Welcome to your weekend open thread! It’s going to be a hot weekend this weekend so be sure to drink plenty of fluids. I’m preparing to watch the USA-Ghana World Cup match. Who else is watching?
Mark Kleiman explains, it’s not possible to work with Republicans. They play Calvinball.
Why, I’m so old that I remember when market-simulating pollution-control regulations – polluter charges or cap-and-trade – were the official conservative alternative to command-and-control regulation. I was sympathetic to that critique, and frustrated about the environmental movement’s unwillingness to see reason.
But now that the enviros have embraced a GHG tax or its cap-and-trade equivalent as the way to deal with global warming, conservative support is nowhere in sight. They’re all too afraid of Grover Norquist.
Remember this the next time a conservative explains how we ought to voucherize public education. The minute that happens, the conservatives will come back and decide that we need to means-test the vouchers. That done, they’ll attack the remaining program as “welfare.”
Steve Benen points out that the official policy of the McCain-Palin presidential ticket was support of cap-and-trade. Seriously I don’t understand why Democrats don’t just offer real liberal ideas at this point. They really have nothing to lose. Perhaps in the negotiations with the Democratic Asshole Caucus they can actually sneak in some good policy.
A must-read post at Campaign For America’s Future: “The Reagan Revolution Home To Roost — In Charts”
It seems that you can look at a chart of almost anything and right around 1981 or soon after you’ll see the chart make a sharp change in direction, and probably not in a good way. And I really do mean almost anything, from economics to trade to infrastructure to … well almost anything. I spent some time looking for charts of things, and here are just a few examples. In each of the charts below look for the year 1981, when Reagan took office.
Here’s one – it documents the change in concentration of wealth:
There’s plenty more charts to study at the link.