pursuing—mostly through mandates, naturally—with a religious-like fervor. There were numerous problems with the approach, he observed.

The fact is that sometimes recycling makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t. In the legislative rush to pass recycling mandates, state and local governments should pause to consider the science and the economics of every proposition. Often, bad ideas are worse than none at all and can produce lasting damage if they are enshrined in law. Simply demanding that something be recycled can be disruptive of markets and it does not guarantee that recycling that makes either economic or environmental sense will even occur.

If only lawmakers had heeded Mr. Reed’s advice, or that of John Tierney, who offered similar guidance in The Times the following year.

Believing that there was no more room in landfills, Americans concluded that recycling was their only option. Their intentions were good and their conclusions seemed plausible. Recycling does sometimes make sense--for some materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill. And since there's no shortage of landfill space (the crisis of 1987 was a false alarm), there's no reason to make recycling a legal or moral imperative.

That’s economics, you say. What about the environment? Well, the environmental benefits of recycling are far from clear. For starters, asPopular Mechanics noted a few years ago, the idea that we don’t have sufficient space to safely store trash is untrue.

According to one calculation, all the garbage produced in the U.S. for the next 1000 years could fit into a landfill 100 yards deep and 35 miles across on each side--not that big (unless you happen to live in the neighborhood). Or put another way, it would take another 20 years to run through the landfills that the U.S. has already built. So the notion that we're running out of landfill space--the original impetus for the recycling boom--turns out to have been a red herring.

Recycling Efforts Backfire and Create Waste Themselves

And then there are the energy and resources that go into recycling. How much water do Americans spend annually rinsing items that end up in a landfill? How much fuel is spent deploying fleets of barges and trucks across highways and oceans, carrying tons of garbage to be processed at facilities that belch their own emissions?

The data on this front is thin, and results on the environmental effectiveness of recycling vary based on the material being recycled. Yet all of this presumes the recyclables are not being cleaned and shipped only to be buried in a landfill, like so much of it is today. This, Mises would say, is planned chaos, the inevitable result of central planners making decisions instead of consumers through free markets.

Most market economists, Reed points out, “by nature, philosophy, and experience” a bunch skeptical of centrally planned schemes that supplant choice, were wise to the dynamics of recycling from the beginning.

As engineer and author Richard Fulmer wrote in 2016,

Recycling resources costs resources. For instance, old newsprint must be collected, transported, and processed. This requires trucks, which must be manufactured and fueled, and recycling plants, which must be constructed and powered.

All this also produces pollution – from the factories that build the trucks and from the fuel burned to power them, and from the factories that produce the components to build and construct the recycling plant and from the fuel burned to power the plant. If companies can make a profit recycling paper, then we can be confident that more resources are saved than are used. However, if recycling is mandated by law, we have no such assurance.

Again, economics is the key.

It’s time to admit the recycling mania is a giant placebo. It makes people feel good, but the idea that it improves the condition of humans or the planet is highly dubious.

It’s taken three decades, but the actions of hundreds of US cities suggest Americans are finally willing to entertain the idea that recycling is not a moral or legal imperative.

RETURN OF THE SOWELL MAN

By Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273075/return-sowell-man-lloyd-billingsley

March 11, 2019

“Even the best things come to an end,” wrote Thomas Sowell in a December, 2016, column headlined “Farewell.” At the age of 86, the great economist had decided to stop writing his column and “spend less time following politics and more time on my photography.” Since then, Sowell has been rather quiet, but current political trends have prompted him to re-emerge.

“Socialism is a wonderful sounding idea,” Sowell recently told Fox Business. “It’s only as a reality that it’s disastrous.” A former Marxist, Sowell began to see the difference between reality and rhetoric. “When you see people starving in Venezuela and fleeing in the neighboring countries and realize that this is a country that once had the world’s largest oil reserves, you realize that that’ve ruined a really good prospect with ideas that sounded good but didn’t turn out well.”

Those who wonder who this guy is might take a cue from NBA great Charles Barkley, who in 2000 quipped that “the best rapper out there is white and the best golfer is black.” As it happens, the best economist is also black, and his name is Thomas Sowell. He dropped out of high school and served as a photographer in the Marines during the Korean War. He was the first in his family to attend college and earned a BA from Harvard, a master’s from Columbia and a PhD from the University of Chicago.

The Hoover Institution scholar has probed the world of ideas in books such as Basic Economics, Economic Facts and Fallacies, and Wealth, Poverty and Politics. He is also the author of The Economics and Politics of Race, Ethnic America, Affirmative Action Around the World, and the 1985 Marxism: Philosophy and Economics. Sowell’s conservative economics and criticism of affirmative action have drawn vicious attacks from the left.

Columnist Carl Rowan compared Sowell to Vidkun Quisling and NAACP general counsel Thomas Atkins called him one of the “house niggers” on the plantation. Lani Guinier, a Clinton nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, even questioned Sowell’s blackness. The economist, who was raised in Harlem, does not generally respond in kind, but he was justified to say “I don’t need some half-white woman from Martha’s Vineyard telling me about being black.” Sowell also kept on writing thoughtful, well-researched books such as the 2013 Intellectuals and Race, more relevant than ever with leftists smearing all rivals as racists.

Sowell shows how supposedly “progressive” intellectuals championed eugenics out of fear of the “inferior” races. For progressive sociologist Edward Ross, black Americans were “several million of an inferior race.” Madison Grant, a progressive activist educated at Yale and Columbia, penned The Passing of the Great Race, which Hitler called his “bible.” Author Jack London, a socialist, held that “the inferior races must undergo destruction, or some humane form of economic slavery is inevitable.”

On the correlation between skin color and intelligence, Sowell quotes a tenth-century Muslim scholar who charged that Europeans grow paler the farther north you go, and that the “farther north the more stupid, gross and brutish they are.”

In the view of the current “race industry,” whites who outperform blacks are simply unjust beneficiaries of past discrimination. Likewise, Asians who outperform blacks and Hispanics are beneficiaries of “privilege.” Sowell shows how diversity dogma generally ignores discrimination against Asians and Jews, high achievers despite centuries of persecution in many countries.

At the same time, the intellectuals of the left “pay no price for being wrong, no matter how wrong, or with what catastrophic consequences for millions of other people.” That dynamic was on display in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, where socialist Bernie Sanders chose to celebrate his honeymoon, and the Soviet client states in Eastern Europe and Cuba, an all-white Stalinist dictatorship. The American left championed them all, and they now keep the faith as Venezuela’s socialist regime starves and oppresses the people, who flee by the millions.

Sowell, who turns 89 this year, knows that socialism is guaranteed to wreck America. He is troubled by the fathomless ignorance of “rising star” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow Democrat socialists. The great economist may be back in the fight, like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, but unlike Victor Laszlo, Sowell is not sure we will win this time.

With willful ignorance, intolerance and bad ideas on the rise, Sowell has “a great fear that, in the long run, we may not make it.”  On the other hand, as he said in his 2016 “Farewell” article, “let us hope that we can learn something from the past to make for a better present and future.”

To that end, everybody should get to know Thomas Sowell, whose books on economics, race and affirmative action, should be part of high-school and college curricula across the nation. If we are going to have a better present and future, as Sowell explained on Fox Business, everybody will have to  “test ideas against facts.” 

California’s Rendezvous With Reality

By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/27/californias-rendezvous-with-reality/

February 27, 2019

One of the elevated sections of the high-speed rail under construction in Fresno, Calif., Dec. 6, 2017.(AP)

Californians brag that their state is the world’s fifth-largest economy. They talk as reverentially of Silicon Valley companies Apple, Facebook and Google as the ancient Greeks did of their Olympian gods.

Hollywood and universities such as Caltech, Stanford and Berkeley are cited as permanent proof of the intellectual, aesthetic and technological dominance of West Coast culture.

Californians also see their progressive, one-party state as a neo-socialist model for a nation moving hard to the left.

But how long will they retain such confidence?

California’s 40 million residents depend on less than 1 percent of the state’s taxpayers to pay nearly half of the state income tax, which for California’s highest tier of earners tops out at the nation’s highest rate of 13.3 percent.

In other words, California cannot afford to lose even a few thousand of its wealthiest individual taxpayers. But a new federal tax law now caps deductions for state and local taxes at $10,000—a radical change that promises to cost many high-earning taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.

If even a few thousand of the state’s 1 percent flee to nearby no-tax states such as Nevada or Texas, California could face a devastating shortfall in annual income.

During the 2011-16 California drought, politicians and experts claimed that global warming had permanently altered the climate, and that snow and rain would become increasingly rare in California. As a result, long-planned low-elevation reservoirs, designed to store water during exceptionally wet years, were considered all but useless and thus were never built.

Then, in 2016 and 2017, California received record snow and rainfall—and the windfall of millions of acre-feet of runoff was mostly let out to sea. Nothing since has been learned.

California has again been experiencing rain and cold that could approach seasonal records. The state has been soaked by some 18 trillion gallons of rain in February alone. With still no effort to expand California’s water-storage capacity, millions of acre-feet of runoff are once again cascading out to sea (and may be sorely missed next year).

The inability to build reservoirs is especially tragic given that the state’s high-speed-rail project has gobbled up more than $5 billion in funds without a single foot of track laid. The total cost soared from an original $40 billion promise to a projected $77 billion. To his credit, newly elected Gov. Gavin Newsom, fearing a budget catastrophe, canceled the statewide project while allowing a few miles of the quarter-built Central Valley “track to nowhere” to be finished.

For years, high-speed rail has drained the state budget of transportation funds that might have easily updated nightmarish stretches of the Central Valley’s Highway 99, or ensured that the nearby ossified Amtrak line became a modern two-track line.

California politicians vie with each other to prove their open-borders bona fides in an effort to appeal to the estimated 27 percent of Californians who were not born in the United States.

But the health, educational and legal costs associated with massive illegal immigration are squeezing the budget. About a third of the California budget goes to the state’s Medicare program, Medi-Cal. Half the state’s births are funded by Medi-Cal, and in nearly a third of those state-funded births, the mother is an undocumented immigrant.

California is facing a perfect storm of homelessness. Its labyrinth of zoning and building regulations discourages low-cost housing. Its generous welfare benefits, non-enforcement of vagrancy and public health laws, and moderate climate draw in the homeless. Nearly one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients live in the state, and nearly one in five live below the poverty line.

The result is that tens of thousands of people live on the streets and sidewalks of the state’s major cities, where primeval diseases such as typhus have reappeared.

California’s progressive government seems clueless how to deal with these issues, given that solutions such as low-cost housing and strict enforcement of health codes are seen as either too expensive or politically incorrect.

In sum, California has no margin for error.

Spiraling entitlements, unwieldy pension costs, money wasted on high-speed rail, inadequate water storage and delivery, and lax immigration policies were formerly tolerable only because about 150,000 Californians paid huge but federally deductible state income taxes.

No more. Californians may have once derided the state’s 1 percent as selfish rich people. Now, they are praying that these heavily burdened taxpayers stay put and are willing to pay far more than what they had paid before.

That is the only way California can continue to spend money on projects that have not led to safe roads, plentiful water, good schools and safe streets.

A California reckoning is on the horizon, and it may not be pretty.

AOC: The Perfect Graduate of Today's Biased Colleges

BY ROGER L. SIMON
https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/aoc-the-perfect-graduate-of-todays-biased-colleges/
February 9, 2019

In the immediate sense, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may be the best thing to happen to the Republican Party since Abraham Lincoln. Her Green New Deal is as much dead in the water as it is brain dead and constitutes a fabulous talking point for the GOP to run on in 2020.

But there is a point of concern — and in the long run a more important one.

AOC represents the natural outgrowth of our extraordinarily biased higher educational system. She is its valedictorian, its Social Justice Summa Cum Laude. Give her the SJWPhD honoris causa and, while you're at it, give the United States of America to China. They won't have to fire a shot.

Think I exaggerate? Consider the level of writing and thinking in her Green Deal in whatever ever-changing iteration, with or without the banning of cow flatulence and air travel, and notwithstanding the guaranteed income for those unwilling to work. (Isn't that already the case with internet trolls — but I digress?) This document, if one can call it that, resembles nothing more than the kind of swill presented to — and highly approved by — professors in today's grievance-obsessed colleges, where Shakespeare and Milton are dismissed or rejected and actual thought (i.e., intellectual reasoning) is ridiculed as manifestations of "white privilege."

Actually, AOC is a nascent (or not-so-nascent) totalitarian. Nevertheless, she has brought along with her almost all of the declared Democratic Party candidates (Gillibrand, Harris, Warren, Booker, Sanders, etc.), a couple of whom, one would hope, might be smart enough to know her ideas are fantastical and so expensive as to bankrupt not just the USA but most of the world along with it. It would cause tremendous suffering, most of all to the poor and working classes who can't afford, or even dare to dream of, Teslas or vacations on Mustique.

These are the people the Democrats claim to be helping. Nevertheless, these candidates say nothing and go along. Either they are cowards or fellow travelers or both. But beneath it all, they are wannabe undergraduate Social Justice Warriors.

That's what I mean about the danger of our educational system. It's not global warming that's the problem, as the Green New Deal would have it (though its actual intention appears to have little to do with the environment and everything to do with promoting socialism). The real problem is our colleges (and earlier education, obviously) that are turning out the likes of AOC on an assembly line of the sort that drove Charlie Chaplin mad in Modern Times.

As I wrote elsewhere, only 20 percent of colleges have even one Republican on the faculty. Imagine the indoctrination that is going on. Imagine how much more attention is paid to Marx (and Marcuse and Gramsci, etc.) than to Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, let alone Aristotle, Aquinas, or even James Madison.

Do you think AOC has read one word of Friedrich Hayek? Do you think that she has even heard of him? What do you think she knows of history in general? We already know how informed she is about the Middle East.

This is a new form of proud Know-Nothingism. We can't even say it will come back to haunt us because it already is doing just that. Reforming our educational system is the most important mission of our time. Presidents come and go. Even media grandees come and go — after a while (too long a while). But education remains, shaping our future. Change it or everyone sitting in Congress will be AOC. (No it doesn't stand for All-Out Communist. But wait long enough and it could.)

Roger L. Simon — co-founder and CEO emeritus of PJ Media — is an award-winning author and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter.

WSJ Columnist Takes Little 'Socialist That Could' Ocasio-Cortez To The Woodshed Over Her Moronic New Green Deal

By Matt Vespa
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2019/02/08/wsj-columnist-takes-little-socialist-that-could-ocasio-cortezs-to-the-woodshed-n2541054?fbclid=IwAR3ptGsf6aExvKWU0VdCYzrzCP4DPZDjBdT4PITGMf-8tRyFar5bkp4K6Vg
February 8, 2019

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), with Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), announces Green New Deal legislation at the Capitol on Thursday.

It’s a fine line. I’m not one to attack Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on everything because that is what the Left does with Trump, but when it comes to policy that could destroy the country, curb freedom, and relegate this nation to something out of a socialist hellhole, then by all means, go at it. 

This week, Ocasio-Cortez, one of the faces of the far left, pitched her New Green Deal, which was rightfully laughed out of the room. It called for a complete transition away from fossil fuels…within a decade, upgrading all buildings in the country, and the slaughter of all cows because their farts produce methane. No, I’m not kidding. Oh, and “economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work.”

Kimberley Strassel

✔@KimStrassel

1) By the end of the Green New Deal resolution (and accompanying fact sheet) I was laughing so hard I nearly cried. If a bunch of GOPers plotted to forge a fake Democratic bill showing how bonkers the party is, they could not have done a better job. It is beautiful. #GreenNewDeal

41.1K

5:57 PM - Feb 7, 2019

Kimberley Strassel

✔@KimStrassel

Replying to @KimStrassel

2) See Ron Bailey for look at sheer number of turbines, solar panels, facilities necessary just for the "renewable electricity" bit. Wud need 500k square km, bigger than California. Also note, govt will pay for these--not private sector. https://reason.com/blog/2019/02/07/green-new-deal-democratic-socialism-by-o …

6,674

5:57 PM - Feb 7, 2019

Kimberley Strassel

✔@KimStrassel

Replying to @KimStrassel

3) Also, AOC would put charging stations "everywhere," upgrade or tear down "every building" in the country (homes and businesses), install high-speed rail across every state, upgrade all our infrastructure. (Maybe once Ds allow permitting reform? LOL. LOL. LOL.)

7,958

5:57 PM - Feb 7, 2019

Kimberley Strassel

✔@KimStrassel

Replying to @KimStrassel

4)Somehow, government-run healthcare, "family sustainable" wages, paid leave, and "affordable" housing are also "required" for a clean economy. I would love to understand this logic. (And imagine what wages will need to be to pay for billion-dollar-per-kilowatt electricity)

6,798

5:57 PM - Feb 7, 2019

Kimberley Strassel

✔@KimStrassel

Replying to @KimStrassel

5) Key part though people is bit in fact sheet that explains why resolution is not immediately banning fossil fuels or demanding zero-emissions across economy. Because "we aren't sure that we'll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast." Note "fully."

6,778

5:57 PM - Feb 7, 2019

Kimberley Strassel

✔@KimStrassel

Replying to @KimStrassel

6) Planes run on fossil fuel. No fossil fuel, no visits to granny. Cows produce methane, why alarmists want to get rid of livestock. She can't do it "fully" in 10 years, but AOC is coming after ur air miles and bacon. This is honesty about how Ds wud micromanage private life.

7,719

5:57 PM - Feb 7, 2019

Kimberley Strassel

✔@KimStrassel

Replying to @KimStrassel

7) And how to pay for mass trillions in cost? Don't worry! Federal Reserve will just "extend credit" And "new public banks can be created to extend credit too." Because, you know, like, money is just paper, and how hard can it be to make some more of the stuff, right? Right?

9,032

5:57 PM - Feb 7, 2019

The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel read the proposal, had a good laugh, and then proceeded to take the little socialist that could” to the woodshed for having a brain dead agenda that, in keeping with Democratic social policy tradition, leaves out the price tag and the taxes that would need to be applied to pay for all of this. We all saw how the same people reacted to when pressed about Medicare for All. They had no answer, though we all had a ballpark figure: some $30+ trillion in the first ten years. 

On Thursday Ms. Ocasio-Cortez unveiled her vaunted Green New Deal, complete with the details of how Democrats plan to reach climate nirvana in a mere 10 years. It came in the form of a resolution, sponsored in the Senate by Massachusetts’ Edward Markey, on which AOC is determined to force a full House vote. That means every Democrat in Washington will get to go on the record in favor of abolishing air travel, outlawing steaks, forcing all American homeowners to retrofit their houses, putting every miner, oil rigger, livestock rancher and gas-station attendant out of a job, and spending trillions and trillions more tax money. Oh, also for government-run health care, which is somehow a prerequisite for a clean economy.

It’s a GOP dream, especially because the media presented her plan with a straight face—as a legitimate proposal from a legitimate leader in the Democratic Party. Republicans are thrilled to treat it that way in the march to 2020, as their set-piece example of what Democrats would do to the economy and average Americans if given control. The Green New Deal encapsulates everything Americans fear from government, all in one bonkers resolution.

It is for starters, a massive plan for the government to take over and micromanage much the economy. Take the central plank, its diktat of producing 100% of U.S. electricity “through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources” by 2030. As Ron Bailey at Reason has noted, a 2015 plan from Stanford envisioning the goal called for the installation of 154,000 offshore wind turbines, 335,000 onshore wind turbines, 75 million residential photovoltaic (solar) systems, 2.75 million commercial solar systems, and 46,000 utility-scale solar facilities. AOC has been clear it will be government building all this, not the private sector.

Buried in the details, the Green New Deal also promises government control of the most fundamental aspects of private life. The fact sheet explains why the resolution doesn’t call for “banning fossil fuels” or for “zero” emissions across the entire economy—at least at first. It’s because “we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast”.

This is an acknowledgment that planes don’t run on anything but fossil fuel. No jet fuel, no trips to see granny. It’s also an acknowledgment that livestock produce methane, which has led climate alarmists to engage in “meatless Mondays.” AOC may not prove able to eradicate “fully” every family Christmas or strip of bacon in a decade, but that’s the goal.

Alas, why I, and I’m sure many others, very much liked President Trump’s declaration that this nation has to remain free, and that “America will never be a socialist country.”