Morning Ed: North Atlantic Politics {2017.04.30.Su}
There is some pushback against the Trump plan to get rid of state and local tax deductions. It’s a tax break that pretty strongly benefits blue states and I’m sympathetic to their frustration, but also believe that state and local taxes shouldn’t be deductible. Other than flattening taxes, I’m not sure what we could do to offset it. The same problem occurs with the mortgage deduction, which similarly favors blue states (albeit less reliably)
Paul Gottfried explains the intellectual tradition of the French right.
It’s almost as though… both sides do it.
Corbyn is in a lot of trouble in the upcoming election, but young people love him. Not Scots, though.
Meanwhile, are the LibDems back?
One of only areas I consider Trump to be especially good on is energy, so it figures that the administration’s own incompetence would get in its own way there.
Oh, well, okay then.
I’m still trying to determine if the whole Heath Mello thing was just the result of some bad reporting and a political party that refuses to acknowledge its mistake, or whether the Democratic Party’s new standards on abortion or genuinely this strict.
Okay, I’ll bite — how is Trump “especially good” on energy?Report
There doesn’t seem to be anything in the ground that he wants to leave there and doesn’t want to help get to its final destination! “Especially” is probably an exaggeration, but it’s an area I expected Clinton – or any Democratic successor to Obama – to be particularly bad.Report
And what exactly is good about not wanting to leave anything in the ground?
And I’m not sure what you mean by help get it to its final destination, but Trump was definitely pro Dakota PipelineReport
And for those parts of the country that, for various reasons, would prefer to get their energy from sources that aren’t buried in the ground?Report
Nothing is stopping them is it? Doesn’t CA require that x% of their energy be generated via renewables? Of wait, they did.
On October 7, 2015, Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr. signed legislation to require 50 percent of the state’s electricity to come from renewable energy by December 31, 2030.Report
that’s a remarkably narrow vision of what is ‘energy’.
While I recognize that flipping policy and favoring non-carbon based energy over carbon based energy is impossible, it’d be nice if a Republican administration would at least level the playing field between them. But even that’s absurd. A carbon tax — so that non-polluting forms of energy compete on an even playing field with coal/oil/gas — is a non-starter for this administration.
And you seem remarkably sanguine about the idea of continuing to use carbon-based energy in the face of experts’ opinions about the consequences thereof. See the European Environment Agency’s 2017 analysis, for example.Report
Michael and Francis, I favor All of the Above (my Energy and Planet sections tend to be promiscuous). Used to favor (more) subsidies for renewables and still support a carbon tax as long as it’s pass-through. With the exception of the offshore drilling ban following Deepwater Horizon I might have even been closer to the Democrats than the Republicans.
But I can see the way the wind has been blowing.Report
Why favor All of the Above?
At what point do you think should humanity stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere?Report
When they realize that, okay, nuclear is probably less bad than adding CO2.Report
Assuming it can be built at reasonable cost. What with Toshiba’s nuclear subsidiary declaring bankruptcy, looks good for the federal loan guarantees on the Vogtle reactors in Georgia being called. Across the border in South Carolina, the legislature is considering fairly drastic changes in their regulatory scheme before the utility building the Summer reactors asks for a tenth rate increase related to the project, this one to cover the added costs due to the bankruptcy.
There is a non-negligible chance that in both cases the owners simply abandon the projects and leave the various governments and ratepayers to eat the costs.Report
Wait until you see the costs associated with not switching to nuclear.Report
Jay,
I have the projections. They’re pretty grim. Gonna hit plenty of places harder than it’ll hit the US, but still gonna be hard as hell here.
Move while you’ve got time.Report
I think you meant “renewables plus power management” not “nuclear”. The former is actually much cheaper these days.Report
There are lots of nuts-and-bolts studies for meeting power needs in the Western Interconnect from low-carbon sources, with minimal amounts from nuclear. The Western is, relative to its population and demand, rich in renewables. It is hard to find anything that looks reasonable, at the same level of detail, for the Eastern Interconnect. Mostly for the Eastern there’s magic hand-waving. Many of those turn out to be “rape the public lands in the West”.Report
@michael-cain
I can almost visualize Western Freedom Fighters blowing up the wind turbogenerators along the Great Plains. That will teach those fishing East Coasters a lessonReport
+1 :^)
Still, it’s interesting to read pieces by East Coast environmentalists, who have said for decades that westerners couldn’t be trusted to manage the public lands in their states, that can be summarized as “First we’ll pave the entire state of Arizona with solar cells…”Report
Michael,
Well, if you had to ask me, I’d say we ought to put solar cells where they make the most sense. You do get triple the output in Arizona versus Pittsburgh. And without water, who’s going to live in Arizona anyhow?Report
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When Bernie has fewer than 3 houses.Report
When Al Gore stops flying on jets to environmental conferences.Report
When my congressman gives back the millions of dollars he made selling automobiles.Report
Francis,
Yesterday.
As of right now, we have 20 years to figure out how to feed a third of America’s population. (Because current projections have us only able to feed about 200 million people). And America’s future is relatively bright.
They’re planning genocide, and the wall’s already built, and people are going to drown.Report
Will,
Where I come from, conservative means not pulling things out of the ground that you can’t put back in unless you have to. Because if we pull them out later than everyone else, we can get a better price for them, if nothing else.Report
Oh no you don’t, you can’t hide this @jaybird bait behind small words.
The Bold part, to me, at least, is the story.
That’s not an Autopsy, that’s an Audit.Report
I read that story and my original thoughts were “huh, so they don’t really want to learn anything”.
Have you read Voltaire’s Bastards? I read it a million years ago, back when I was still smart, and there’s a scene in there that comes to mind:
In WWII, Japan was wargaming some battle in the Pacific or other and they deliberately overstated their own powers and understated the powers of the allies so that the war games could be consistently won by Japan and they could consistently give reports about how their war games were consistently good.Report
There’s a book that didn’t hold up well.
Or maybe not. I read it in the late 90s, the very worst time for a pointed critique at what we would call today the ‘neoliberal world order’. Maybe I should give it another shot.Report
Really? I thought it was great. Ahead of its time…
Maybe I need to go back to it again…Report
I just remember a lot of criticism at the right wing governments of the West – though the Soviet Union was recently dead, and Bill Clinton was what people considered ‘left wing’ at that time.Report
I haven’t read that… I think I’ve read a handful of the same critique from the right, though.Report
Lessee, here… Secret meeting? Held by institutional decisionmakers? About money, power and control?
Sounds like the Iron Law of Institutions in action to me:
The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution “fail” while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to “succeed” if that requires them to lose power within the institution.Report
Never met an absentee ceo before, I take it?Report
Isn’t money actually a part of the issue this time though? One of the post-election (or more accurately post-Obama) assessments was that Obama’s political action group, Organizing For Action, diverted money away from conventional means of supporting Democrats at the state and local levels (at least in part because he felt he had to run against those organizations in 2008 when they were largely aligned with Clinton):
I think money is usually overrated, but the last eight years suggests to me there are limits.Report
Yeah, that does sound like an interesting notion to chew on. I do wonder what it means not to trust the local democratic parties and how that relates to messaging though.
Let me re-do the bold… Only about two-dozen lawmakers showed up for the presentation.Report
To be fair, watching the actions of say, the Ohio, Florida, and Wisconsin Democratic Parties in the past decade plus, I wouldn’t trust them much either.Report
The reason why there was a such a reaction against Mello is that a few days before the stuff about him came out, Sanders said that the candidate in Georgia wasn’t a “real” progressive. But on the other hand, he embraced Mello as a progressive champion.
Which was basically saying that economics was the only thing that mattered. If Sanders said something like, “despite our differences, we need men like Mello & Osoff are both people we need within the big tent of the Democratic party,” nothing would’ve happened. But, by saying Mello was a real progressive, but Osoff wasn’t, he was drawing unneeded lines in the sand.Report
Good news, everyone!
The DNC testified in a court of law that they rigged the primary.Report
They told him not to go to Mississippi?Report
Or was this more of a busing in illegals type of thing? He would have won the popular vote without them, don’t you know.Report
Also, protip: the hot thing this season is to say “hacked” instead of “rigged.” It’s futuristic!Report
Autolukos,
Plenty of things. Lotta rigging of voter rolls (deliberately kicking Sanders folks off), deliberate deception on the election of electors to the convention…
All perfectly legal, of course.Report
Here’s a fun headline:
D.C. police infiltrated inauguration protest group, court papers showReport
Well shit; that’s another bet I’ve lost to Kimmi’s cats. Those felines are smarter than they look. Putin smart, I’d say.Report
Oops… this comment was misthreaded; I was referring to the DNC article.
But shit, reading this article I think I’ve lost another bet.
On the plus side, I think there might be a lead in there for a missing Microwave.Report
*shrugs* Costco got us a new one the very same day. I don’t care what the protestors did with the truck or the microwave.Report
I’m glad to hear that, and appreciate the fact that you take our teasing in stride.Report
Good news! Obama is campaigning on Macron’s behalf!Report
A Nobel Peace price winner will, no doubt, have a lot of influence in Euroland!Report