Sen. Chuck Schumer PHOTO: YURI GRIPAS/REUTERS
Chuck Schumer is poised to become the next Democratic leader of the Senate, and he’s already planning for 2017 when he expectsHillary Clinton will be President. To wit, the New Yorker is predicting that the political class might join hands and pass a carbon tax.
“If Hillary wins and we take back the Senate, I believe many of our Republican friends will say we’ve been starving the government for revenues,” Mr. Schumer told an environmental event on Capitol Hill according to the Politico website, “but many of them will not be for raising [income tax] rates.” So Republicans and Democrats will both be hunting for revenues and “you might get a compromise” over a new carbon tax, he added. “I think in 2017 people of both parties might come to that as the best way to fund the government.”
A carbon tax is the emerging fashion in Washington because it serves two goals: It collects heaps of revenue while raising the cost of energy from fossil fuels. The climate change worriers are eager to force business and consumers to use less oil and natural gas, and that means raising their price throughout the economy.
It’s amusing that Sen. Schumer thinks a federal government that spends nearly $4 trillion and 21% of national output a year is “starving” for anything. But then he knows that entitlements continue to grow unchecked and spending for ObamaCare is just getting started. The political pattern pre-Reagan had been that Democratic Presidents pass new entitlements and then Republicans would feel obliged to pay for them. Perhaps he figures Republicans will fall for that again.
Our view of a carbon tax is that it might be acceptable as part of a tax reform that eliminated—entirely—some current revenue source such as the payroll or corporate income tax. But we don’t expect to live long enough to see that day. A slippery compromise would trade a new carbon tax for a reduction in some tax rates, but the politicians would soon return to raising those rates again. The U.S. would be left with the current tax burden plus the new carbon tax—and a permanently larger government.
Mr. Schumer deserves credit for honesty in laying out his all too plausible scenario. Reporters and debate moderators should now ask every presidential candidate whether he or she supports a carbon tax—especially Mrs. Clinton, if she ever dares to take another media question. Americans can’t say they haven’t been warned.
