Posted on 04/09/2025 10:41:59 AM PDT by daniel1212
Ivy league MBA’s. Then all the other MBA who lemminged after them.
Everyone.
Consumers - happy if things are cheaper
Corporations - happy if profits are higher
Politicians (D or R) - happy if lobbyists support their campaigns and their stock portfolio improves
We all exploited cheap labor, regardless of working conditions. Out of sight, out of mind.
It fed a monster too.
Hey Grok. Which states tax carbon dioxide?
Grok:
As of April 9, 2025, no U.S. state has implemented a direct carbon tax on carbon dioxide emissions in the traditional sense—like a statewide fee per ton of CO2 emitted across all sectors. However, several states have adopted carbon pricing mechanisms that effectively put a price on carbon dioxide emissions, primarily through cap-and-trade programs rather than outright taxes. Here’s the breakdown based on the latest info:
California: Has a cap-and-trade program launched in 2013, covering about 85% of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions (including CO2). It sets a declining cap on emissions, and companies buy or trade allowances at auction. It’s not a tax per se, but it prices carbon—current allowance prices hover around $30-$40 per ton.
Washington: Implemented the Climate Commitment Act in 2023, establishing a cap-and-invest program. It caps CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions across major sectors (like energy and industry) and requires emitters to purchase allowances. Prices started at about $20 per ton and have risen since. Again, not a direct tax, but it functions as a market-based carbon price.
Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) States: This involves 11 Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states—Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia. RGGI, started in 2009, is a cap-and-trade system targeting CO2 emissions from power plants. Allowance prices have typically been lower, around $10-$15 per ton recently, though they fluctuate with auctions.
Oregon: Finalized rules in 2022 for a Climate Protection Program, which caps emissions from fossil fuel combustion (including CO2) and requires large emitters to reduce emissions or buy credits. It’s not fully rolled out yet, but it’s another cap-and-trade variant, not a tax.
Massachusetts (additional program): Beyond RGGI, it has a state-specific cap-and-trade system for power plants, running parallel to RGGI, with a stricter emissions decline out to 2050. It’s layered on top of the regional effort.
No state currently has a broad, economy-wide carbon tax like you’d see in countries such as Canada or Sweden, where emitters pay a fixed rate per ton of CO2. Boulder, Colorado, did have a municipal carbon tax on electricity from 2007 to 2012 (around $7 per ton, later raised), but it expired and hasn’t been replicated statewide. Proposals for outright carbon taxes—like Washington’s failed Initiative 732 in 2016—haven’t gained traction.
These cap-and-trade systems indirectly tax carbon by making emitters pay for allowances, but they differ from a direct tax because the price isn’t fixed by law—it’s set by market dynamics within a capped limit. Over 30% of the U.S. population lives in states with some form of carbon pricing, mostly via these programs. If you’re looking for a specific state or more details on how these work, let me know!
Trump wants to make the U.S. a manufacturing country again.
Manufacturing provided jobs at all skill levels and allowed us to advance through merit. It paid for our healthcare. The bigger the company, the better deals they were able to make with the healthcare company. We got sick leave, vacation time and retirement savings. California Manufacturing has dropped from 15.6% to 7.7% over the last 30 years. We are now a service economy. Computer related industries put Americans in debt with college loans so that they could hire foreign VISA holders that work cheaper and can’t easily change jobs.
The globalists decided that the U.S. had to limit their production of CO2 so that other countries could pollute indiscriminately and bring themselves out of poverty.
It worked for many countries.
We have the World Trade Organization and it is worthless. China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) on December 11, 2001. They had to commit to significant reforms—like reducing tariffs, opening markets, and improving intellectual property protections—to get in.
China has stolen our trade secrets, ignored our patent laws and won’t allow us to manufacture in their country unless they own 51 percent of the company. As our country shut down manufacturing, our country became reliant on solar and wind generators made in China.
American-made cars sold in China annually, as of 2023, is 150,000 to 250,000. That’s a tiny slice of China’s 26-30 million total vehicle sales yearly.
In 2005, THE EPOCH TIMES acquired a secret speech given by Defense Minister Chi Haotian to high-level Communist Party Cadres sometime before his retirement in 2003.
…
Chi Haotian said:
Our resources are in very short supply. The environment is severely polluted, especially that of soil, water, and air. Not only our ability to sustain and develop our race, but even its survival is gravely threatened, to a degree much greater than faced by Germany back then.
Anybody who has been to Western countries knows that their living space is much better than ours. They have forests alongside the highways, while we hardly have any trees by our streets. Their sky is often blue with white clouds, while our sky is covered by a layer of dark haze. Their tap water is clean enough for drinking, while even our ground water is so polluted that it can’t be drunk without filtering. They have few people in the streets, and two or three people can occupy a small residential building; in contrast, our streets are always crawling with people, and several people have to share one room.
…
Chi Haotian continued:
To resolve the issue of America we must be able to transcend conventions and restrictions. In history, when a country defeated another country or occupied another country, it could not kill all the people in the conquered land because back then you could not kill people effectively with sabers or long spears, or even with rifles or machine guns. Therefore, it was impossible to gain a stretch of land without keeping the people on that land. However, if we conquered America in this fashion, we would not be able to make many people migrate there.
Only by using special means to “clean up” America will we be able to lead the Chinese people there. This is the only choice left for us. This is not a matter of whether we are willing to do it or not. What kind of special means is there available for us to “clean up America”?
Conventional weapons such as fighters, canons, missiles and battleships won’t do; neither will highly destructive weapons such as nuclear weapons. We are not as foolish as to want to perish together with America by using nuclear weapons, despite the fact that we have been exclaiming that we will have the Taiwan issue resolved at whatever cost. Only by using non-destructive weapons that can kill many people will we be able to reserve America for ourselves.
There has been rapid development of modern biological technology, and new bio-weapons have been invented one after another. Of course, we have not been idle, in the past years we have seized the opportunity to master weapons of this kind. We are capable of achieving our purpose of “cleaning up” America all of a sudden. When Comrade Xiaoping was still with us, the Party Central Committee had the perspicacity to make the right decision not to develop aircraft carrier groups and focus instead on developing lethal weapons that can eliminate mass populations of the enemy country.
From a humanitarian perspective, we should issue a warning to the American people and persuade them to leave America and leave the land they have lived in to the Chinese people. Or at least they should leave half of the United States to be China’s colony, because America was first discovered by the Chinese. But would this work? If this strategy does not work, then there is only one choice left to us. That is, use decisive means to “clean up” America and reserve America for our use in a moment. Our historical experience has proven that as long as we make it happen, nobody in the world can do anything about us. Furthermore, if the United States as the leader is gone, then other enemies have to surrender to us.
Biological weapons are unprecedented in their ruthlessness, but if the Americans do not die then the Chinese have to die. If the Chinese people are strapped to the present land, a total societal collapse is bound to take place. According to the computation of the author of Yellow Peril, more than half of the Chinese will die, and that figure would be more than 800 million people!
Just after the liberation, our yellow land supported nearly 500 million people, while today the official figure of the population is more than 1.3 billion. This yellow land has reached the limit of its capacity. One day, who knows how soon it will come, the great collapse will occur any time and more than half the population will have to go.
1. automation
2. the development of the shipping container and the refinement of supply chains around containerized shipping
3. the enormous economies of scale in maritime shipping that make it cheaper to transport freight several thousand miles internationally than several hundred miles domestically.
Good summary! Also, a free market cannot exist in societies without a strong moral foundation. Freedom infers a moral foundation and is distinct and different from anarchy. Most are very confused about that nowadays.
Plus,
l: U.S. agrees to sell supercomputer to China, officials say Administration aims to embrace, not isolate, Beijing. By New York Times News Service UPDATED: October 24, 2018 at 6:41 PM EST
WASHINGTON — In a good-will gesture toward China, the Clinton administration has agreed to sell it a sophisticated $8 million supercomputer, senior administration officials said yesterday.
The decision is part of the administration’s strategy to embrace, rather than isolate, China despite disagreements over human rights, weapons proliferation and trade. The Clinton administration is determined to grab an ever-larger share of China’s market, the fastest growing in the world, and reduce a trade deficit that could exceed that with Japan by the end of the decade.
Even more significant for American business, the administration has also decided to lift the ban on important components for China’s nuclear power plants, such as generators, senior Commerce Department officials said. That could mean billions of dollars in sales for General Electric Co. - https://www.baltimoresun.com/1993/11/19/us-agrees-to-sell-supercomputer-to-china-officials-say-administration-aims-to-embrace-not-isolate-beijing
The mainstream media played a large part. They lauded the jobs leaving the US like it was a good thing. We are now an “information economy”, and the “smokestack industries” are leaving, they propagandized. We have a “peace dividend” (to squander after the fall of the Berlin Wall), they opined.
Spot on one of the major reasons they got greedy Detroit is the poster child of it.
Corporate Greed.
More profits, less costs.
Corporate Greed.
Yep, that “giant sucking sound” and they all laughed.
I saw it as a good idea. Maybe overall, in the long run it is.
Who knows?
Stupid owners, stupid stockholders, stupid lawyers, stupid unions, stupid press, stupid politicians, stupid American consumers, stupid environmentalists, stupid bureaucrats, clever competitive nations…..
I don't recall ever responding to one of your posts, but if you are going to continue with unassailable historically accurate comments like this, you can expect to see me often. Thanks.
I've been listening carefully to media accounts for any talking head to mention what you said. Crickets.
The unions started this ball rolling postwar and clung to their political protection racket even after advances in international shipping logistics, ever increasing environmental costs, and population moving to right to work states finally spoiled their rigged game. Unions are anti-free market and rely on veiled threats of violence and economic hostage taking. You get to buy products that they got paid to make at wage rates above what the market would pay, thus creating market distortions.
Trump's policy can succeed only to the extent that unionization never recovers to its 1950s-60s proportion of the labor market and doesn't swing the rust belt swing states back to blue.
Global free trade. Once the tariff barriers came down we exported American manufacturing jobs and imported Third World poverty.
Your stat seems to make my point if what survived globalization is 90% non-union.
All true. Bureaucratic bloat caused by the eternal culprit...government.
Everybody. The world changed.
Let’s start with the big push for more people to go to college in the 1960s. This pushed a lot of the workforce to move from seeking blue collar work to white.
Add in dramatic improvement in the global shipping industry making it much easier to move products around.
Then you get the 70s problems American manufacturing had, both at the execution level not making good products but also at the management level not recognizing changes in the market. American auto industry is where both of those were the most obvious with them not reacting to the fuel situation and refusing to high MPG cars, and also making a lot of just plain crappy cars.
Then of course you get the unions driving up American labor costs.
EPA regulations forcing cleaner manufacturing.
Also improvements in the global economy making America no longer the only important market, often times not even an important market at all.
Also insisting that software not be counted in the manufacturing segment. There are some good reasons for this, but also bad reasons. But the fact remains that software is probably our #1 export and it doesn’t land in a lot of the numbers.
Automation of course cost manufacturing jobs all over the world, but people only pay attention to “our” numbers.
If I put more time in it I could probably think of half a dozen more factors. But the simple fact is the world changed. And it’s not going to change back.
“The union boogie man died 30 years ago.”
Two words “Government unions”.
Sure most all union industries are dead or off shore, but we can’t kill the government or off shore it.
The biggest threat to your health, safety, and welfare is
the government!
Run by UNION employees.
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