Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade Compared to Smoot-Hawley Tariff

Tom McClintock, Republican Representative of California, gave a speech to the House of Representatives after it had just passed the Waxman-Markey Carbon Cap and Trade taxation scheme to limit CO2 emissions. The speech is posted at IBDeditorials.com. He says it is known what the effects of this law will be because California passed Assembly Bill 32 for the purpose of limiting CO2 emissions and we can examine its effects.

McClintock says they are:

• Before January 2007, CA's unemployment tracked the national average closely. Since, its unemployment has increased at a rate sufficient to cause an increasing divergence with the national unemployment rate. It is now 2% greater than the national rate, the highest it has been since 1941, this despite the fact that Gov. Schwarzenegger promised many new green jobs, just as Obama has.
• The city of Truckee, CA was about to sign a long-term power contract with a coal-fired power plant in Utah, but AB32 prevented it and their electricity costs doubled.

He says the cap and trade bill has

profound implications for agriculture, construction, cargo and passenger transportation, energy production, baking and brewing — all of which produce enormous quantities of this innocuous and ubiquitous compound. In fact, every human being produces 2.2 pounds of carbon dioxide every day — just by breathing.

Then he compares the Waxman-Markey bill to the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff that did so much to bring on the Great Depression:

When you discuss the folly of the Hoover administration — how it turned the recession of 1929 into the depression of the 1930s, the first thing that economists point to is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that imposed new taxes on more than 20,000 imported products.

Waxman-Markey is our generation's Smoot-Hawley. In fact, it's worse, because it imposes new taxes on an infinitely larger number of domestic products on a scale that utterly dwarfs Smoot-Hawley.

Never forget that this nonsense constraining our lives has been brought to you by the Democrat Party in the name of socialism. The Republicans too often are willing to join in the destruction of the individual's sovereign rights, but they do not do it anywhere near as well as the Party of Mass Destruction.

The New Smoot-Hawley Tariff Coming

As though much tighter socialist control over the American economy were not bad enough in delaying any recovery from the current recession, Obama and the remainder of the Tripartite Axis Powers (TAP or the Administration, House, and Senate) will use punishing tariffs to keep Americans from importing goods made abroad in countries which do not have carbon taxes or cap-and-trade laws such as the TAP plans for us.

Along with the New New Deal of Socialism comes the New Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. The Great Depression was greatly deepened and extended by the combination of the New Deal of Socialism and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. The New Smoot-Hawley Act will put high tariffs on products imported which use high energy inputs in their manufacture, such as aluminum products, steel, glass, paper, cement, and fertilizer. These products will become very expensive in the U.S., so U.S. manufacturer's will try to produce more of them abroad instead of in the U.S. after the carbon cap-and-trade law goes into effect. But, both these U.S. multinationals and foreign firms in countries without tough carbon taxes will be kept out of the American market by the New Smoot-Hawley Tariff. This tariff or adjuncts to it will also be designed to punish imports from countries with minimum wage laws deemed too low by the Democrats, with other environmental policies they do not like, and with laws not sufficiently favorable to the unionization of workers. The net result should do a very efficient job of cutting off the import-export trade of the U.S. and greatly hurt the world economy. Of course, it will be the equivalent of shooting ourselves in the head, as government power mongers peculate the American people.

You can read more about a part of these plans in the Wall Street Journal article about the Secretary of Energy's comments about a new carbon tariff here.