Many Americans will pay 30 percent or more for their electricity and barely notice the difference, but for millions more, such as the members of the Navajo Nation, the Clean Power Plan will have farther-reaching effects, destroying jobs and harming families.
The EPA’s Clean Power Plan has been delayed by the U.S. Supreme Court. But, if the courts allow it to proceed, it will result in higher electricity costs, lost jobs, and a lower standard of living.
The industry is responsible for more than 2,500 of the highest-paying jobs in the Navajo Nation. These revenues represent the Navajo Nation’s ability to act as a sovereign nation.
Texas requires licensing for 33 percent of these occupations, but charges slightly more in average fees, $304, and quite a bit less in mandatory training, 326 days.
Short of ending federal funding for hundreds of programs, Congress needs to resist the urge to micromanage distant states, counties and cities and shift to block grants with few strings attached.
Using utility bill surcharges to fund government programs is a surreptitious way to tax, especially when elected representatives set up an autopilot system so they can avoid accountability at the ballot box.
It isn’t at all sustainable to assume that each new worker in the private sector could support one new government employee, much less three or four as is the case in Virginia and Maryland.
A new research report shows that just 12 policy mistakes at all levels of government add $546 billion a year in consumer costs.
As recently as 2012, the Institute for Justice ranked Texas as having the 17th-most-burdensome low-income occupational licensing requirements in the nation.
The bottom line is simple: colleges do no favors by admitting unqualified students in the quest for politically correct demographic balance.
According to the EPA’s own projections, this costly quest at remaking our power grid will reduce the global temperature by 18 one-thousandths of a degree Celsius by 2100 — well within the margin of error of wildly inaccurate models.
In the end, the Berlin Wall, the most tangible relic of the contest between freedom and the ideology of militarized collectivism, came down without a shot being fired on November 9, 1989.