The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), best known for its pioneering work in the civil rights movement, has joined an increasingly loud chorus calling out proposed “cap-and-trade” legislation as a regressive tax, and a steep one at that. Roy Innis, CORE National Chairman since 1968, writes: The civil rights challenge of our time is to stop extreme environmental policies that drive up the cost of energy and disproportionately hurt low income Americans and the working poor.” As Innis himself notes, the American Gas Association (AGA) has extensively documented the high …
Sometimes judicial activism isn’t about who wins the case. It may be that the Supreme Court got it right today when it ruled that school officials violated the constitutional rights of 13-year-old Savana Redding when they ordered her to shake out her underwear to see if she was hiding more of the prescription pain pills found on a schoolmate. But one thing it didn’t do is provide any kind of guidance for school officials who now face the prospect of liability for violating this new rule… whatever it is. This …
When pressing the House of Representatives on the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill, President Obama remarked, Make no mistake: This is a jobs bill. Insert “killing” between “jobs” and “bill,” and you have yourself an accurate statement. Cap and trade is a jobs-killing bill. According to The Heritage Foundation analysis of the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill, over the 2012-2035 timeline, job losses average over 1.1 million. By 2035, a projected 2.5 million jobs are lost below the baseline – without a cap and trade bill. Particularly hard-hit industries are agriculture, …
Everyone remembers President Obama’s now-infamous comment as a candidate that he thinks everyone is better when we “spread the wealth around.” Of course, we spread plenty of wealth around through the tax code before Obama became President. In 2006, the latest year of available data, the top 20 percent of earners paid over 86 percent of all income taxes. While the bottom 50 percent of earners paid almost no taxes whatsoever. To get a complete picture of government redistribution, however, we need to know who receives the spending in addition …
The auto industry has long been a target of environmental activists. The push to put American consumers in smaller cars has been made quite clear. First, the Obama Administration enacted higher fuel efficiency standards – standards laden with unintended consequences. Now Congress is considering a cap and trade proposal that, by 2035, would raise inflation-adjusted gasoline prices by 58 percent. But that’s not all. The Heritage Foundation’s economic analysis of the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill found that the transportation equipment industry would be one of the hardest hit sectors. …
On September 11, 2008, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, at a mass rally of fanatics, ordered U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela, Patrick Duddy, out of the country within 72 hours. The reason for Duddy’s expulsion was Chávez’s pique with the diplomatic spat between the Bush Administration and the government of Bolivian Evo Morales. The expulsion speech was laced with hate-filled invectives. “Go straight to hell you, Yankees of s—t,” screamed Chávez. The four-letter expletive figured prominently throughout the speech. For a professional diplomat like Ambassador Duddy, those events were certainly traumatic, personally and professionally. …
When it comes to cap and trade, Texas Congressman Gene Green asserted, I’d like to vote for a bill, but I’m not going to vote for one unless I think it’s going to be good for the area I represent.” He went on to say his district had “more chemical plants than I can count.” This is a problem for proponents of cap and trade, because the chemicals industry is one of the most energy-intensive industries in the United States. Since cap and trade artificially drives up the price of …
One of the advantages of The Heritage Foundation’s economic analysis of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill is we can determine out who loses most of all the losers. We’ve detailed the negative impacts cap and trade would have on farmers, manufacturers and construction workers. This time, it’s the wood product industry. Wood products encompasses everything from logging, sawmills and planning mills, manufacturing veneer and plywood, treating wood products, building wood and mobile homes, building wood containers and pallets, etc. Simply put, it’s everything dealing with wood, and Waxman-Markey hits the …
It’s no secret operating machinery uses a lot of energy. What policymakers are trying to keep a secret is how cap and trade will affect the machinery industry, along with other energy intensive industries (farming, construction, manufacturing). Cap and trade is an energy tax in disguise. Knowing that the public won’t accept an energy tax, especially not in a recessionary environment, Members of Congress are trying to push the cap and trade bill, despite the fact that most people think it has to do with regulating Wall Street than tackling …
We continue to highlight particular industries hit hard by the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill. The next three, although technically classified as two categories, are also energy-intensive subsets of the manufacturing sector. The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) classifies the plastics and rubbers products industries as a manufacturing “subsector [that] make[s] goods by processing plastics materials and raw rubber. The core technology employed by establishments in this subsector is that of plastics or rubber product production. Plastics and rubber are combined in the same subsector because plastics are increasingly …
