The American Spectator

Obama and Congressional Democrats are burdening Americans with taxes that will deprive workers of income for substantial portions of their entire working lives.

Requiring people to work without compensation is — you guessed it — slavery. That a half-black American should enslave his fellow citizens as well as their children and grandchildren is an irony too painful to contemplate for long.

A prediction: When Republicans regain the White House and Congress, they will attempt to undo as much of Obama’s buffoonery as possible, Democrats will encourage civil violence. Count on it.
— David Govett
Davis, California

Has anyone else noticed that more and more photographs of Obama show one of his teleprompter screens with him looking straight at it? [As in the photograph used to illustrated Mr. Antle’s piece.]

Subliminal criticizing.

Do you think Obama has had a set of teleprompters installed at his seat at the breakfast table?

(From left teleprompter -> )  “Good morning…” (from right teleprompter ->) “…children” (From left teleprompter ->) “Have you finished…” (from right teleprompter ->) “…your homework yet?”  (Engaging smile).
— A. C. Santore

AT WHAT COST?
Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.’s Cap-and-Trade Socialism :

Bob, brilliant piece. So glad there are people out there like you with a brain, not afraid to call it like you see it, and wade through the subversive, oblique politics.

One important piece that might be worth following up on.

Jason Furman of the National Economic Council spoke to senate staffers in late February and told them that the CBO thinks they can bring in closer to $2 trillion over the next 10 years via their cap and trade program. This far exceeds their publicly stated estimate of $646 billion. 

All serious, credible estimates of the cost of CO2 emissions reduction policy via cap and trade are somewhere between 2-4% of GDP (Lomborg, Nordhaus, Tol, others).  We are a $14 trillion GDP economy.  I’ll trust you to do the math, but the point is that even $2 trillion is likely low.

Most importantly, and not included in your article, is that Furman told the senate staffers and CBO has stated publicly that they intend to use up to 80% of the tax, errr, revenue to fund middle class tax cuts. Therefore, the bulk of this money won’t go to “alternative energy” R&D, won’t go to “green jobs” or similar measures that are targeted at environmental improvement. Nope, this money is just part of the administrations wealth redistribution plans, plain and simple.  That’s a huge, tangible socialist maneuver, and has NOTHING to do with the environment.

You might also chase this thread.  Many credible scientists and environmental economists and statisticians in this area all have calculated what the expected difference in temperature would be in the year 2100 if all Annex I and II nations under Kyoto implemented Kyoto, met their targets, and extended those CO2 reductions into perpetuity.  The calculated difference vs. “business as usual” (IS 92a scenario in the UN IPCC reports, for reference) is between .15 - .20 degrees Celsius, in the year 2100.  At a cost of 2-4% of global GDP, not once, but every year!