Australian election won’t deter U.S. carbon tax supporters

American carbon tax supporters are undeterred by Australian election results that were widely interpreted as a repudiation of the tax.

“We would say the Australian experiment shows precisely the wrong way to implement a carbon tax,” Ray Lehmann, spokesman for the R Street Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Simply laying a new tax on top of citizens’ existing burdens is never going to be either popular or economically productive.”

Conservatives contend that the Australian election should serve as a warning to U.S. policymakers who seek to impose such a tax on the carbon dioxide emissions at home.

“Australia is a great example of how not to do [a carbon tax]: not revenue-neutral, not coupled with regulatory and tax reform, and using a bad structure in cap-and-trade,” R Street’s Andrew Moylan said.

R Street bills itself as a group which supports “free markets; limited, effective government; and responsible environmental stewardship.” The group has been trying to muster up support for a $20 per ton carbon tax among conservatives, and contends that a carbon tax could be beneficial if coupled with regulatory and tax reform.

“I myself would certainly vote to repeal it were I an Australian MP or senator and would have voted Liberal0National were I a voter,” R Street’s president Eli Lehrer told TheDCNF.

Even liberal Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders is not backing down from his support of a carbon tax in the aftermath of the Australian election.

The Daily Caller

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Liberals in Retreat in Colorado and Across the Globe

Three elections across the globe deliver an unpleasant shock to liberal ideologues.



Three elections in the last week have challenged long-held liberal premises about how elections are fought and what the public wants. It’s worth examining those results in such widely separated places as Australia, Norway, and the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

In Colorado, liberals are already in denial about the fact that two Democratic state senators were recalled from office in districts Barack Obama carried by some 20 percentage points only ten months ago. The recalls were organized by citizens upset with the lawmakers’ votes in favor of a gun-control measure. The two senators also helped pass bills perceived as being against the interests of rural areas and helped push through a fraud-prone election law that shifted the Centennial State to all-mail voting.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee’s chairwoman, said the results simply reflected “voter suppression, pure and simple.” Matt Vespa of Red State scoffed at her flimsy explanation: More Democrats and independents signed the two recall petitions than did Republicans, he noted, which “only further discredits DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s insane claim that her side lost due to voter suppression.”

Liberals are also claiming that the black arts of the National Rifle Association skewed the results. But the gun-rights group came very late to support the recalls, and the Denver Post reports that pro-gun-control groups spent some $3 million versus only $540,000 by recall supporters.

Grover Norquist, a board member of the National Rifle Association, claims once again that liberals mistook “position for passion” on an issue. In the wake of the Newtown massacre of last December, the Left believed public opinion had finally turned in favor of gun control; in support of this view, they cited surveys showing overwhelming support for background checks and limits on ammunition magazines. As Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast wrote, “You cannot oppose the will of 90 percent of the public and expect no consequences.”

Via: National Review Online
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