California’s Global Warming Policy is Not One to Follow
via: Heritage
The old adage, “As goes California, so goes the nation,” could foreshadow troubling years ahead when it comes to economic prosperity in the United States. And if the California Air Resources Board (CARB) moves forward with implementing costly regulations to reduce carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions, it could serve as a precursor to what the U.S., specifically small businesses and American families, will face under a nationwide cap and trade program.
The Global Warming Solutions Act, also known as AB32, is a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in California to 1990 levels by 2020, and by 80 percent by 2050. Since 85 percent of America’s energy needs come from carbon-emitting fossil fuels, the regulations imposed equate to a massive tax on energy consumption if enacted.
Who suffers the most? According to a new study by Sanjay Varshney, Dean of the College of Business Administration, California State University, Sacramento and Dennis H. Tootelian, Ph.D., Professor of Marketing and Director, Center for Small Business, California State University, Sacramento, small businesses and families do. They found that:
small businesses in California will pay an additional $49,691 as a result of the California Air Resources Board’s implementation of AB 32. Citing severe economic impacts, a coalition of small business organizations called today for the suspension of the regulatory proceedings to implement California’s greenhouse gas program until the report’s findings are analyzed and mitigation measures are added to the state plan.
The report concluded that when the program is fully implemented, the average annual loss in gross state output from small businesses alone would be $182.6 billion, approximately a 10% loss in total gross state output. This will translate into nearly 1.1 million lost jobs in California. Lost labor income is estimated to be $76.8 billion, with nearly $5.8 billion lost in indirect taxes.
The study reveals that when the plan is fully implemented, California families will be facing increased annual costs of $3,857.”
Griselda Barajas, owner of Tex Mex Restaurant in downtown Sacramento, asked, “Californians will be getting less and paying more. How can the small business community survive in a political climate so determined to put us out of business?”
Stanley Young, a spokesman for CARB, dismissed the report because it was not commissioned by the state government and commissioned by the Small Business Roundtable. It’s possible they commissioned the report knowing very well these regulations would severely affect their bottom lines. If AB 32 increased their profit, who’s to say they wouldn’t commission a report supporting the bill? Michael Shaw with the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) asserted, “When Assembly Bill 32 authorized this program in 2006, CARB promised to develop a greenhouse gas plan that would provide benefits to small business, not bankruptcy.”
And because the report did not come from the government and instead two Ph.D. professors, it shouldn’t be taken seriously? Apparently checks and balances of government power aren’t necessary anymore. We’ll have the government commission, sanction and publish every study and tell us whether their policies are good or bad for American citizens.
Maybe CARB should revert back to the critiques of their own economic analysis of the bill. Tom Tanton, senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, elaborates,
CARB released its economic analysis in September, three months after releasing its mix of measures for implementing the legislation. CARB projected the planned policies would increase gross state economic product by $4 billion in 2020, to $2.59 trillion, compared to $2.586 trillion if no emission reductions were undertaken.
Perhaps most interesting is the unanimous condemnation of the board’s economic analysis by its own selected peer reviewers.
All six economists selected by CARB to peer review the analysis found it deeply flawed. Several said the state “handpicked” data to improve the economic case for the proposed plan.”
More here.
In May, California’s unemployment rate hit 11.5 percent—the highest it has been since 1941. We recently learned that unemployment for the nation hit 9.5 percent in June—the highest rate in 26 years. California has the fourth highest foreclosure rate in the country. Of the cities with unemployment rates exceeding 15 percent, nearly half are in California.
As goes California, so goes the nation. And so go the people. Straight to the unemployment line.
Rep. Blackburn: We’ve Tried Gov’t-Run Health Care Already
via: Heritage
Rep. Marsha Blackburn has seen the future of health care in America that the left wants to implement. Blackburn’s home state of Tennessee implemented TennCare, a Medicaid style program in 1994.
The results were predictable.
Employers moved employees onto TennCare because the subsidized public plan appeared to cost less. “As a result of this insurance rates for those who have private coverage were going through the roof,” said Blackburn who spoke at Heritage’s weekly Blogger Briefing today.
Costs rose everywhere, however, not just within the dwindling private sector. “This program started to consume every new dollar that was generated in the state,” said Blackburn. The budget-busting program grew at a 1.5-percent annual rate, with costs skyrocketing from $2.5 billion in 1995 to $8 billion by 2004. “[Supporters] were willing to guarantee that it would save money – and it ends up eating 38% of the state’s budget.”
When costs explode in a public plan there’s only one thing to do: ration health care. We reported on TennCare’s problems back in 2000.
Chronically low reimbursement rates for doctors and hospitals have led to rationed care, which means less care in most cases.
A March 1999 actuarial review by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that managed care organizations reimbursed providers at a rate of about $11 per member per month (about 10 percent) below what would be considered an “actuarially sound” level.
“There is no example that you can point to that shows where having private insurance in competition with the public option brings the costs down. It leads to exploding costs,” said Blackburn.
Heritage has solutions that cut costs and empower individuals. Go here to learn more.
It Can’t Happen Here
via: humanevents
So grave was the crisis in western China that President Hu Jintao canceled a meeting with President Obama, broke off from the G8 summit and flew home.
By official count, 158 are dead, 1,080 injured and a thousand arrested in ethnic violence between Han Chinese and the Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uighurs of Xinjiang. That is the huge oil-rich province that borders Pakistan, Afghanistan and several Central Asian countries that seceded from the Soviet Union.
Uighur sources put the death toll much higher.
The Communist Party chief in Xinjiang has promised to execute those responsible for the killings.
In 1989, fear that what was happening in Eastern Europe might happen in Beijing produced Tiananmen Square. The flooding of Chinese troops into Xinjiang bespeaks a fear that what happened to the Soviet Union could happen to China. Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, the Chinese, as they showed in Tibet, will wage civil war to crush secession.
Already, Beijing has struggled to ensure perpetual possession of Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet — half of the national territory — by moving in millions of Han Chinese, swamping the indigenous peoples, as they did in Manchuria.
The larger issue here is the enduring power of ethnonationalism — the drive of ethnic minorities, embryonic nations, to break free and create their own countries, where their faith, culture and language are predominant. The Uighurs are such a people.
Ethnonationalism caused the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, triggered World War I in Sarajevo, and tore apart the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. Ethnonationalism birthed Ireland, Turkey and Israel.
Ethnonationalism in the 1990s tore apart the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and broke up Czechoslovakia, creating two-dozen nations out of three. Last August, ethnonationalism, with an assist from the Russian Army, relieved Georgia of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Russia has its own ethnic worries in Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, whose Moscow-installed president was nearly blown to pieces two weeks ago and where a Chechen convoy was ambushed last week with 10 soldiers killed.
The ethnonationalism that pulled Ireland out of the United Kingdom in 1921 is pulling Scotland out. It split the Asian subcontinent up into Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Iran, Iraq and Pakistan are all threatened.
Persians are a bare majority against the combined numbers of Azeris, Kurds, Arabs and Baluch. Each of those minorities shares a border with kinfolk — in Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
Turkey has fought for decades against Kurd ethnonationalism.
If one were to wager on new nations, Kurdistan and Baluchistan would be among the favorites. And Pashtun in Pakistan outnumber Pashtun in Afghanistan, though in the latter they are the majority.
In Africa, the savage attacks on the Kikiyu by Luo manifest a resurgent tribalism, as did the horrors of Rwanda, where Tutsi in the hundreds of thousands were massacred by Hutu.
President Clinton may have apologized to the Africans for not sending troops to stop the genocide in Rwanda, but if the America of Obama is into interventionism to protect human rights, Africa in the 21st century should provide us plenty of opportunity.
Evo Morales in Bolivia, Ollanta Humala in Peru and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez are stoking the embers, goading the Indian populations, the indigenous peoples, to take back what the white man took 500 years ago. They have met with no small success.
The contrast between insouciant America and serious China today is instructive. China is protectionist; America free trade. China is nationalist; America globalist. China’s economy is export-driven; America’s base is consumption. China saves; America spends. China uses its foreign exchange to lock up overseas resources; America uses foreign aid for humanitarian assistance to failed states. Behaving like ruthlessly purposeful 19th-century Americans, China grows as America shrinks.
Where Beijing floods its borderlands with Han to reduce indigenous populations to minorities, and stifles religious, ethnic and linguistic diversity, America, declaring, “Diversity is our strength!” invites the whole world to come to America and swamp her own native-born.
Observing the lightning breakup of the Soviet Union, the Chinese take ethnonationalism with deadly seriousness. American’s elite regard it an irrelevancy, an obsession only of the politically retarded.
After all, they tell us, we were never blood-and-soil people, always a propositional nation, a nation of ideas. Our belief in democracy, diversity, and equality define us and make us different from all other nations.
Indeed, we now happily predict the year, 2042, when Americans of European ancestry become a minority in a country whose Founding Fathers declared it set aside for “ourselves and our posterity.”
Without the assent of her people, America is being converted from a Christian country, nine in 10 of whose people traced their roots to Europe as late as the time of JFK, into a multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural Tower of Babel not seen since the late Roman Empire.
The city farthest along the path is Los Angeles, famous worldwide for the number, variety, and size of its ethnic and racial street gangs.
Not to worry. It can’t happen here.
Will Obama Beat the Clock on Health Takeover?
President Barack Obama’s push for a government run health care has proceeded in three separate phases … and we’re just entering the last.
Phase One: Fantasy Football. The President’s push for health reform began in pure fantasy land. The Obama administration’s first budget was based on rosy economic assumptions that no independent reputable economist believed in at the time. Obama’s economic experts assumed the economy would only contract by 1.2% this year. As we pointed out at the time, the economy was already contracting at an annualized rate of over 5%. The Obama budget went on to assume GDP growth at a rate a full percentage higher than the Blue Chip consensus over the next four years. The Obama budget also claimed they could help pay for expanded government run care by implementing the use of health information technology, care coordination, disease management, and “evidence based” medicine. As it has in the past, the Congressional Budget Office refused to entertain Obama’s fantasies and score these proposals as cost savings. That set up the next phase…
Phase Two: Work the Refs. The left did not give up hope the CBO change the rules of the game in their favor. During a Senate Finance Committee hearing, chairman Max Baucus publicly lectured CBO director Doug Elmendorf, claiming Elmendorf had a moral duty to be “creative” and deliver budget estimates favorable enough to win broad support for Obama’s plan. To his credit, Elmendorf stood his ground and told Baucus the CBO would never “adjust our views to make people happy.” The CBO has since released a scoring of the Senate HELP committee bill. In direct contradiction of President Obama’s claims, Elmendorf told the Senate that the Affordable Health Choices Act “would add to the long-term burden of spending to the federal government.”
Phase Three: Beat the Clock. Now that President Obama’s economic forecasts have been exposed as “fantasy”, he is pressing for quick passage of health reform before he is forced to acknowledge reality and issue a new budget forecast next month.
The Obama health care plan will dramatically reorganize almost a sixth of the American economy. Congress should not be rushed into decisions of this magnitude without a full debate. At the bare minimum, Congress should at least take the time to read whatever health care legislation they end up voting on. But under the current Congressional leadership, such suggestions are apparently a punchline.
The Next Cardozo? Let’s Hope Not
via: Heritage
Judge Sonia Sotomayor announced today her admiration for Justice Benjamin Cardozo, who served for 6 years on the Supreme Court after nearly 30 on the New York Court of Appeals. Let’s hope she misspoke, as she has admitted to doing frequently in her speeches and written remarks.
Cardozo, she said, believes that the facts drive the law and the conclusion that the law will apply to that case” and had “great respect” for precedent, the legislative branch, and the Constitution.
Unfortunately, for Cardozo, the facts and the law were often at odds. Cardozo is renowned for the “quick development” of the law of tort and products liability that occurred under his watch in New York State. When a consumer went up against a corporation in Cardozo’s court, there was little doubt in which direction his empathy, as well as the law of the case, would flow.
In MacPherson v. Ford, for example, Cardozo created modern products liability–and the tort crisis that now afflicts us. In Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad, he dramatically expanded the reach of tort liability, and confused generations of law students with flowery language and vague standards. And in a variety of cases, he gave lower courts license to look far beyond the four corners of a written contract to determine its meaning.
His work on the Supreme Court was also problematic. In Steward Machine Co. v. Davis and Helvering v. Davis, for example, he gave the Court’s blessing to Social Security and rendered the 10th Amendment a nullity.
Cardozo was perhaps the leading legal realist, believing that judges should sit as philosopher-kings, determining complex issues of public policy that previously had been the domain of the political branches.
So let’s hope Judge Sotomayor doesn’t intend to be an activist on the Supreme Court and merely, once again, misspoke.
Outside the Beltway: Austin Electricity Consumers Paying More for Renewable Energy
via: Heritage
Our latest edition takes us to Austin, Texas, where consumers are suffering from higher electricity prices stemming from a renewable energy push where consumers can opt in to plans to buy their electricity from renewable energy. The problem is people aren’t buying anymore because it is too expensive. The solution. Spread the costs to all consumers. A recent article in the American-Statesman elaborates:
For the past decade, Austin’s ambition to become the world’s clean-energy capital has been best exemplified by one effort: GreenChoice, a program that sells electricity generated entirely from renewable sources such as wind.
Now the nationally renowned program is struggling to find buyers — the latest allotment is 99 percent unsold after seven months on the market — and Austin Energy is looking for ways to bring down the rising costs.
Austin Energy officials say that times have changed and that the nation’s most successful (by volume of sales) green-energy program, which offers the renewable energy only to those who select it, might no longer be the best way to carry out the city’s goals. It now costs almost three times more than the standard electricity rate.
“It was our intent to use it to stimulate the market for renewables, which it did, and then eventually phase it out,” Roger Duncan, the head of Austin Energy and the chief architect of GreenChoice, said. “It was never intended to go on forever.”
Duncan said part of the solution might just be adding new wind, solar and other renewable-energy projects into the bills of all Austin Energy customers, which could increase rates for everyone. He said there are also numerous other policies being considered but declined to discuss them, saying only that they will be proposed publicly in the near future.”
Government subsidies for renewable energy is only necessary because renewables are too expensive to compete in the market otherwise. In effect, the government is forcing costlier energy options on electric consumers. Since renewables are lavished with substantial tax breaks, a national mandate will cost Americans both as taxpayers and as ratepayers. Clearly, when consumers are given the choice, they are going to opt not to pay for pricier electricity. But unfortunately for consumers in Austin, they may not have a choice as the costs may soon be spread to all consumers.
Moreover, subsidies are poor policies because they distort normal market forces and encourage government dependence. By subsidizing a portion of the actual cost of a non-competitive project, the government is artificially making it cheaper and distorting the allocation of resources by directing capital away from more competitive projects.
Duncan went on to say, “I think it’s time to sit back and look at the philosophy behind GreenChoice.”
The same could be said for the whole green movement.
How Cap and Trade Affects the Health Care Debate
via: Heritage
The Waxman-Markey energy tax plan will have all sorts of unwanted side-effects. As the healthcare debate ramps up, it’s worth noting problems misguided global-warming legislation can generate for medical care.
Though it would be nearly impossible to trace out all the impacts of higher energy costs on medical services, one broad measure is the impact on the costs of medical care. By driving up energy costs, Waxman-Markey will drive up the costs of running hospitals, manufacturing medical equipment, producing drugs, driving ambulances and virtually every other component of our healthcare system.
The Center for Data Analysis, analyzed the economic impact of the Waxman-Markey energy tax legislation using the sophisticated Global Insight macro model. This model allows detailed analysis of the impacts by industry.
So what happens to healthcare? On top of all the other factors that will lead to higher prices down the road, Waxman-Markey will add an additional 11.6 percent to healthcare costs by 2035 (the last year of the analysis). So, though Waxman-Markey aims its economic bombs at global-warming, healthcare will suffer hundreds of billions of dollars in collateral damage each year.
“Equality Requires Effort”
via: Heritage
So said Judge Sotomaytor in response to a question by Sen. Kohl on racial discrimination and diversity.
But what about Chief Justice Roberts’s elegant statement to the contrary on racial relations and equality: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
What “effort” matters, too. Does she mean still more state-sanctioned or -required discrimination? That’s a question to which the Senate must demand a response.
Sotomayor Quote of the Day: Bias
via: Heritage
As described here, each day during the confirmation hearing I will feature an activist case and a troubling quote from Judge Sotomayor. Today’s quote comes from her 2001 speech at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where Judge Sotomayor made the following troubling statement regarding judicial impartiality:
Judge Cedarbaum nevertheless believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law. Although I agree with and attempt to work toward Judge Cedarbaum’s aspiration, I wonder whether achieving that goal is possible in all or even in most cases. And I wonder whether by ignoring our differences as women or men of color we do a disservice both to the law and society. (emphasis added)
Compare her quote with the federal judicial oath of office:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.
Juxtaposing Judge Sotomayor’s statement with the judicial oath raises serious questions as to whether she believes complying with the impartiality requirement of the oath is achievable, or even desirable. She dismisses its promise of impartiality as merely an aspiration, labeling it as contrary to reality and offering, in its place, her own theory of judicial decision-making. The oath, however, is not merely an aspiration or a routine symbolic gesture—it is a requirement for judicial office. If Judge Sotomayor is confirmed as a justice of the Supreme Court, it is of utmost significance that she be able to honestly take and fulfill this oath. Her remarks on this issue should therefore be of primary concern to each senator that questions her during confirmation hearings for a lifetime (or, if you prefer, good behavior) seat on the highest court in the land.
Ricci Shenanigans
via: Heritage
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) is currently questioning Judge Sonia Sotomayor about her Ricci v. DeStefano decision. Yesterday at Bench Memos, Heritage fellow Robert Alt blogged about Sotomayor’s role in the case:
Ed Whelan has rightly referred to Judge Sotomayor’s dismissive procedural treatment of the Ricci case—in which the panel simply affirmed on the basis of the district court opinion in a single paragraph instead of actually issuing a substantive opinion—as “shenanigans.” Stuart Taylor has a must read commentary explaining just how this procedural maneuver very nearly shielded the case from Supreme Court review. Because summary orders are not circulated to all circuit judges in the same way as full opinions, Clinton appointee Judge Cabranes only found out about the Ricci case by reading about it in a local newspaper. Given the importance of the issues, he sought review of the decision by the full (en banc)court. As Taylor notes, Cabranes’s en banc request and blistering dissent from the en banc court’s decision not to hear the case brought Ricci “forcefully” to the Supreme Court’s attention. Were it not for Cabranes’s opinion, it is far more doubtful that the summary disposition in Ricci would have caught the attention of the Court among the 7,000-plus other petitions vying for review.
Taylor also raises questions as to whether the summary treatment by the panel comports with Second Circuit Local Rule 32.1(a), which provides that a panel may dispose of a case “by summary order instead of by opinion” only “in those cases in which decision is unanimous and each judge of the panel believes that no jurisprudential purpose would be served by an opinion (i.e., a ruling having precedential effect).” In light of Judge Cabranes’s dissent from denial of en banc, in which he emphasized that the case raised significant issues never before decided in the Second Circuit, and the Supreme Court’s decision not only to take the case but to reverse the opinion below, it would be hard to say that there was no jurisprudential purpose in even bothering to issue an opinion. Indeed, it is difficult to see the purpose in disposing of the case by summary order, other than to make sure that it didn’t see the light of day.
