Starving Baby Polar Bears Drowning Makes Democrats Angry
“The arguments of liberals are more often grounded in reason and fact.”
– Barack Obama
Boxer said she wanted to hold the hearing so she could take the temperature of Congress before she launches into crafting climate legislation.
So in other words the process from which democrats begin crafting policy that could result in trillions of dollars of impact to the US economy is not one of fact finding or even the debate of “facts” but a forum to express feelings about climate change.
I realize that in order to pass policy that requires taking things away from Americans that they like requires adding a little sizzle to the steak but reducing what is inarguably a very complex engineering and economic problem into inflammatory vignettes is not how good policy gets made. Similar tactics of simplistic rhetorical bludgeoning were used to pass Johnson’s War on Poverty. How did that work out?
2 comments:
Politicans aren't wonks. They leave the wonkiness to the wonks, because most of them are lawyers who have no real training in statistics, econometrics, or economics, and therefore would be nigh incapable of interpreting any study of sufficient nuance to be useful.
Sorry, just had to express my pessimistic thought of the day.
All policies are crafted to produce some beneficial outcome(Y). All policies have costs(X). It is the most basic duty of elected representatives to make such value judgments. One would expect a good policy to resemble X<=Y. Would the Kyoto protocol have achieved this? No one seems to know because the discussion was never allowed to go there. I doubt it though given the preoccupation with anecdotal vignettes by advocates of the policy intended to gloss over reasonable doubts.
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