Friday, January 18, 2019

Statist Economists, Including All LIving Former Fed Chairs, Call for Carbon Tax

Fed chairs turned climate experts
A group of statist economists, including Fed chairs from Alan Greenspan to Janet Yellen, is endorsing a plan to "combat" climate change by slapping a tax on greenhouse gas emissions and then distributing the revenue to American households.

All living former Federal Reserve Board chairs and previous leaders of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers have signed on to a statement asserting that a gradually rising carbon tax is “the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary.”


"Global climate change is a serious problem calling for immediate national action," the group of 45 economists says in an essay published by the Wall Street Journal late Wednesday. As if members of this group understood climate science to any significant degree,

Of note, former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, who didn't see the Great Recession coming on his watch while he was Fed chairman, signed onto the piece indicating he thinks he knows more about climate change than economic policy.

“A carbon tax will send a powerful price signal that harnesses the invisible hand of the marketplace to steer economic actors towards a low-carbon future,” according to the piece. In truth, the only hand here is a crony hand.

If the statist group of high-level financial technocrats involved isn't enough to make you suspicious of the program, this should. The endorsed plan has drawn financial support from Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips and Exelon Corp.

At this point, it appears that the Republican-controlled Senate will stop passage on any such related legislation.

Here is the list of those who signed the document:
George Akerlof, Robert Aumann, Angus Deaton, Peter Diamond, Robert Engle, Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen, Oliver Hart, Bengt Holmström, Daniel Kahneman, Finn Kydland, Robert Lucas, Eric Maskin, Daniel McFadden, Robert Merton, Roger Myerson, Edmund Phelps, Alvin Roth, Thomas Sargent, Myron Scholes, Amartya Sen, William Sharpe, Robert Shiller, Christopher Sims, Robert Solow, Michael Spence and Richard Thaler are recipients of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Paul Volcker is a former Federal Reserve chairman.
Martin Baily, Michael Boskin, Martin Feldstein, Jason Furman, Austan Goolsbee, Glenn Hubbard, Alan Krueger, Edward Lazear, N. Gregory Mankiw, Christina Romer, Harvey Rosen and Laura Tyson are former chairmen of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan and Janet Yellen have chaired both the Fed and the Council of Economic Advisers.
George Shultz and Lawrence Summers are former Treasury secretaries.
-RW 



1 comment:

  1. Wonderful. Some of the most dangerous and naive famously known economists, who all happen to be dying within the next 30 years maximum, believe this would actually work.

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