WashACE Blog

Don't create artificial regulatory barriers to entry

Government regulation is often the source of concern for business, so it can be confusing when existing private providers of a service ask for government intervention.

The legislature seems poised to help soil and wetland scientists this year with SB 5225 and its companion HB 1313, which are both moving through in their respective committees with "do pass" recommendations.

In his opinion column this weekend Danny Westneat questions (cleverly and appropriately) the scientists' request. 

Government can place a heavy foot on the scales of fair competition, creating (intentionally or not) artificial and harmful barriers to entry.

Calling out the "sweet grandfather clause" in this legislation, Westneat writes: 

There may be a need to license workers in wetlands, just as there is in, say, hospitals. But this bill gives away its intentions in the fine print. First, it declares an emergency...then it exempts anyone already working as a wetlands specialist from having to take the certification test.

Opponents say the bill's added costs, unintended consequences, and expansion of government create confusion without solving the issues it attempts to address.

Greens priority would cost Lewis County 300 jobs

State revenues are slow, but environmentalists and healthcare advocates with their legislative partners, still want to tax more, layoff workers, increase energy prices, and jeopardize the rural economy of Lewis County area.

Katie Schmidt posted on the TNT political blog that a bill sponsored by Senator Phil Rockefeller (D, Bainbridge Island) would phase out TransAlta’s coal-fired plant in Lewis County by 2020. 

Environmental groups and healthcare workers said coal-fired electricity is too harmful to go on...

Workers at TransAlta and residents of Lewis County, though, pointed out that the plant provides about 300 well-paying jobs in an area plagued by unemployment...

TransAlta USA president, Lou Florence, said the plant pays an average salary of about $88,000 per year. According to the Office of Financial Management, the median household income in Lewis County is about $42,000 per year.

This is one of the environmental community’s top four objectives for this legislative session. 

Am I missing something?

Dedicated Taxes, Cap-and-Trade, I-1098 and the Plugging Budget Holes

We've seen it here. Lawmakers earmark taxes to fund popular programs, then raid the accounts when times get tough. I wrote about it early this year in this column.

Stateline.org has a cautionary report today about how states in the Northeast have used "cap-and-trade" revenue to supplement the state budget. It has to do with an auction of carbon credits.

The auction, a quarterly feature of North America's only working cap-and-trade regime for greenhouse gases, raised $80.5 million. It was the latest installment of a windfall that the ten states have largely committed to promoting energy efficiency.

 Lately, however, a few of the cash-strapped states have had other designs on the money. The same day as the most recent auction (June 9), New Hampshire lawmakers voted to take all of the state's expected $3.1 million share of the proceeds and use it to help plug a $295 million budget hole. That move came after New York and New Jersey had staged even bigger raids on cap-and-trade funds.

Reportedly, the raids have environmentalists queasy. Really. Join the club.

As Congress debates cap-and-trade legislation of its own, the RGGI raids would seem to confirm the fears of critics. ... Now, with three states stashing extra auction proceeds in their general funds, there’s evidence to support the view that cap-and-trade regimes amount to just another tax.

 

...Kenneth Green, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C., is not surprised to see the three states raiding the money. “There’s no such thing as a dedicated tax when the government has the money in its hands,” he says. “Congress makes the law and they also make the budget, so just because they say the money has to go somewhere doesn’t mean they’ll put it there.”

Just so. Remember that when the sponsors of the I-1098 income tax initiative claim the new money is "dedicated" to health and education programs. There's no such thing as a dedicated tax.

Good Reasons Not to Raise the Hazardous Substance Tax

Don't miss this op-ed in the Herald of Everett by Don Sorensen on the Hazardous Substance Tax. We've written previously on it (see here and here). Sorensen writes:

First, increasing the tax will increase the price Washington consumers pay for gas and diesel at the pump. This will hit low-income families, already struggling with the recession, extra hard. These increases will also hit many other businesses, from truckers to farmers to retailers...

Second, increasing the tax puts good, family-wage jobs at risk. Proponents are touting the new jobs that could be created by the tax...But they conveniently fail to talk about the existing good jobs threatened by this major tax increase. The Tesoro Anacortes refinery that I manage is a prime example. These are tough times for the refining industry and our continued viability would be put at risk by this massive tax increase.

Read the op-ed. This potential tax increase has long-term negative consequences for families and businesses in the state.

Environmental and Labor Agendas Reported This Morning

Unsurprisingly, they both think higher taxes are necessary.

In The News Tribune, John Dodge writes of a modest environmental agenda that doesn't look all that modest to me.

Once again, the state environmental coalition of 25 nonprofit groups will push a bill to impose a fee on petroleum products that contribute to stormwater pollution, which is the number one urban pollution problem in Puget Sound, said Dave Peeler, director of programs for People for Puget Sound.

That's a huge cost passed on to consumers and diverting gas tax dollars - calling it a "fee on petroleum products" doesn't change it's character - from highway construction. A bad idea in good times, it's a terrible idea now.

And the Washington State Labor Council released its 2010 agenda, not bothering to pretend that the WSLC ambitions are at all modest. While claiming to be "focused on jobs, jobs, jobs," it's mostly old wine in old bottles.

Some snippets drawn from the agenda, which I urge you to read in full. (BTW, they also like the "petroleum fee.")

    •    Opposing the deregulation of public services, including state liquor stores.
    •    Extending collective bargaining rights to teachers, musicians, interpreters, and child care workers, allowing them a voice in decisions in the workplace.
    •    Codifying rest and meal breaks, protecting the health and safety of workers.
    •    Filling the Washington’s state budget gap by closing tax loopholes and raising revenue, thus protecting critical services and institutions as well as 23,000 state employee jobs and an additional 14,000 private sector jobs.
    •    Repealing I-960 to allow legislators the opportunity to do the jobs they were elected to do: making decisions on how we finance state services and employment.
    •    Paying prevailing wages on all public-private partnership projects and federally funded projects, ensuring our tax dollars create quality jobs that create quality results.
    •    Requiring all corporations that receive state tax breaks to pledge that they are committed to creating jobs and economic prosperity in Washington state.
    •    Capturing $98 million in federal Unemployment Insurance modernization funds by extending unemployment eligibility to part-time workers and to workers facing undue hardship; extending 2009 U.I. stimulus package through 2010 ($45 weekly benefits and higher minimum benefits).
    •    Protecting vulnerable injured workers against unfounded attacks on the workers’ compensation system. 


Labor's "jobs agenda," then, focuses on making it easier to increase taxes, expanding UI benefits, opposing contracting out, battling workers' compensation reforms, pushing for more collective bargaining and workplace regulation, preserving the status quo for state workers and boosting employer costs.

How would an agenda focused on job destruction differ?

Economy Over Climate Change, 85-12

That's the finding of a USA Today/Gallup poll reported in SeattlePI.com.

Which do you think should be a higher priority for the Obama administration right now?

85% Improving the economy
12% Reducing global warming

At Publicola, Josh Feit consider the implications of the survey for the legislative session.

So far, the left’s agenda in Olympia this year seems more blue than green. When a supergroup coalition of lefties (dubbing itself Rebuilding Our Economic Future) showed up in Olympia last week to protest the budget, no environmental groups took the stage with the union members, health care advocates, education leaders, and financial aid students.

<snip>.

[Coalition spokesman Sandeep] Kaushik tells me that was an accident and the environmental community is part of the coalition that’s working out a platform and message on the budget.

I’m sure they are. But I do wonder if the issue that seemed to be the zeitgeist during the last half of this decade has suddenly been displaced in our state.

It wouldn't be the first time that fiscal reality forced a change in strategy and priorities. The public gets it.

More on the CRU Climate Scandal

Here's my column on the scandal spreading from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (England).

Events continue to unfold. On the Commentary blog, John Steele Gordon notes that Phil Jones, the CRU director, has stepped down pending an investigation, according to AP. And Michael Mann, he of the wobbly hockey stick, is under investigation at Penn State.

A geeky, but interesting, discussion on the software & IT issues at Dude, with Keyboard. (h/t Instapundit)

And, in Australia, as today's Wall Street Journal reports, proposed cap-and-trade legislation sparks a parliamentary revolt. 

Interesting times.

Change in Business Climate Needed

Don Brunell's Columbian column highlights an issue deserving much more attention: lawsuits filed over climate change.

Global warming is about to create an avalanche of lawsuits against the federal government and private industry.

He gives a number of frightening examples. Then this:

Congress is wading in as well. The 1,427-page energy bill passed by the House of Representatives gives enforcement powers over greenhouse gas emissions to "… citizens, states, Indian tribes and all levels of government."

Simply put, that means everybody can sue everybody.

His conclusion:

Ironically, all this litigation could end up harming the environment rather than helping it. Rather than face a future of endless litigation, companies that employ millions of Americans will simply move to countries with less stringent environmental regulations — and jobs will go with them.

If we are to have any chance of putting millions of Americans back to work, we need climate change all right. We need to change the business climate in this country to encourage, rather than discourage, employers to do business here.

Precisely right.

A Sampling of Writing on the Climate Change Scandal

I spent part of the holiday weekend working on a column on what some folks are calling Climategate, the release of thousands of emails and other documents revealing a pattern of bad behavior at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, England. (Having taken a vow to resist the "gate" suffix for political mischief and misdeeds, I'll just call it the climate change scandal.) As the holiday weekend wore on, the commentary and analysis piled up, along with great links to the leaked information.

The coverage in local papers has been limited, so I thought I'd put some of the best of what I'd read up here.

In the Wall Street Journal, Kim Strassel writes that the scandal has sunk any remaining prospects for Senate passage of a cap-and-trade bill.

One of the best headlines appears over a good WSJ editorial: Rigging a 'Climate' Consensus

Megan McCardle's Atlantic article points up the real problem with the climate science emails. She cites a perceptive assessment by CBS news reporter Declan McCullagh, widely viewed as having done the best MSM reporting on the scandal. This is from McCardle's post:

The emails seem to describe a model which frequently breaks, and being constantly "tweaked" with manual interventions of dubious quality in order to make them fit the historical data.  These stories suggest that the model, and the past manual interventions, are so poorly documented that CRU cannot now replicate its own past findings.

That is a big problem.  The IPCC report, which is the most widely relied upon in policy circles, uses this model to estimate the costs of global warming.  If those costs are unreliable, then any cost-benefit analysis is totally worthless.

The IPCC report she refers to is the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments. As McCullagh writes:

That report, in turn, is what the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged it "relies on most heavily" when concluding that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and should be regulated.

Then we discover that the raw data has been dumped, making replication impossible.

What's it all mean? IChristopher Brooker, in an op-ed for the Daily Telegraph, calls it "the greatest scientific scandal of our age," with science taking a back seat to ideology.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

Michael Barone frames the question appropriately.

The more interesting question going forward is whether European and American governmental, academic and corporate elites, having embraced global warming alarmism with religious fervor, will be shaken by the scandalous CRU e-mails. They should be.

My column is scheduled to run Wednesday.

McDermott's Effort To Breach Snake River Dams Threatens Jobs, Economy

Once again, Rep. Jim McDermott, D- Seattle, has called on Congress to remove four Snake River dams. Here's how Les Blumenthal frames its prospects for McClatchy.

... for the fifth time, the Seattle lawmaker has introduced legislation that likely will go nowhere, put his Democratic colleagues from Washington in an awkward position and sharpen the focus on Snake River dam breaching just as the Obama administration prepares its salmon-recovery plan.

I like that "go nowhere" part. AWB president Don Brunell explains the consequences in his weekly column. 

Without the dams, thousands of jobs would evaporate and an important food producing region would dry up, along with state and local government revenues. Power bills would jump again with the loss of additional hydropower facilities, which supply 70 percent of our state's electricity.

Thankfully, Gov. Chris Gregoire opposes McDermott's effort to remove the dams. She realizes that without the Snake River reservoirs, the region would become an arid wasteland.

What a strange distraction as the region continues to struggle with job creation and investment.