It’s hard to know what’s going on in the heads of people who think that we could solve our problems if only environmentalists would ditch cap-and-trade in favor of a carbon tax scheme. Their basic point, that the kind of carbon tax proposal that policy wonks would dream up would be superior policy to the kind of cap-and-trade plan that would result from the compromises necessary to get 60 votes in the Senate, is very true. But by the same token, the kind of cap-and-trade proposal that policy wonks would dream up would be superior policy to the kind of carbon tax plan that would result from the compromises necessary to get 60 votes in the Senate.

People really should, my view, spend more time worrying about why it is that the U.S. legislative process involves doing such violence to policy proposals from a technocratic point of view. This is a big problem, and one that it would probably possible to ameliorate (though not eliminate) through procedural reforms.

But it is what it is. Switching the initial proposal around doesn’t change the basic realities. And that’s especially true because the initial proposals are actually extremely similar. On the one hand, you could tax people who emit carbon dioxide. On the other hand, you could sell permits to people who want to emit carbon dioxide. There’s a difference between these proposals, but it’s a very small difference. Once the sausage gets made, you wind up with a cap-and-trade plan that looks pretty different from that, but that’s because of the sausage-making process not because of any intrinsic features of the legislative proposal. Anyone who thinks a carbon tax would necessarily be simple ought to spend an afternoon looking into the corporate income tax.

Something I’ve heard a fair number of people complain about is that since Barack Obama took office the dollar has gotten a lot cheaper, or “weaker” as they say. This sounds bad to people, even though it’s probably a good thing under the circumstances. More to the point, it’s important to note the context:

Now if you know someone who spent all of 2007 and the beginning of 2008 lambasting conservative economic policies for destroying the value of the dollar, and then who felt that good things were happening to the economy during the fall and winter of 2008, as reflected in the rise of the dollar, then you know someone who’s a crazy crank. But he’s a crazy crank who’s earned the right to complain about Obama! But if you know someone who never mentioned the falling dollar in 2007, and never mentions today that the Obama-era “plummet” merely reflects a reversion to where things were before the financial panic, then you know a partisan crank.