FWIW Harry Enten of 538 is bullish on Johnson performing at the 7% he’d need to qualify for Federal funding in 2020.
He notes that he is maintaining his roughly 9% share at a point that Enten says other third party candidates have often begun to fade.
Now personally I find the analysis more punditification than anything else. There is no large n of third party candidates polling in this range and the one who did was a very different circumstance - Perot’s second run, after he was well known. Moreover using “late summer average” as “Average of polls conducted in the seven days ending on Aug. 25 of each election year” is silly for a third party candidate who is often not included in most polls.
I’ll bet that Johnson underperforms the 7.1% 538 predicts for him, and is closer to Nader’s 2.7% than their call but guessing against 538 is more often than not a sucker’s game, so I aint too willing to put much money down!
Taxes went up during World War II, then went down again. I think crushing Hitler was in the interests of the US citizenry.
Godwin agrees. All internet discussions on libertarianism wind their way towards Hitler. It’s a tradition!
More seriously, your vague appeal to “History” isn’t especially convincing. The Federal government is basically a pension plan that happens to have an army. Broadly speaking it isn’t special interests that keep federal outlays high, it’s the preferences of voters - entirely reasonable preferences. Johnson supports carbon free riding because of the vapid utopianism of his Libertarian base. Serious conservative economists are typically members of the Pigou Club.
To be honest though, I really don’t blame Johnson for his lame stance, given the sorts of core supporters he has to contend with. I’m just saying that while Johnson and Weld are both qualified, they aren’t exactly a profile in courage.
Voters also don’t want to pay extra for their carbon-based energy. Standing against that is more of a profile in courage than Democrats who want to tax companies so that the dimmer consumers won’t know they are being taxed indirectly.
I rant across a rant by some Robert Tracinski dude, who is one of the LP-betrayed. Gary Johnson is not ideologically pure enough for him.
I mean, come on, man, that just does not work. As long as the LP strives to be pure and exclusively RW, they will remain marginal, and their candidates will be undermined by party infighting (which I struggle in vain to perceive as a bad thing). Bill Maher calls himself a libertarian, but the LP seems to want nothing to do with him.
I mean, I honestly want everyone to have a voice in the process, even the fringe, to the extent that is appropriate. When you gate whole groups off, you end up with silly-to-dangerous whackadoodles, like truthers, anti-vaxxers, chemtrailers and sov-cits (yes, I am at least partly blaming Amerigoofs on the 2-party system). But when you cannot accept compromise and incremental change, when your position is so very all-or-nothing, thank you for attending, now you will find the chairs in the foyer mighty comfy.
The other advantage of any consumption tax, be it on carbon ‘consumption’ or general consumption, is that it makes it relatively more attractive to employ labor compared to the same tax on labor, like the payroll tax. That is more relevant nowadays in an apparently prolonged situation of lower labor force participation, even compared to what would be predicted by the aging of the labor force. IOW even though the nominal unemployment rate in the US is not high, there seems to still be a jobs problem.
Also a consumption (carbon or other) tax directly hits non-workers as well as workers legally in the country or not (though a labor tax still hits them indirectly, in the cost of products of that labor). That could be a positive or negative depending on which aspect. For example it’s a political problem insofar as it raises prices for retired people who already paid a lifetime of payroll tax.
But a carbon tax to raise general revenue (not as a slush fund for green subsidies) seems a possible point of meeting of left and right on climate change. It still however is not an easy solution. On the greener side there’s no gtee that a given cost of carbon would cut carbon emissions by what a given person or group thinks is necessary. And on the green-skeptic side, it’s still not a free lunch to discourage cheaper forms of energy via a carbon tax if the concern about climate change turns out overblown. Moreover it has the same problem as any and every national climate change measure: it can just serve as incentive to move carbon intensive activities to countries which don’t take such measures, as for example in US-China informal agreement that the latter country will not set a baseline for carbon reduction for another 14 years.
Climate change is IMO the most complex issue the political system has ever envisioned tackling, except perhaps the comprehensive management of the economy (as in all out socialism/communism, which proved beyond the ability of human political systems), and even that could be meaningfully attempted country by country. One side of the US political system now makes the question apparently simple by (commonly, if not uniformly) saying ‘this is not a problem’, to which a simple response is ‘yes, it is’. However once and if there’s political consensus ‘yes, it is’, then it’s quite intractable. A carbon tax is among many measures which seem sensible, and less inefficient that regulatory fiat methods now used in the US (eg. car mileage standards, which lose a lot of their effect by lowering the cost of driving so encouraging more of it, besides all kinds of weird loopholes). But it might share with existing US measures negligible impact on the problem globally, and it’s not actually cost free.
PS on the actual topic of Johnson and climate change, I agree with Measure for Measure’s post. Johnson is correct insofar a more efficient thus bigger economy has more resources to spend on externalities like the effect of GHG emissions. And he’d also be correct IMO to emphasize using market forces in the mechanisms used to divert resources to reducing those externalities. But it has be collective, ie govt, action to set up those mechanisms, pretty much by definition of an ‘externality’.
However in fairness to Johnson, the actual proposal for cap and trade was an additional regulatory/revenue structure, not a replacement of other taxes, and moreover the political wheels were to be greased by making it mainly a slush fund for green subsidies which IMO has a huge efficiency/cronyism problem that should not be understated. Then also by the same token the Democrats are not typically willing to admit that fighting climate change means higher costs and lower standards of living, just in near term $'s and cents terms compared to ignoring the externality. I’m not saying it should be ignored, because of the risk of long term costs, but the method of selling it politically tends to be to make believe it won’t cost average people money now to fight it, which it will, and try to hide those costs, making the measures less efficient and thus more costly to achieve the same effect.
IOW Johnson’s dishonesty in saying ‘I accept there’s a problem but I’m a free market guy’ as if the market could solve it without cost, has to be viewed in the context of low level of honesty on this problem by most other politicians (GOP: ‘the problem doesn’t exist’, Dems: ‘it’s a big problem but won’t cost you anything to fix it, either it will cost somebody else, or there will be virtuous circle of green jobs and golden unicorns where it doesn’t cost anybody anything’, that’s unfair to the most reasonable voices in either party, but I don’t think totally unfair overall).
Not quite fair, I think. He is likely sincere in his commitment to advance the Libertarian agenda. He may not know what that means, perzackly, but do any of us?
Chefguy - And quite a good pepper at that. We use Penzey’s Aleppo pepper flake wherever the recipe calls for ordinary red pepper flake. Much fuller flavor.
I’d never heard of the city Aleppo until this morning, I’ve only ever heard of people talking about Syria, and doing a search on the boards there have been all of eight threads in the past six months that bring it up.
I do not follow international news as much as I should. Aleppo has been mentioned several times–because of bad stuff going down.
(A few months ago, I read a book about T E Lawrence in which the author recounted his own visit to this lovely city in the 1960’s. The book was recent enough for a note that the city was no longer lovely.)
Well, we are of course in danger of going down the rabbit hole of “This is important to me, why isn’t it to you?”
Still. As someone who does like to spend time following politics and what my social studies teachers liked to call “current events,” and as someone who likes maps, I do know what Aleppo is and I do know why it is significant.
I can appreciate that other people with my interests might not recognize the name, or might recognize it and not know what makes it important (or why we should “do something” about it).
But we’re not talking about Ordinary Citizen With an Interest in Geography and Government. We’re talking about someone who is running for President of the United States, and he should be held to a higher standard. I get twitchy when I know things about the world that a candidate doesn’t seem to know. Indeed, I’d say that everything I know about politics and national and world affairs ought to be contained inside what every candidate already knows.
An analogy: I follow baseball pretty closely. I know something about the top prospects on my favorite team. It wouldn’t make me very happy if someone mentioned the name of one of the top guys to my team’s GM and he responded, “Who’s that?”
(Of course, it’s possible he heard or saw it wrong: “What would you do about a lepeau?” [what the hell is a lepeau?] or “What would you do about ULEPO?” [I don’t think I’ve ever seen that acronym] That happens. Still, it does seem to me that Aleppo should be familiar enough to a serious candidate for his mind to go there immediately instead of to these other places. In the same way that our baseball executive, hearing that the giants are coming to town, is not likely to think of Jack and the Beanstalk.)