Links tagged “economics”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s now infamous talking points on the Green New Deal are the most unintentionally honest explanation of the neo-socialism now gripping the Democratic Party. --Marc Thiessen, Fox News, 16 February 2019

Somehow the Democrats managed to create a shiny, magical rainbow-colored unicorn and immediately impale themselves on it. How bad is the debut of the Green New Deal looking a week later? “Dead on arrival” makes it sound better than it is. It’s more like Zima meets Green Lantern times Bill Simmons’s HBO show. --Kyle Smith, National Review, 14 February 2019

So GND is clearly one of the most expensive technology/fuel approaches to implementing decarbonization. Germany has already tried it by more gradually reducing the use of coal and nuclear fuels. and it appears to be a major disaster with sky-high electricity prices and increasingly unreliable energy availability. Why should we repeat their disastrous approach, but in an even more extreme manner?

"Nobody but nobody in my business seriously invests in Europe. They haven’t for a generation. Europe is no longer competitive. It has the worlds most expensive energy and labour laws that are uninviting for employers. Worst of all, it has green taxes that, at best, can be described as foolish as they are having the opposite effect to how they were intended." - Billionaire businessman Sir Jim Ratcliffe, Open Letter to the European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, 12 February 2019

Rex Murphy: US Democrats’ ‘Green New Deal’ Will Turn America Into Venezuela - "The Green New Deal uses environmentalism as a lever to pursue a far-larger, more sinister, agenda, a mad leap to a socialist nightworld. --Rex Murphy, National Post, 12 February 2019

The unemployment rate when FDR took the oath in 1933 was 25 percent. It never fell below 14 percent through the 1930s. In June 1938, despite huge Democratic majorities in Congress, FDR was presiding over a nation where unemployment was back up to 19 percent. World War II and the conscription of 16 million young men gave us “full employment.” And the war’s end and demobilization saw the return of real prosperity in 1946, after FDR was dead.

Yet this Green New Deal is nothing if not ambitious. To cope with climate change, the GND calls for a 10-year plan to meet “100 percent of the power demand of the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.”

Union officials told Reuters they were skeptical. “We will never settle for ‘just transition’ language as a solution to the job losses that will surely come from some of the policies in the resolution,” said Yvette Pena O’Sullivan, executive director of the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA), whose members work in construction and other industries.

Phil Smith, a spokesman for the United Mine Workers (UMWA), which represents workers in the coal industry, echoed the concerns. “We’ve heard words like ‘just transition’ before, but what does that really mean? Our members are worried about putting food on the table,” he said.

JunkScience's Steve Milloy: 1. The entire economy would operate under the Green New Deal.

2. The government would have 'appropriate ownership stakes' in ALL Green New Deal businesses.

“America’s ruling class is freaking out about [Ocasio-Cortez’s] proposal to redistribute wealth and power from the people on top to the people on the bottom,” Waleed Shahid tweeted Tuesday, referring to a Fox News segment on the “Green New Deal.”