Government Regulates to the Mean, Plus More on Hidden Taxes | Coyote Blog

So why not a carbon tax? Well, the politicians have all explained this pretty directly — because they do not want to pay the political cost of raising taxes, particularly on something like gas whose price gets so much media attention. Having demagogued oil companies as evil for so many years for raising gas prices, politicians were not able to bear the irony of themselves being responsible for higher gas prices.

So instead, they will force cars to be built more fuel efficiently, which will almost certainly raise the price of cars (as well as reduce choice and certain features). These higher costs and reductions in choice are most certainly a tax on consumers, but they are an indirect tax. They show up as rising prices and perhaps falling attractiveness of auto makers’ product lines, which consumers will blame on auto makers, not the Congress or Obama.

So Obama will continue to say he has never raised taxes on the middle class, when in fact he has just made their cars $1500 more expensive. Some day, we may live in a world where politicians are called to task for this kind of bait and switch, but my guess is that Obama gets away with it.

Guy who formerly pretended to be fictional hero promotes non-solution to fictional "problem"!

As Washington fluttered with climate change action yesterday, actor and environmental campaigner Pierce Brosnan added some star power to a public hearing at the Environmental Protection Agency about greenhouse gas emissions. But Brosnan said nothing about the hearing's topic, the endangerment finding that could mean regulations over emissions sources under the Clean Air Act. Instead, he praised Washington's alternate approach to climate change, the Waxman-Markey bill, which is getting a (slow) mark-up on Capitol Hill this week. Video below...