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Economy

Politics the only consistency in carbon tax policy

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4 minute read

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Never mind that there is no easy connection between CO2 and temperatures, except in […]

The misplaced idea that carbon dioxide is pollution undergirds the dubious concept of the carbon tax. Never mind that there is no easy connection between CO2 and temperatures, except in the easily questioned computer models created by climate change proponents.  Nevertheless, the carbon tax policy is the signature climate change policy of the Trudeau Government. This tax has raised energy prices across the country and supercharged inflation without any impact on reducing harmless carbon dioxide emissions.

The main impact of the carbon tax is to reduce of everybody’s living standards just a bit more each year. Finally, it seems to have succeeded in doing something else: undermining Liberal support. The awkward attempt to solve this political and policy problem sent federal arguments for the carbon tax into complete contradiction last week.

On October 26 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a three-year moratorium on carbon taxes for home heating oil, a move that was good politics but curious policy.

“We’ve heard clearly from Atlantic Canadians through our amazing Atlantic MPs that since the federal pollution price came into force … certain features of that pollution price needed adjusting to work for everyone,” said Trudeau.

You see, last July Atlantic provinces had to give Ottawa worthy proposals to keep themselves out of Ottawa’s carbon pricing scheme. They failed, so their citizens have felt the pinch. Forty percent of Atlantic Canadians, but only three percent of all Canadians use fuel oil.

This reality facilitated a political solution–a national policy with mostly regional consequences for Liberal support. The problem was how to spin it.

“We are doubling down on our fight against climate change and…supporting Canadians while we fight climate change,” the PM said.

“Economists and experts around the world have long known that putting a price on carbon emissions is the best way to drive down those emissions that cause climate change, is the cheapest, most efficient and most impactful way and it’s working,” the PM insisted.

This circle can’t be squared, except politically. The fuel oil announcement was made hours before Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre held his scheduled “Axe the Tax” rally against carbon taxes in Windsor, N.S., the riding of Liberal Atlantic Caucus chair Kody Blois.

Put together, this is a national but regional policy to adjust a carbon tax that works but does not work. It’s doubtful that taxes or grants will change the weather, of course, but fuel oil was unworthy of an exemption.

The heat output per gallon of fuel oil is 138,690 British Thermal Units and almost equal to that of natural gas (139,050 BTU). However, natural gas only produces 117 lbs of CO2 per million BTU, whereas distillate fuel oil produces more than 160 lbs. The worst “polluters” just got a break.

Meanwhile, residents west of Quebec, where natural gas use ranges from 49 to 77 per cent, will pay carbon taxes, as they always have–and more so as they increase every April. It’s moves like this that have allowed a federal government to maintain power that hasn’t won the popular vote since 2015.

Poilievre’s plan to end the carbon tax is a winner for policy sanity.

Lee Harding is a Research Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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Business

‘Time To Make The Patient Better’: JD Vance Says ‘Big Transition’ Coming To American Economic Policy

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JD Vance on “Rob Schmitt Tonight” discussing tariff results

 

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Hailey Gomez

Vice President JD Vance said Thursday on Newsmax that he believes Americans will “reap the benefits” of the economy as the Trump administration makes a “big transition” on tariffs.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,679.39 points on Thursday, just a day after President Donald Trump announced reciprocal tariffs against nations charging imports from the U.S. On “Rob Schmitt Tonight,” Schmitt asked Vance about the stock market hit, asking how the White House felt about the “Liberation Day” move.

“We’re feeling good. Look, I frankly thought in some ways it could be worse in the markets, because this is a big transition. You saw what the President said earlier today. It’s like a patient who was very sick,” Vance said. “We did the operation, and now it’s time to make the patient better. That’s exactly what we’re doing. We have to remember that for 40 years, we’ve been doing this for 40 years.”

“American economic policy has rewarded people who ship jobs overseas. It’s taxed our workers. It’s made our supply chains more brittle, and it’s made our country less prosperous, less free and less secure,” Vance added.

Vance recalled that one of his children had been sick and needed antibiotics that were not made in the United States. The Vice President called it a “ridiculous thing” that some medicines invented in the country are no longer manufactured domestically.

“That’s fundamentally what this is about. The national security of manufacturing and making the things that we need, from steel to pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, and so forth, but also the good jobs that come along when you have economic policies that reward investing in America, rather than investing in foreign countries,” Vance said.

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With a baseline 10% tariff placed on an estimated 60 countries, higher tariffs were applied to nations like China and Israel. For example, China, which has a 67% tariff on U.S. goods, will now face a 34% tariff from the U.S., while Israel, which has a 33% tariff, will face a 17% U.S. tariff.

“One bad day in the stock market, compared to what President Trump said earlier today, and I think he’s right about this. We’re going to have a booming stock market for a long time because we’re reinvesting in the United States of America. More importantly than that, of course, the people in Wall Street have done well,” Vance said.

“We want them to do well. But we care the most about American workers and about American small businesses, and they’re the ones who are really going to benefit from these policies,” Vance said.

The number of factories in the U.S., Vance said, has declined, adding that “millions of workers” have lost their jobs.

“My town [Middletown, Ohio], where you had 10,000 great American steel workers, and my town was one of the lucky ones, now probably has 1,500 steel workers in that factory because you had economic policies that rewarded shipping our jobs to China instead of investing in American workers,” Vance said. “President Trump ran on changing it. He promised he would change it, and now he has. I think Americans are going to reap the benefits.”

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COVID-19

Trump’s new NIH head fires top Fauci allies and COVID shot promoters, including Fauci’s wife

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From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X. “Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.

On day one of his new job as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya removed four powerful agency heads, including Dr. Anthony Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, and others associated with the questionable handling of the COVID-19 shots.

Grady, who had served as chief of the agency’s Department of Bioethics, and other longtime Fauci allies in top posts at the NIH involved in the development and distribution of the untested COVID shots produced by Big Pharma were offered jobs in Alaska and other remote locales far away from the NIH’s sprawling Bethesda, Maryland, complex just outside Washington, D.C.

The purge came amid massive layoffs in health-related agencies under the umbrella of Health and Human Services (HHS), now headed by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement’s founder, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long questioned vaccine safety and American medicine’s focus on treating disease rather than preventing it.

A total of about 20,000 personnel – mostly bureaucrats – or about 25 percent of the HHS workforce have been or will be handed pink slips amid Kennedy’s realignment of the agency.

MAHA critics were quick to call Tuesday’s axing of Fauci confederates as “one of the darkest days in modern scientific history” fueled by Kennedy’s desire to exact revenge on Fauci’s former trusted associates who represent the antithesis of the MAHA movement.

However, the revamping of the federal government’s side of the health industry is no more harsh than the treatment meted out by those formerly in control who, at best, suppressed, and worst, punished those who questioned their iron grip on health-industry regulations and standards.

For years, Kennedy’s critics have dismissed his quest to revamp healthcare and his questioning of the efficacy of the COVID-19 mRNA jabs as anti-science, labeling him as an “anti-vaxxer” in order to suppress his messaging.

Dr. Francis Collins – whom Bhattacharya replaced as head of NIH – in an October 2020 email to Fauci condemned Bhattacharya as a “fringe epidemiologist” because he had co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized harmful COVID lockdown policies.

“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X.

“Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.

“We spend 4X more than Italy on healthcare — and live 7 years less. Dead last in cancer rates. This isn’t science — it’s a system profiting off sick kids,” explained Calley Means, RFK Jr. HHS advisor during an interview with Laura Ingraham following the NIH firings.

“Firing the people who oversaw this? That’s step one,” declared Means.

Other NIH officials who were offered reassignments were Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded Fauci as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Clifford Lane, a close Fauci ally who served as deputy director for clinical research at NIAID, and Dr. Emily Erbelding, NIAID’s microbiology and infectious diseases director.

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