David Bahnsen writes at National Review Online about the potential negative consequences of Elizabeth Warren’s campaign promises.
Despite her claim to be running a campaign for middle-class America, Warren has advocated taxing carbon emissions, including through a cap-and-trade marketplace, a policy that disproportionately hurts those in the most challenging economic circumstances. Households in the bottom income brackets spend the highest portion of their income on energy, making a carbon tax among the most regressive of taxes. Some proposals call for redistributionist mechanisms to offset this regressive unfairness, but of course Warren’s broad policy platform has already made a claim on every revenue source you can think of for every spending category you can imagine — meaning there is no empty space on the shelf available to simply trade out a carbon tax for a lower payroll tax, and so forth. And in addition to the regressively unfair nature of this tax, it also serves as a huge subsidy to what Senator Warren loves to call “big oil.” The great beneficiaries of complexity and of regulatory cost are the big players, not the smaller companies!
As we delve deeper into Warren’s climate agenda, we get into the real disasters for the American economy, and indeed, for America’s national security. One of the great economic and geopolitical stories of the last generation has been America’s becoming a net exporter of energy to the world, reversing decades of foreign oil dependency. …
… Warren’s having none of it, though, economic benefits and national security be damned: “I support re-imposing limits on crude oil exports and I opposed lifting the 40-year-old ban on exporting crude oil,” Warren boasted to the liberal CNN “Climate Town Hall” audience in September. She opposes construction of new liquefied-natural-gas terminals and has consistently opposed exporting oil and gas in any form.
