Defending The Indefensible

One of the primary Democrat defenses for the cap-n-tax bill that I've heard in the past day or so is that it'll only cost about as much as a postage stamp per day while creating lots of 'green' jobs.  Iain Murray blows that one away:

Speaking at the White House just now, he said that this was a "jobs bill" that would cost the same as a "postage stamp a day." Now, by my reckoning that means that he has secret plans to put the price of First Class Mail up to $3.40, because according to the best analysis out there, the bill will cost the average family $1241 a year. Moreover, high prices are what the president said he wanted (video evidence here).

As for jobs, look at that Heritage link and particularly Chart I. You'll see that the effect in 2012 is almost 2,000,000 jobs lost. Over a million more are lost in each of 2013 and 2014, before the "green jobs" — those low-paying, temporary construction jobs the greenies rave about — come online. They never quite stop the effect being negative and then, once the brave new economy is in place, they go away and the job losses mount almost exponentially as industry relocates to China and India, who would never be so mind-bogglingly stupid as to impose such limits on themselves.

Murray also points out that this legislation would likely spark a trade war with India and China, and that can't possibly end well for us.

The Democrats are desperately chanting that this is not a tax, but the reality is that it is legislation designed to artificially increase costs on every man, woman, and child in America through regulation.  Sounds like a tax to me...what about you?

And how about those 'green' jobs?  Let's recall how that whole idea worked out for Spain (emphasis mine):

Every "green job" created with government money in Spain over the last eight years came at the cost of 2.2 regular jobs, and only one in 10 of the newly created green jobs became a permanent job, says a new study released this month. The study draws parallels with the green jobs programs of the Obama administration.

President Obama, in fact, has used Spain's green initiative as a blueprint for how the United States should use federal funds to stimulate the economy. Obama's economic stimulus package,which Congress passed in February, allocates billions of dollars to the green jobs industry.

But the author of the study, Dr. Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor at Juan Carlos University in Madrid, said the United States should expect results similar to those in Spain:

"Spain's experience (cited by President Obama as a model) reveals with high confidence, by two different methods, that the U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about 9 jobs lost for every 4 created, to which we have to add those jobs that non-subsidized investments with the same resources would have created," wrote Calzada in his report: Study of the Effects on Employment of Public Aid to Renewable Energy Sources.

It's an unmitigated disaster waiting to happen.

And there will be ramifications at the ballot box:

Legislative haste of the sort exemplified by H.R. 2454 contradicts the advice of our Founders. Smitty, a military man of constitutionalist persuasion who helps me out at my personal blog, was moved today to quote James Madison's famous expression of the rule of law:

It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?

Sheer regard for political self-preservation may produce enough Democratic "no" votes today to stop Waxman-Markey. If not, the repeal of this disastrous legislation should be the first campaign promise of every Republican challenger in 2010.

This is another potential leverage point, especially if your Rep is a Democrat.  It is truly distressing that Obama and the Democrats continue shoving thousands of unread pages of trillion-dollar legislation down the throats of American taxpayers in a blinding fit of hysteria-inducing panic.  Surely there are enough reasonable Democrats in the House who understand this...there may even be some who want to oppose this but need the political cover against their leadership that lots of angry phone calls will give them.

They just conducted a test vote and it passed, but only in a squeaker.  There were around 30 Democrats who opposed it.  The real vote will come sometime today, so get on the phone NOW, send this information to everyone you know, and encourage them to get on the phone, too.  If we value the freedom and prosperity in America, we've got to stop this thing from becoming law, as quickly as possible.

There's my two cents.