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FEATURED STORY
Pimlico Deal Is The Mess We Always Knew It Would Be: The project was always a politically connected boondoggle to fund a legacy sport that nobody really cares about in Maryland but one day a year. It's time to cut bait.
News and Politics
Guest Post: MoCo’s Proposed STEP Act Works Against Its Own Goals: Ignoring Low-Level Traffic Violations is STEP in the Wrong Direction
Potential Trump Prosecution Is Bad for Trump. It's Also Good for Trump: In a sane world, criminal prosecution would be a career ender for a politician. This is not a sane world.
Maine, town by town: Old Orchard Beach: A town ripe for an upset
The World Is Not Enough: The left got their $15 minimum wage and it caused inflation. Now the same leftists want to raise the wage even more because of the inflation they caused
Kristi Noem To Headline MDGOP Dinner: The Controversial Governor of South Dakota will headline the annual "Red, White, and Blue" Dinner on June 19th
Shameless Plugs
OLW Returns To The Duckpin This Weeek
It's week two of the 2023 Old Line Wiffle Season, as The Marauders take on the 1st-place Wildcats live at 10 AM this Saturday, April 1st.
The Monday Thought(s)
A Carbon Tax?
Here’s a nugget that you’ll be surprised to learn about: some Republicans in the Senate are looking at supporting a carbon tax.
Senate Republicans are warming to a climate proposal Democrats have been pushing for years: legislation to impose import taxes on high-carbon industrial commodities.
In interviews this week, several said they saw a “carbon border adjustment mechanism” as ripe for bipartisan cooperation, and plan to introduce new Republican-drafted legislation soon. But the devil is in the details, and senators are divided both between and within party lines over how a CBAM would work, and what costs — if any — it would impose on American companies.
“I do support some form of [a CBAM] as long as it doesn't become a domestic energy tax,” Sen. Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, told Semafor. “We ought to be acknowledging the excellence of the American manufacturing community, [which is] already paying a lot to comply with our much stricter environmental regulations.”
A CBAM is a fee applied to certain imports — which could include steel, iron, fossil fuels, or others — pegged to the carbon emissions associated with their production in their country of origin. From a climate point of view, it aims to prevent carbon “leakage,” whereby a country essentially offshores its most carbon-intensive industries and imports as needed, reducing its own carbon emissions but not those of the world overall. It also protects domestic companies that face higher production costs due to climate policy, and leverages U.S. purchasing power to exert downward pressure on global CO2 emissions.
This issue is being pushed a by a weird coalition of two Trump superfans (Kevin Cramer, Lindsay Graham) and one anti-Trumper (Bill Cassidy).
The worst part about this? Is the fact that it sticks the nose under the camel’s tent for direct carbon taxes on manufacturers and goods
The biggest issue dividing proponents of the policy on Capitol Hill is whether a CBAM would need to be paired with a domestic carbon tax. In textbook economics, and in the European Union’s version of the policy introduced last year, a CBAM only makes sense if domestic producers are also paying a price for the carbon they emit. Otherwise, such a policy could be unfairly protectionist and face legal challenges in the World Trade Organization. The U.S. doesn’t have a federal carbon tax, so it’s not clear what a CBAM could be pegged to.
The entire concept is a little bit weird and seems more aimed at being an alternative to direct protectionist tariffs against China favored by Trumpworld. Not that those policies did anything but drive up domestic costs, which is also what the CBAM would do. Just something to keep an eye on.
When Does This Bullshit Stop?
I mean…….
We’ve now reached the point where Donald Trump goes on his bubble of a social media platform and talked about “potential death & destruction” if he is charged with a crime? What kind of Weimar Republic-era nonsense is this?
One thing has become obvious: the crowd who asked aloud “what will it hurt to humor him” when it came to everything that has happened since Trump lost on Election Day 2020 was very, very wrong.