Douglas Turner: Energy bill exemplifies Washington elitism
WASHINGTON — A big reason congressional Democrats are so blithely eager to push the 2009 version of President Bill Clinton’s carbon tax is that they never have to pay for gasoline.
Flunkies drive them everywhere in big cars leased at your expense. They get picked up and dropped off at airports, chauffeured to fund-raisers.
On rare times when members drive themselves, they pay for gas out of their generous office accounts. If overdrawn there, they tap their fat campaign treasuries collected by lobbyists.
So senators and House members don’t think about the additional 66 cents a gallon that their climate, or energy bill, or cap-and-trade bill, or whatever you want to call it, will impose on you and me.
In June, it passed the House by two votes. Reps. Brian Higgins, D-Buffalo, and Louise Slaughter, DFairport, voted for it, and Chris Lee, R-Williamsville, and Eric Massa, D-Corning, were against.
This all-devouring Jabba the Hut is now stirring in the Senate, with the ultra-liberal Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., pushing the hardest.
The energy bill is the best example of the campus elitism, the snobbery that infects the once-populist Democratic Party. It imposes a regressive carbon tax on our poorest citizens and on struggling farmers for an unproven theory and a new gimme for Wall Street.
Although it is the last thing the economy and people of upstate New York need, both our Democratic senators will support it. Charles E. Schumer is said to be studying it. He will likely vote for it when it hits the floor.
Freshman Kirsten Gillibrand has emerged as the bill’s strongest supporter in the East, after Kerry. It is all about Al Gore and his book, his Nobel Prize and President Obama, who grabbed the ideology, one may say religion, of man-made global warming for his campaign.
New Yorkers will pay for this intellectual crusade through the exhaust pipe in lost jobs, in higher home heating costs, in bigger federal, state and property taxes and in the price of food.
Everyone, ranging from the liberal Brookings Institution, to the conservative Heritage Foundation to the National Black Chamber of Commerce, predicts the bill will cost millions of jobs. This is net loss after allowing for so-called green jobs.
Everyone, including the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, says it will impose harsh penalties on those least able to afford higher prices and an even tougher job market.
But it will be worth it, backers say, because the bill offers cleaner air and a reduction in carbon emissions that alone cause global warming and the eventual flooding of Martha’s Vineyard.
In blaming every big storm on carbon emissions, supporters look like liberal versions of televangelist Pat Robertson, who said that America’s sins caused Hurricane Katrina.
A difficulty is that two environmental groups, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, say the legislation won’t block pollution.
Gillibrand says she’ll fix things that farmers don’t like in the bill. But the American Farm Bureau denounced it just last Thursday. Her office also said ways will be found to compensate the poor. That “solution” promises more centralized planning, and deficits. What about those caught in the middle?
So who does it help? Wall Street is licking its chops.
The bill sets up a new kind of currency among businesses that emit a lot of carbon emissions to sell to businesses that don’t.
Gillibrand crowed a few days ago that New York’s “financial talent, expertise and institutions are uniquely suited” to benefit from cap-and-trade legislation, adding that “entities like the New York Stock Exchange, J. P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and the new Green Exchange are developing carbon-trading platforms or expanding their environmental trading desks.”
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