Posts Tagged ‘Waxman-Markey’

Our Values Are Askew

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

The House recently passed the Waxman-Markey bill, a first-step toward addressing the problem of global warming, over the vociferous objections of the oil and coal industry who claim that switching to alternative fuels will severely limit economic growth and cost American taxpayers a fortune.

The Congressional Budget Office, however, estimates that the Waxman-Markey Bill will cost only $22 billion a year in 2020, less than 0.1 percent of projected GDP in that year, or about $70 out of the pocket of each person in the country.

However, when it comes to military spending, we have a much different debate. As Dean Baker reports,

Two years ago, the Center for Economic and Policy Research commissioned Global Insight to use its model to project the economic impact of Iraq war levels of military spending. They projected the effect on the economy of a sustained increase in defense spending equal to 1.0 percent of GDP, an amount slightly less than the increase sustained in the years following the start of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. […]

After 20 years, the model predicted, GDP would be reduced by $60 billion, almost three times the cost of  the Waxman-Markey bill.

Global Insight projected that after 20 years of higher defense spending, annual car sales would be down by more than 700,000. Housing starts would be almost 40,000 lower. Exports would be 1.8 percent lower and imports would be 2.7 percent higher, leading to a trade deficit that would be almost $200 billion larger. The model also projected that there would be nearly 700,000 fewer jobs as a result of the higher level of defense spending.

As Baker points out, there are seldom editorials, news stories, speeches from Congress, or TV ads lamenting the cost of Iraq-war levels of military spending.

Apparently, as far as the mainstream media and the political class is concerned, expenses incurred to conduct an unnecessary war are perfectly acceptable; expenses incurred to save the environment are a cause of concern and a reason to put our heads in the sand and ignore climate change.

What explains this differential treatment? Why are military operations justified regardless of cost, but efforts to save the environment unjustified when accompanied by minimal costs?

As a nation, our value system is seriously askew.

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Posted in Domestic Policy, Environmental Issues, Ethics | No Comments »

Saving the World

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Matt Yglesias asks “How much will Americans pay to save the world”. The answer is not much.

He reports that

A recent Washington Post poll asked Americans how they would feel about cap and trade under some different cost scenarios. Turns out that if the monthly cost is $10, 56 percent support cap-and-trade and 42 percent opposed it. But when the cost is $25 per month, sentiment shifts to 44 percent in favor and 54 percent opposed. That’s pretty stingy of the American people.

Stingy indeed. It calls to mind David Hume’s remark that “It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”

Happily, at least the first step in climate change legislation, the Waxman-Markey bill,won’t cost that much. Here is a handy chart from Think Progress that compares GDP with and without cap and trade.

waxman-markey-and-gdp-1

 

But I’m not sure the public is as stingy as Matt Yglesias thinks. Many people remember The Population Bomb, Silent Spring, and other books that predicted environmental disaster, and their predictions didn’t pan out.

That is not because these books didn’t point to a real threat, but because we were able to respond to the threat in ways that enabled us to avoid the worst consequences.

So the public has developed the habit of treating predictions such as the catastrophic effects of climate change with some skepticism.

That is not entirely irrational as long as the skepticism does not become denial, and as long as we start to develop responses to the dire predictions, such as Waxman-Markey.

 

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Posted in Environmental Issues | No Comments »

Why Liberal Legislation is Hard

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

It is obviously too early to tell yet how much of Obama’s legislation he will get through Congress. But on both health care and climate change, there are signs that, by the time the House and Senate are finished with it,  the legislation will be so full of compromises that it will not solve the problems it was intended to solve.

Matt Yglesias has a good summary of why it is difficult to get liberal legislation through Congress:

The fact of the matter is that the Senate is what it is—to wit, an institution with an enormous status quo bias, that’s also biased in favor of conservative areas. On top of that, the entire structure of the US Congress with its bicameralism and multiple overlapping committees is biased toward making it easy for concentrated interests to block reform. Between them, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Chuck Schumer, Kristen Gillibrand, Bill Nelson, Dick Durbin, Roland Burriss, Arlen Specter, Bob Casey, Sherrod Brown, Carl Levin, Amy Klobuchar, Kay Hagan, Bob Menendez, Frank Lautenberg, Mark Warner, Jim Webb, Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and Evan Bayh represent 50 percent of the country’s population. But that only adds up to 22 Senators—you need thirty-eight more to pass a bill.

Meanwhile, the fact of the matter is that in recent years plenty of incumbent Republicans have been brought down by primary challenges from the right and as best I know zero Democrats have been brought down by primary challenges from the left. This has been a huge advantage for the Democrats in terms of winning elections—it’s an important part of the reason Democrats have these majorities. But it also means that when it comes to policymaking, Republicans have a lot of solidarity but Democratic leaders have little leverage over individual members. In other words, nobody thinks that Collin Peterson (D-MN) is going to lose his seat over badly watering down Waxman-Markey and that matters a lot more than airy considerations of capital.

The American presidency is a weird institution. If Barack Obama wants to start a war with North Korea and jeopardize the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, it’s not clear that anyone could stop him. If he wants to let cold-blooded murderers out of prison, it’s completely clear that nobody can stop him. But if he wants to implement the agenda he was elected on just a few months ago, he needs to obtain a supermajority in the United States Senate.

There is no easy answer to this status-quo bias. The only solution is a long-term battle to shift the electorate to the left.

 

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Posted in Politics, Reviving the Left | No Comments »