RSS
Home
California: Green and Broke 2.0
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
California is known for economic boom-bust cycles, earthquakes, wildfires, urban riots, progressive politics, celebrity excesses and green environmental initiatives. Today, the Golden State faces chronic State budget shortfalls, one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates with one of the lowest bond ratings, and a total collapse of its principal wealth builder, its real estate markets.
For decades, the biggest enemy of fiscal responsibility in California has been its elitist political culture. Thanks to historical gerrymandering, virtually all state.jpg)
legislative districts are safe Democrat majorities and Republican minorities. Republican candidates promise never to raise taxes; Democrats pledge myopic allegiance to environmentalists and militant public employee unions. The majority Democrat progressives must now take responsibility for California’s record unemployment rates, high business and personal taxes, labor union extortions and job-killing environmental regulations.
legislative districts are safe Democrat majorities and Republican minorities. Republican candidates promise never to raise taxes; Democrats pledge myopic allegiance to environmentalists and militant public employee unions. The majority Democrat progressives must now take responsibility for California’s record unemployment rates, high business and personal taxes, labor union extortions and job-killing environmental regulations.For decades, partisan California eco-groups have contrived a utopian stew of environmental regulations that choke our economy – even before the chill of recession. The result is a tangle of costly and often redundant environmental regulations that punish innovation and prosperity, and impose ubiquitous increased costs of living and doing business. Such cost burdens fall most heavily upon those among us who can least afford them.
Before the recession, Californians naively approved the California Global Warming Solutions Act in 2006 (Assembly Bill 32) that mandates reductions of greenhouse gases associated with global warming through carbon taxes, alternative fuels and renewable replacements. All new climate regulations and mandates increase the unit production costs and corresponding consumer prices of all goods and services.
A study released this week by the Governor's California Small Business Advocate reports that small businesses paid more than $134,000 each in regulatory costs in 2007. Estimates are that the cost of California regulations neared $493 billion – the equivalent of 3.8 million jobs. Environmental regulatory costs are a significant embedded cost in all of California’s products, services and enterprise.
Environmentalists con you with the rhetoric of virtue, but are never held accountable for their destructive impacts under the critical criteria of economics, national security and scientific rigor. Chronic eco-group obstructions have reached a tipping point in the hysterics of global climate change in a time of global economic recession. Environmentalism has become the central front in the war against capitalism.
A freeze on climate regulations such as A.B 32, and their inherent costs, would assist California in economic recovery. California doesn’t need a green economy. California needs a growing economy.
Related Articles:
Comments
.jpg)
For about a decade, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri has been Chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Founded in 1997, …
.jpg)
The global green establishment gathers in Copenhagen Denmark this week with the task of coming up with a replacement for the expiring Kyoto Protocol …
