New Poll: Americans Aren’t Willing to Pay for the ‘Green New Deal’—And It’s Not Even Close

New Poll: Americans Aren’t Willing to Pay for the ‘Green New Deal’—And It’s Not Even Close

Hopefully, this polling will mean that ultra-expensive, big-government approaches to addressing climate change are taken off the table.

Image Credit: Competitive Enterprise Institute

 

Brad Polumbo

News Briefs Climate Change Environment Energy Green New Deal

Americans largely agree that climate change and pollution are real problems. But a new poll reveals that they aren’t interested in shelling out massive amounts from their wallets in pursuit of progressive, big-government “solutions” like the so-called “Green New Deal.” 

After all, the Green New Deal would cost taxpayers up to $93 trillion, a truly astounding sum that comes out to nearly $600,000 per US household. Yet most Americans aren’t even willing to sacrifice $50 a month to mitigate climate change. At least, that’s the finding of newly-released polling from the fiscally-conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).

CEI surveyed a representative sample of 1,200 registered voters on environmental issues, and their findings have a margin of error of 2.83 percent.

A strong majority of respondents said they were somewhat or very concerned about the issue of climate change. However, one of the most interesting follow-up questions was this: “How much of your own money would you be willing to personally spend each month to reduce the impact of climate change?”

The vast majority of voters were only willing to make very minimal financial sacrifices. 

About 35 percent said they wouldn’t be willing to spend anything, with another 15 percent saying they’d only sacrifice $1-$10. Another 6 percent were willing to give up $11-$20, while 5 percent said they’d sacrifice $21-$30. In all, a whopping 75 percent of respondents were not willing to pay more than $50 a month.

One need not extrapolate very far from this data to conclude that essentially zero American households are willing to pay $600,000 a year for a “Green New Deal”-style big-government climate change agenda.

“This poll shows once again that Americans are unwilling to pay for the left’s anti-energy policies,” concluded Myron Ebell, the director of CEI’s Center for Energy and Environment. 

Indeed it does.

And, hopefully, this polling will mean that ultra-expensive, big-government approaches to addressing climate change are taken off the table. From deregulating artificial meat to cutting the red tape blocking emission-free, extremely safe forms of nuclear power, there are plenty of ways to address this issue without digging into Americans’ wallets.

https://fee.org/articles/new-poll-americans-aren-t-willing-to-pay-for-the-green-new-deal-and-it-s-not-even-close/

Why Inflation Matters

 TIMESMAN TAKEN ABACK:

Here’s a piece that could help: Why Inflation Matters.

Inflation also erodes the value of debt. That erosion is great for people with a fixed-rate mortgage, but bad for lenders. So when inflation goes up, lenders charge higher interest rates on everything from bonds and mortgages to car loans. Interest rates rise not only to compensate investors for inflation but also to account for the risks associated with an uncertain inflationary environment. Even the threat of high inflation can cause rates to increase, making investment more expensive and less appealing.

Inflation also imposes costs for consumers: just ask anyone who lived and shopped in the 1970s, when prices quickly outpaced their paychecks. And not everyone experiences inflation the same way. It has become popular to argue that tolerating higher inflation will boost low-skill employment and wages, but the supposed beneficiaries are the same people most hurt by rising prices. Someone on a fixed income, perhaps retired with a pension, will get poorer each year. A low-skill worker with less market power will be less likely to get a raise to keep up with inflation. Low earners are also less likely to have money invested in assets, like stocks, that offer inflation protection; they spend more of their income on goods—oil, food, housing, and health care—that are susceptible to high inflation.

We still don’t know what the latest burst of inflation means. It could be transitory, mostly a result of the end of the pandemic. It could also soon make people under 40 learn why their elders are so worried. In any case, loose Fed policy that courts high inflation won’t be cost-free.

Welcome back, Carter!

69 by Ed Driscoll

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/452168/

A GOVERNMENT INVESTIGATION OF THE PANDEMIC RESPONSE? NO THANKS.

A GOVERNMENT INVESTIGATION OF THE PANDEMIC RESPONSE? NO THANKS.

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN CORONAVIRUS, MEDIA BIAS

The Washington Post doesn’t just want a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol. It also wants a commission to investigate “how the pandemic response was bungled.” (These words appear in the subtitle of the Post’s editorial, paper version.)

The Post’s goals are the same for both commissions: to attack Donald Trump and to divert attention from the failure of the Biden administration to come to grips with illegal immigration, rampant violent crime, China, etc.

I argued that there should be no Jan. 6 commission here. In this post, I’ll argue that there should be no commission to investigate the pandemic response.

The Post’s call for a commission stems from its premise that the pandemic response was “bungled.” It wasn’t — not in any sense that would justify the government investigation the Post contemplates.

Last year, the world was confronted by a deadly virus it didn’t understand. A friend compared the coronavirus to an alien force with superior technology. Until we developed counter-technology — a vaccine — there was no effective way to combat the virus.

The U.S. did no worse than should have been expected to limit deaths from the virus. Our per capita death rate is similar to nearly all the countries it make the most sense to compare us with. We were all shooting in the dark.

This doesn’t mean there are no questions worth probing. There are questions any time a catastrophic event occurs.

One question is whether it made sense to keep children out of classrooms once we got a handle on how the virus affects kids. Hint: It did not.

Another question is whether the lockdowns imposed should have been as severe and long-lasting as they were. This question requires, among other things, an assessment of the economic and psychological damage caused by lockdowns (as opposed to the economic and psychological damage that would have resulted from the pandemic alone and from deaths that may have been prevented by lockdowns). The question may not be answerable with anything close to certainty until we have a better sense of how long-lasting the adverse effects of lockdowns will be and how resilient Americans are these days, in general.

The Post’s editorial does not mention these issues as possible matters to investigate. That’s one giveaway of the Post’s intent.

Perhaps the most interesting question is the origin of the virus. Did it originate in the “wet markets” in Wuhan or in a Chinese lab there? But as the Post acknowledges, China is determined to prevent a meaningful investigation of that issue.

So there are questions. But the existence of questions doesn’t mean we need a government commission to investigate them. The questions will be studied ad nauseum by researchers and analysts in and out of government. If we’re lucky, some of the researchers and analysts might even be relatively objective.

The government commission the Post desires won’t be. The Post wants the investigation to be “chartered” by Biden or by the Democratic Congress.

The interests of both are clear. They want to make Donald Trump look as bad as they can, to do the same to Republican governors who ended lockdowns relatively early (or never imposed them), and to make Democratic governors like Gretchen Whitmer look good. They want a brief ready in case the Republicans nominate Trump, Kristy Noem, or Ron DeSantis in 2024.

Let them prepare their own brief — one that doesn’t come with an undeserved government seal of approval.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/05/a-government-investigation-of-the-pandemic-response-no-thanks.php

WHY THE SUPREME COURT SHOULD HEAR THE HARVARD CASE

WHY THE SUPREME COURT SHOULD HEAR THE HARVARD CASE

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN RACE, RACIAL PREFERENCES, SUPREME COURT

We are writing with unfortunate frequency about the spread of the racial spoils system in the U.S. That system first took hold in college admissions policies. The Supreme Court could have stopped it in its tracks, but declined early on to do so. Since then, it has continued to tolerate blatant racial discrimination against Whites and Asian-Americans.

Now, the Supreme Court has the opportunity to address the problem it helped create. The Court can do so if it agrees to hear the case filed by a group of Asian-American students against Harvard for its racially discriminatory admissions policy. (That case is Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.)

The editors of the Wall Street Journal urge the Court to hear the case. They point out, as we have, that:

In America today the principle that drove the civil rights movement — equality for all — is fast giving way to the view that race must be a dominant factor in every decision from college admission to eligibility for federal farm programs to the make up of corporate boards to who get priority for a Covid vaccine.

The editors acknowledge that the Court has already agreed to hear cases on the hot-button issues of abortion and guns. It might be tempted to conclude that this is enough white-hot controversy for one term.

However, the editors submit that taking the Harvard case is arguably even more important than deciding the gun and the abortion cases. They warn:

If the Justices abdicate on the race question now, the virus of racial separatism will spread even more deeply into American life. In a few years it may be much harder to eradicate without considerable social harm. The U.S. would slide toward the racially divisive politics of countries like Malaysia, where government bias is ingrained in law to unhappy effect.

This, indeed, is where we are headed — and fast. Let’s hope that the Supreme Court steps up and stops the rot.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/05/why-the-supreme-court-should-hear-the-harvard-case.php

THE RHYME OF LEFTIST HISTORY

THE RHYME OF LEFTIST HISTORY

 BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN HISTORY, LEFTISM, LIBERALS

The current scene keeps bringing back to mind the old saying attributed (incorrectly) to Mark Twain: history doesn’t repeat itself—but it rhymes. Right now the country seems to be repeating the cycle of the 1960s, when liberals in power gave us reckless spending that stoked inflation, social engineering like “model cities” and busing, degraded law enforcement with soft-on-crime policies contributing to a massive crime wave, and race riots that elicited ritual confessions of liberal guilt (i.e., the Kerner Commission report of 1968). By the time the cycle was done in the early 1970s, Richard Nixon piled up a 49-state landslide—a repudiation of liberalism that carried through Reagan’s landslides in the 1980s.

For example, the Biden’s Administration’s claim that “domestic violent extremism” (meaning conservatives) is the nation’s most serious security threat is a near-exact copy of the Kennedy Administration’s big public push to label “right-wing extremism” (they had in mind the John Birch Society) as a serious threat to the nation. This was no mere talking point. The Kennedy Administration contemplated schemes of censorship through Post Office regulations, had the FCC scowl at radio stations that carried conservative programming when their broadcast licenses were up for renewal, and had the Justice Department threaten anti-trust investigations of major companies that resisted JFK’s policies, such as General Electric. (It has long been rumored that GE canceled Ronald Reagan’s contract as host of GE theater in 1962 because of pressure from the Kennedy Justice Department, though there is no documentary evidence.) And let’s not forget how the left tried to put the blame for JFK’s assassination on a conservative “climate of hate” rather than on the Communist assassin himself.

The point is, government attacks on conservatives and conservative media today are hardly new.

Liberals were slow to perceive the rising backlash to their misgovernment as the 1960s wasted away their long-run political dominance. So it is fun to observe today’s New York Times:

A Year After George Floyd: Pressure to Add Police Amidst Rising Crime

Now, a year after Mr. Floyd’s death, Los Angeles and other American cities face a surge in violent crime amid pandemic despair and a flood of new guns onto the streets. The surge is prompting cities whose leaders embraced the values of the movement last year to reassess how far they are willing to go to reimagine public safety and divert money away from the police and toward social services. . .

A year after streets echoed with calls to “defund” law enforcement and city leaders embraced the message by agreeing to take $150 million away from the Los Angeles Police Department, or about 8 percent of the department’s budget, the city last week agreed to increase the police budget to allow the department to hire about 250 officers. The increase essentially restores the cuts that followed the protests. . .

It is a trend mirrored across the country, where crime is skyrocketing in many big cities, putting liberal leaders under pressure to balance the demands of activists against the concerns of some residents about rising violence. In New York, where homicides grew by nearly 45 percent last year, crime is dominating the discussion in the race for mayor.

Good to see the Fox Butterfield Effect is still alive and well at the Times. The Times wants to blame it on “more guns,” without considering that gun purchases might be soaring because liberals have given people reason to doubt that the police will protect them from crime.

Meanwhile, there are signs that the public is already reversing course in its esteem for Black Lives Matter, which includes second thoughts even among blacks (also reported by the New York Times) and especially hispanics:

The Times story adds:

The deterioration in support is noteworthy because we do not merely observe a return to pre-Floyd opinion levels. Rather, since last summer, Republicans and white people have actually become less supportive of Black Lives Matter than they were before the death of George Floyd — a trend that seems unlikely to reverse anytime soon.

Gee, I wonder why that might be? Maybe the categorical demonization of all white people and coerced confessions of collective white guilt might have something to do with it?

A few of the smarter progressives and unbiased journalists understand this. Take Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress:

From certain quarters the immediate interpretation will be that America is full of stone cold racists who refuse to Face The Truth about our white supremacist society, hence the failure of BLM popularity to hold up. But that leaves out other very salient developments such as the association of some BLM protests with violence and looting, the linkage of BLM with strenuously “anti-racist” ideology and above all the promulgation of the idea and slogan “defund the police” which is still embraced by many activists and supporters. It seems highly plausible that the much of the good will toward BLM generated by opposing flagrant acts of police violence has been squandered by these highly unpopular acts and ideas.

Movements either get broader and smarter over time or they lose momentum. BLM is unlikely to be an exception to this rule.

Last week Wall Street Journal reporter Gerald Seib observed:

Conversations with a variety of Democrats and public-opinion watchers suggest that Democrats are quite comfortable with the size and scope of their economic agenda, which they believe matches the public’s thirst for a new and vigorous start after the coronavirus pandemic. They are more worried on the cultural front, where their progressive wing is pushing the party to places on social issues where the loyalty of moderate voters will be strained.

Here’s the fun paragraph:

“I think we’ve won the argument with many Americans that we need more investment in the American people,” Rep. Ro Khanna of California, a leading member of the House Progressive Caucus, said in an interview at The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything Festival last week. “Where the Democrats, candidly, I think, get into trouble is conveying that we believe in markets, conveying that we believe the American experiment is an extraordinary one, that we love our founding and our Constitution and that we have an aspirational vision of American patriotism, conveying that we do believe in borders (and) conveying that we believe in law enforcement.”

One reason Democrats “get into trouble” conveying their support for “the American experiment” is that a lot of Democrats don’t support it, not to mention the New York Times and college campuses where the founding (and especially the founders) and the Constitution are held in complete contempt. This statement reminds me of Irving Kristol’s comment way back in the 1950s about Joe McCarthy: “For there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: He, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesman for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.”

Seib concluded:

Cries on the left to defund the police, which in some cases have ratcheted into seeming calls to eliminate police departments; a “cancel culture” environment in which some progressives seek to bully into silence those who disagree with them; and dismissal of middle America’s concerns about a surge of migrants crossing the southern border—all are troublesome with moderate and independent voters.

Let’s vote.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/05/the-rhyme-of-leftist-history.php

BIDEN FUELS RACIAL DIVISIONS WITH BLACKS-ONLY DEBT RELIEF FOR FARMERS

BIDEN FUELS RACIAL DIVISIONS WITH BLACKS-ONLY DEBT RELIEF FOR FARMERS

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN RACIAL PREFERENCES

The dishing out of benefits based on skin color is becoming a huge issue in America. A practice that once seemed mostly confined to admission to college now extends as far as access to interviews with the mayor of Chicago.

And, most significantly, it extends to the receipt of dollars from the federal government.

Blacks say they are tired of being taken for granted by Democrat politicians. So Democrats are determined to reward them with lucre. Key Dems may also have internalized the noxious teachings of critical race theory.

Pandemic relief provides the occasion for the current round of doling out dollars to Blacks. But one senses that any excuse will do.

The New York Times has just run a story about one group of Blacks now benefiting from government largesse — farmers. The piece centers around a farmer in Missouri named Shane Lewis. He stands to have a $200,000 debt written off, pursuant to a $4 billion federal program, because he is Black.

The Times doesn’t put it this way. It says the debt relief program was “created by Democrats to help farmers who have endured generations of racial discrimination.”

But the Times’ story refutes this claim. The farmer in question began farming ten years ago. There is nothing in the story that suggests his family farmed — all indications are to the contrary — and thus no basis for concluding that he suffered from generations of discrimination against black farmers. Nor does Biden’s program appear to require evidence of that.

Past societal discrimination has not been upheld as a constitutional justification for the government awarding benefits to members of one race in preference to members of other groups. Actual victims of past racial discrimination can, of course, seek relief. And in the case of black farmers, they have.

The Obama administration agreed to a $1.25 billion settlement for a class of them. Perhaps there is a historical basis in fact for a settlement of that magnitude. There is no historical basis for forgiving the debts of farmers like Mr. Lewis.

He complains that he’s had trouble getting credit. Banks scoffed at his plans, he says. But nothing in the Times’ article indicates that race had anything to do with this. Plenty of entrepreneurs of all races have grievances against loan officers at banks.

White farmers in Lewis’ neck of the woods aren’t pleased that the Biden administration’s debt relief is available only to Blacks. In fact, the title of the Times’ article is, “‘You Can Feel the Tension’: A Windfall for Minority Farmers Divides Rural America.”

Of course it does. Of course there’s tension.

Nor is it likely that resentment against handing out money to Blacks because of their skin color exists only in “rural America.” The Times notes that the area where Lewis lives consists overwhelmingly of Trump supporters. But distaste for racial spoils systems extends far and wide.

Liberal California just rejected racial preferences by that state. And this was against a backdrop of the issue of racial preferences in things like college admission. It’s questionable that California voters were even thinking about the more offensive practices of racially-based cash handouts and debt relief.

Voters throughout America probably will soon have to think about these practices. Democrats aren’t likely to be happy about what they conclude.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/05/biden-fuels-racial-divisions-with-blacks-only-debt-relief-for-farmers.php

Obama Reveals What He Really Thinks About the TEA Party (Worth the longer read for its historical revelations on BO's animus toward us)

Obama Reveals What He Really Thinks About the TEA Party

BY TYLER O'NEIL  

(AP Photo/John Locher)

In 2017, former President Barack Obama resorted to profanity to let his former staffers know what he really thought about the TEA party movement. The movement rose up to challenge Obama’s increase in the size and scope of the federal government, especially his health care overhaul known as “Obamacare.” Democrats have long demonized the TEA party as racist, and Obama echoed this baseless charge.

According to Edward-Isaac Dovere, a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the forthcoming book Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Donald Trump, Obama called the TEA party “racist motherf**kers.” Business Insider’s Sonam Sheth obtained an advance copy and reported the remarks.

After the Obama Foundation’s holiday party in Chicago in 2017, the former president and his staff chatted about the latest hurdles the Democratic Party faced. Staffers “got him going by asking what it was like, after coming in working with Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein and other big bankers, to be made out as an anticapitalist by the Republicans,” Dovere writes in the book, referring to the chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase and former chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, respectively.

Recommended: ‘Racist, Sexist Pig,’ ‘Corrupt Motherf**ker’: Here’s What Obama Said About Trump in Secret

“Obama gave a long, reasoned answer,” Dovere writes. “As for the Tea Party, Obama said, well, they were ‘racist motherf—ers.'”

The former president also showed immense disdain for then-President Donald Trump, Dovere writes.

“He’s a madman,” Obama told “big donors looking to squeeze a reaction out of him in exchange for the big checks they were writing to his foundation,” Dovere writes.

“More often: ‘I didn’t think it would be this bad.’ Sometimes: ‘I didn’t think we’d have a racist, sexist pig.’ Depending on the outrage of the day … a passing ‘that f**king lunatic’ with a shake of his head,” Dovere adds.

Obama condemned Trump as “that corrupt motherf**ker” after news broke that Trump was speaking to foreign leaders without any aides on the calls.

Yet Obama’s claim that the TEA party was racist echoed a longstanding — and baseless — critique from the Left. In 2019, The New York Times published a thoughtful retrospective about the movement, and leftists faulted the Times for leaving out any accusations of racism. The Times duly relented. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) claimed that “the grounding of the tea party was xenophobia, the underpinnings of white supremacy.”

I witnessed the TEA party in action, and I helped conservative TEA party Republicans challenge establishment Republicans, so I can tell you the movement was not about racism.

The TEA party movement was about holding Washington, D.C., accountable to the people. It was about holding establishment Republicans accountable for decreasing the size and scope of government. It was about fiscal responsibility and reining in the monstrous federal deficit and federal debt. Some of us still believe in these principles, and were sad to see President Trump fail to shrink the deficit, even as he cut regulations and fulfilled other conservative promises.

As the Federalist’s David Harsanyi rightly pointed out, Texas is TEA party activists were just as angry with the wealthy white leader of Congress — Nancy Pelosi — as they were at the black president, Barack Obama. They were also angry at the white former president, George W. Bush, for selling out on fiscal conservatism. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) accused a TEA party crowd of calling him ugly names and spitting on him while he walked with Pelosi. There were cameras that day, and no one was able to find evidence to back up his claim.

I raised money for tea party candidates in 2014, hoping those small government candidates would beat the Republican establishment sell-outs who kept the deficit high and refused to stand up for the Originalist plain meaning of the Constitution. Every single one of the Republicans we hoped to unseat was white.

The TEA party movement helped energize Republicans, leading to victories in the House and Senate, and ultimately the White House. Many of the promises of that movement remained unfulfilled under Trump — even Obamacare stands today, and the national debt has ballooned. True change in Washington is hard, and while Trump did fulfilled many important promises — originalist Supreme Court justices, cutting regulations, defending the sanctity of life, reversing the Obama administration’s rejection of science on transgender issues — he failed to curb the growth of the federal debt.

President Joe Biden’s radicalism will only energize the Republican Party and the conservative movement, giving something like the tea party a resurgence. Whether or not the TEA party returns, however, one thing is certain: the TEA party was never racist, even if the Left is anxious to paint it that way.

Recommended: The Left Still Thinks the Tea Party Was All About Racism

Obama’s profane attack on the TEA party reveals more about him than it does about his critics.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/05/24/obama-reveals-what-he-really-thinks-about-the-tea-party-n1449203?utm_source=pjmedia&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm&newsletterad=&bcid=333548a2571394d78f5984884e55069e&recip=28668535

CRB: GIRLS WILL BE BOYS

CRB: GIRLS WILL BE BOYS

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN BOOKS, GENDER, GENDER FOLLIES

We continue our preview of the new (Spring) issue of the Claremont Review Books with Mary Eberstadt’s review/essay “Girls will be boys.” Subhead: “The trans-kid craze must be stopped.”

The left’s war on nature has manifested and taken root in the transgender movement with astonishing speed and success. Eberstadt takes up the new books by Abigail Shrier and Debra Soh that challenge it in its trans kids aspect (“specifically, minor girls who want to be boys”). Eberstadt compares the transgender/trans kids mania to the QAnon cult and lands here:

Someday, the self-dealing authorities who stoke the trans-kid craze will answer for it—the corrupt doctors and politicos, the rubber-stamping “gender theorists,” the online voyeurs, the merchants, including Planned Parenthood, who make a buck off this pathos.

Meanwhile, fellow citizens can step up. If destroying the reproductive organs of healthy adolescents isn’t objectionable, not much is. Social conservatives are doing their part to protect against the trans-kid craze. Now others can help, too. May the individual Ls, Gs, Bs, and adult Ts who want no part of this experiment repudiate the claim that they endorse it. May the landmark Keira Bell lawsuit in the United Kingdom—which resulted in prohibiting kids from access to puberty blockers without court approval—be the first of many.

Now that we have [Shrier’s] Irreversible Damage and [Soh’s] The End of Gender, it’s past time to stand up for the obvious.

Read the whole thing here.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/05/crb-girls-will-be-boys.php