Top Republicans discuss a carbon tax with the White House

  We thought when Donald Trump won the election that the talk about cap and trade and carbon taxes were dead issues, but apparently they are not because according to this story top Republicans and business leaders are trying to convince the administration a carbon tax is the way to go in return for regulatory cuts.

  Here is more:

A group of prominent Republicans and business leaders pitched a tax on carbon dioxide to top White House aides Wednesday, selling the plan as an economic win that could drive job growth and yield environmental dividends too.

Former Secretary of State James Baker and other members of the new “Climate Leadership Council” pressed the case in a 45-minute meeting in the Roosevelt Room that included President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser Gary Cohn, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and senior aide Kellyanne Conway.

“The signs were very encouraging,” Ted Halstead, who founded the council, said after the meeting. “Two weeks into this new administration, we have positioned our solution as the most promising climate solution — if they want to go there.”

  And they had a brief meeting with Mike Pence:

Baker also met briefly with Vice President Mike Pence, as the old-guard Republicans try to persuade the Trump administration that a carbon tax imposed in exchange for abolishing a slew of environmental regulations is an insurance policy against the risks of climate change.

“We know we have an uphill slog to get Republicans interested in this,” Baker said before the White House meeting. But “a conservative, free-market approach is a very Republican way of approaching the problem.”

  I don’t know, I guess I cannot figure out how controlling businesses with a bigger tax burden is any more of a free-market approach than controlling businesses through government regulation, but that is just me. And it certainly does not sound conservative…

  I have been saying for quite awhile now that both the establishment Republicans and the establishment Democrats are on the same side, putting on a show known as the Hegelian Dialectic; create or take advantage of a crisis, control both sides of the argument, and implement the predetermined solution, otherwise known as thesis, antithesis, synthesis and I think this is yet another example.

  It seems highly unlikely something like this would pass on its own but could it be pushed through as part of a broad tax overhaul plan as the above-linked article suggests? It looks like we are not out of the woods on global warming just yet.

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium