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May 26, 2010
Volume 4, Number 21
In This Issue:
1) Republican Convention
2) Where's the Beef?
3) Who Supports Cap and
Trade?
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Republican Convention
 Scott Walker needed 60 percent of the delegate votes at last weekend’s state convention to win the Republican Party endorsement for governor. He got 91.3 percent.
Walker’s Republican opponent Mark Neumann garnered 1.8% of the delegate vote after giving a speech that included quotes from the Gettysburg Address and how his family’s first trip to Washington D.C. inspired him to public service. Neumann told delegates that his plan to turn Wisconsin around included cutting government spending to cut taxes and create jobs.
We were unable to find a copy of the Neumann speech online.
The Walker speech defined his approach to governance: “Don't spend more money than you have. Smaller government is better government. People create jobs, not the government.”
Taxing and spending, he added, requires discipline all but totally foreign to government today: “Our plan calls for reducing government spending and cutting taxes, not taxing you to kingdom-come and back with the promise of a discount down the road”
You can see the Walker Speech here.
Considering the ideas embraced by Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, what’s shaping up is a genuinely marvelous contrast in approaches. Wisconsin voters will have a clear choice and their best opportunity in a long time to say what they think government in this state ought to look like.
Where's the Beef?
 Remember when Democrats, seemingly overnight, concluded they could salvage their unpopular agenda by calling everything they wanted to do a “jobs bill?” Evidently a copy of the focus group report has reached the Barrett for Governor campaign.
Last week, Mayor Barrett unveiled what he called his “smart, ambitious agenda to create jobs and grow our state’s economy.”
That’s liberal campaign talk for “the wheezy non-starters that identify declining economies.”
Naturally, the most substantive proposal is targeted tax cuts, a ploy governments roll out when their revenue demands are hurting everyone and they need to negotiate favors for employers threatening to leave.
Predictably, Barrett’s tax credits lean toward green hallucinations like ”energy independence,” and the vibrant-sounding but undefined “construction to jump-start the projects we need to strengthen our economic infrastructure and create jobs now.”
Beyond that, the plan says Barrett will “jump-start job creation right now,” by moving “immediately to provide the kinds of assistance and incentives that businesses need to create jobs quickly.”
Why do we quote this meaningless jump-starting drivel? Because it’s a dead giveaway that whoever wrote the plan has either no idea what needs to be done or—more likely—no intention of doing it. Follow through on the plan would require shrinking government instead of expanding it.
“Tom knows that creating jobs will be his main job,” the plan says. Wrong. Others do that. The job for a governor is to keep government out of the way, not to peer over the shoulders of people who actually do create jobs to make sure they’re creating the ones endorsed in the Democratic Platform.
Who Supports Cap and Trade?
 Most businesses frown on policies that artificially inflate their costs—as a cap-and-trade policy for carbon emissions is plainly intended to do. But some in the energy business can afford indifference, if they believe regulatory agencies will allow them to recover those costs through higher rates. If, as in Madison and Washington, the regulators themselves promote the policies that drive up costs, the prospects of pay back for energy companies is good.
But there might be less subtle ways to obtain support for policies that initially appear burdensome. Early this month we saw a news release from NRG, the New Jersey-based energy producer, hailing the new Kerry-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill.
No surprise there; NRG is a member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a big business, with their own angles to cash in on policy mandates. The surprise was finding an announcement on the Department of Energy website that two months earlier the DOE picked NRG to receive $154 million in stimulus funds for a small carbon capture demonstration project.
Then we found a May 12 press release from Duke Energy praising Kerry and Lieberman. The very next day, another Duke press release announced the DOE was giving it $204 million in stimulus funds for grid modernization.
Undeniably, your tax dollars are going straight to organizations that lobby to raise your energy costs, but don’t let that confuse you. Duke and NRG’s enthusiasm for cap-and-trade is all about saving the planet.
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