We like to say that we have the safest, most abundant, most affordable food and fiber supply in the world. But this isn’t just a boastful expression, it is a reality. Our farmers and ranchers are responsible for feeding folks living in our country and throughout the world.
But, cap and tax legislation threatens that safe, abundant and affordable food and fiber supply. The agriculture industry, as we know it, will not survive under the heavy burdens of a cap and tax policy.
This week the Agriculture Subcommittee on Conservation, Credit, Energy, and Research held two important hearings to learn more about the economic impact of climate change legislation. Despite the fact that the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed the Waxman-Markey climate change bill last June – a bill that I voted against—this is only the second time Members of the Agriculture Committee have had the opportunity to explore specifically the economic impact of climate change legislation on the agriculture sector.
Witnesses at the hearing included the chief economist from the U.S. Department of Agriculture as well as members of academia. They highlighted and discussed various studies that have been completed on the costs of cap and trade on the agriculture industry.
Although these studies make different assumptions or have different end results, the overwhelming conclusion from each one is that the cost to agriculture is real. Our farmers and ranchers have much to lose and very little, if anything, to gain.
During the hearing, Dr. Joseph Glauber from USDA said, “there is no question that agriculture is an energy intensive sector… [and] agriculture will be hit by higher energy costs.” Another witness, Dr. John M. Antle from Montana State University, testified that the current economic studies “have tended to under-emphasize the costs of adaptation” for farmers. Dr. Patrick Westhoff from the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute added that “the House-passed legislation would raise energy costs and this would translate into higher farm production expenses.”
It is expected that higher energy prices and higher operating costs will decrease farm income anywhere from $5 billion to $50 billion per year.
Dr. Glauber also testified that a cap and trade program would dramatically reduce livestock production by double digits by 2050, which is particularly alarming. If USDA’s analysis is true then U.S. agriculture will no longer be able to provide food security for the U.S. population, which is expected to grow by 130 million Americans by 2050.
What this all means for the American consumer is higher food costs or worse a dependency on foreign nations for our food supply. I believe we can find alternatives to cap and trade that will not have these overwhelmingly negative effects on our farm economy. We should be exploring these alternatives.
Meanwhile, a vote on the Senate version of a cap and tax bill is not expected until sometime next year. This legislation seems to be just as bad if not worse than the Waxman-Markey bill. I give credit to Oklahoma’s senior Senator, Jim Inhofe for pushing his Senate colleagues to have a deliberative debate on this issue.
My friends, the agriculture industry and rural America cannot afford the devastating economic effects of cap and tax. We must remain alert on this issue.
Frank Lucas represents Oklahoma’s Third Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives and serves as the Ranking Member of the House Agriculture Committee. For more Frankly Speakings, please visit Rep. Lucas’ at http://www.house.gov/lucas/frankly-speaking/index.shtml.
John Stossel left out an important aspect about jobs. What are the wages that are paid by Adidas in America? By outsourcing those jobs to China, it lowers the wages Adidas is willing to pay to American workers.
What good does it do to create jobs that pay minimum wage or just above, with no benefits?
John Stossel and the conservative philosophy of government getting out of the way will only turn America into a third world country.
Wrong Bruce. It is because they outsourced the jobs is why they can pay the big bucks here in America. Do you think that if the Big Three didn't outsource they would still be able to pay such high wages to their UAW workers?
Hey Bruce According to your World there wont be NEED for HIGH wages CAUSE LIBS will give Everything to Everybody! With the Redistribution of WEALTH EVERYBODY will be the Same. Same Mortgage Same Health Care Same type Green Cars Same Pay Hell your World there wont be NEED for ANYTHING but Government so whats your POINT?
Stossel is fantastic. Obama needed a jobs summit so somebody could explain the birds and the bees to him about where jobs come from. The Community Organizer in Chief still thinks the stork delivers jobs.
It is becoming increasingly likely – indeed, possibly inevitable without either massive public outcry, a little luck, or both – that Americans will get a massive lump of coal in their stocking for Christmas this year – in the form of Washington-run healthcare.
Sure, it is possible that Democrats will fail to pull together 60 votes – getting trapped between watering down the public option enough to earn yes votes from the Independent Joe Lieberman (CT) or (supposedly) Republican Olympia Snowe (ME), and keeping the public option strong enough to maintain yes votes from admitted socialist Bernie Sanders (VT) and like-minded liberals who refuse to admit they are actually socialist, such as Sherrod Brown (OH).
But, given the pressure coming from the President, the lack of response from Senate Republicans and a building compromise among liberal and moderate Democrats to hide (but not really eliminate) the public option under a “trigger” or an “OPM-managed” plan – the Senate may well pass a bill which Speaker Pelosi could take up and pass “as is” and send to the President to sign on Christmas Eve.
All of this is even more likely for one simple reason… it is Christmas. The American people have a funny way of actually focusing on family, friends, gift-giving and – oh, I don’t know – the birth of Jesus this time of year. In other words… all the good things – which means anything but what the fools in Washington are doing.
This Christmas, however, we owe it to those generations before ours who have passed down this great Republic to us, to those brave men and women fighting to protect our freedom overseas, and most of all, to our children and the generations to come, to pay attention… and to fight this healthcare bill with everything we have.
Have you called your Senator? Have you told a friend to call his? Have you called the office of Senators Lincoln, Nelson, Landrieu, Webb or any others and told them you will contribute to their opponent in their next election if they vote for the bill?
Failure simply is not an option. If this bill becomes law, it means:
Mandatory health insurance – or face jail time; Washington, D.C. bureaucrats have control over your healthcare and the lives of your family; Rationing of healthcare – including doctor shortages, waiting lines, and overuse of “free” healthcare; More expensive healthcare for everyone – especially the young and healthy; Bankrupting the U.S. Government (to the extent it is not already); Long term lower standards of care – in other words… less progress, fewer life-saving treatments, less life-saving medicine, less innovation…
No – what I want for Christmas is for the American people to rise up and say no to socialized medicine - and for Senate Republicans to have the courage to help them.
Prove it Bruce. Prove it prove it prove it. Where is the proof Bruce? Because you said so, I think we have established, only means that it is a LIE. Typical lieberal Hypocrat.
Wow, this Barack Obummer supporter is apoplectic about the lies that Obummer has been telling! BWAAAHAHAHAHA ... this guy is talking some sense, a rare thing for a Hypocrat:
Courtesy of the HuffPo: Robert Scheer Dear Barack, Spare Me Your E-Mails
Barack Obama's faux populism is beginning to grate, and when yet another one of those "we the people" e-mails from the president landed on my screen as I was fishing around for a column subject, I came unglued. It is one thing to rob us blind by rewarding the power elite that created our problems but quite another to sugarcoat it in the rhetoric of a David taking on those Goliaths.
In each of the three most important areas of policy with which he has dealt, Obama speaks in the voice of the little people's champion, but his actions cater fully to the demands of the most powerful economic interests.
With his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, he has given the military-industrial complex an excuse for the United States to carry on in spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined, without a credible military adversary in sight. His response to the banking meltdown was to continue George W. Bush's massive giveaway of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street, and his health care reform has all the earmarks of a boondoggle for the medical industry profiteers.
Health reform was the subject of Obama's Tuesday e-mail, which proclaimed in its heading, "We will not back down." Addressing me by my first name, which I assume is in acknowledgment that I, like the millions of other suckers with whom he so intimately corresponds, had contributed to his campaign, he began with a clarion call for yet another contribution, this time to donate.barackobama.com/FinalStretch.
"As we head into the final stretch of health reform, big insurance company lobbyists and their partisan allies hope that their relentless attacks and millions of dollars can intimidate us into accepting the status quo. So I have a message for them, from all of us: Not this time. We have come too far. We will not turn back. We will not back down."
But we, following him, have already backed down. Does the president not recall that he began his health care reform effort by ingratiating himself with the insurance lobbyists in taking "single payer" off the table on day one? The insurers are not really upset with what may survive as a minuscule public option, for they have won the big prize: Everyone must buy insurance from them under penalty of law, and there will be no built-in requirement for cost control. Their so-called opposition to the current plans has to do with fine-tuning the president's guarantee of their future profits.
The same contradiction between progressive rhetoric and big-business giveaways was on display, also on Tuesday, when Obama addressed the economic crisis. Speaking at the Brookings Institution, an Establishment think tank that helped craft the radical financial deregulation of the Clinton years, Obama blamed Republicans for the mess. He thundered against "an opposition party, which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that led to the crisis, decided to hand it over to others to solve."
Rubbish. It was Bill Clinton--in his trademark triangulation of progressive rhetoric with the big-business agenda--who presided over the passage of banking deregulation that led to the mess. Obama knows that full well because he laid out that sordid record in a major speech on economics during the primary campaign, in March 2008 at Manhattan's Cooper Union:
"Under Republican and Democratic administrations, we failed to guard against practices that all too often rewarded financial manipulation instead of productivity and sound business practices." He specifically cited the New Deal protections of the Glass-Steagall Act and other legislation that Clinton's radical deregulation legislation had swept away. Inexplicably as a matter of logic, or all too predictably given the political power of Wall Street, Obama as president turned to the same pro-deregulation Clintonistas to run his economic "reform," led by Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.
As for "solving" the banking problem, Obama simply followed the lead of his Republican predecessor. The throw-money-at-Wall-Street solution for which Obama takes credit is the one crafted by Bush's treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, and it was fully endorsed by then New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner, whom Obama named to replace Paulson. The buying off of the financial hustlers was blessed by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who has been renominated to that position by Obama.
The solution that Obama boasts of has left us with trillions more in debt, one out of four children poor enough to qualify for food stamps and, as Obama conceded in his Tuesday speech, "more than seven million fewer Americans with jobs today than when this recession began."
I do agree with one line in Obama's e-mail to those of us who hoped for the best from his presidency: "the opponents of reform will not rest." But I didn't expect him to be one of them.
Bruce why do you libs always blame others for what you yourselves do? You always question the source and then say it isn't credible. It sucks when someone plays the liberal rules for radicals game back on you?
Well Bruce, your source is fine if mine is. And please, spare me. You NEVER, until this very moment that is, provide a link or a source. You're a hack that way. WE always provide links, invariably without being prompted. We aren't afraid of the truth, or of having our facts held up to scrutiny, because we know they WILL hold up. Not like you libertard Hypocrats that live in a fantasy world.
http://mises.org/daily/2847
This is a long article, so here is part of the conclusion:
This truly massive body of material also suggests that the actual explanation for the stagnation in real wages is precisely an ever-growing burden of government intervention in the economic system. The intervention is in the form of policies that undermine genuine saving and in numerous other ways undermine capital accumulation and the rise in the productivity of labor. Personal and corporate income taxes, the inheritance tax, the capital gains tax, and government budget deficits — all entail the taking away of funds that, if left in the hands of their owners, would have been heavily spent, indeed, overwhelmingly spent, in the purchase of capital goods and labor services. Instead, those funds are diverted into financing the consumption of the government and those to whom the government gives money.
4:20 
We like to say that we have the safest, most abundant, most affordable food and fiber supply in the world. But this isn’t just a boastful expression, it is a reality. Our farmers and ranchers are responsible for feeding folks living in our country and throughout the world.
ReplyDeleteBut, cap and tax legislation threatens that safe, abundant and affordable food and fiber supply. The agriculture industry, as we know it, will not survive under the heavy burdens of a cap and tax policy.
This week the Agriculture Subcommittee on Conservation, Credit, Energy, and Research held two important hearings to learn more about the economic impact of climate change legislation. Despite the fact that the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed the Waxman-Markey climate change bill last June – a bill that I voted against—this is only the second time Members of the Agriculture Committee have had the opportunity to explore specifically the economic impact of climate change legislation on the agriculture sector.
Witnesses at the hearing included the chief economist from the U.S. Department of Agriculture as well as members of academia. They highlighted and discussed various studies that have been completed on the costs of cap and trade on the agriculture industry.
Although these studies make different assumptions or have different end results, the overwhelming conclusion from each one is that the cost to agriculture is real. Our farmers and ranchers have much to lose and very little, if anything, to gain.
During the hearing, Dr. Joseph Glauber from USDA said, “there is no question that agriculture is an energy intensive sector… [and] agriculture will be hit by higher energy costs.” Another witness, Dr. John M. Antle from Montana State University, testified that the current economic studies “have tended to under-emphasize the costs of adaptation” for farmers. Dr. Patrick Westhoff from the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute added that “the House-passed legislation would raise energy costs and this would translate into higher farm production expenses.”
It is expected that higher energy prices and higher operating costs will decrease farm income anywhere from $5 billion to $50 billion per year.
Dr. Glauber also testified that a cap and trade program would dramatically reduce livestock production by double digits by 2050, which is particularly alarming. If USDA’s analysis is true then U.S. agriculture will no longer be able to provide food security for the U.S. population, which is expected to grow by 130 million Americans by 2050.
What this all means for the American consumer is higher food costs or worse a dependency on foreign nations for our food supply. I believe we can find alternatives to cap and trade that will not have these overwhelmingly negative effects on our farm economy. We should be exploring these alternatives.
Meanwhile, a vote on the Senate version of a cap and tax bill is not expected until sometime next year. This legislation seems to be just as bad if not worse than the Waxman-Markey bill. I give credit to Oklahoma’s senior Senator, Jim Inhofe for pushing his Senate colleagues to have a deliberative debate on this issue.
My friends, the agriculture industry and rural America cannot afford the devastating economic effects of cap and tax. We must remain alert on this issue.
Frank Lucas represents Oklahoma’s Third Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives and serves as the Ranking Member of the House Agriculture Committee. For more Frankly Speakings, please visit Rep. Lucas’ at http://www.house.gov/lucas/frankly-speaking/index.shtml.
John Stossel left out an important aspect about jobs. What are the wages that are paid by Adidas in America? By outsourcing those jobs to China, it lowers the wages Adidas is willing to pay to American workers.
ReplyDeleteWhat good does it do to create jobs that pay minimum wage or just above, with no benefits?
John Stossel and the conservative philosophy of government getting out of the way will only turn America into a third world country.
Wrong Bruce. It is because they outsourced the jobs is why they can pay the big bucks here in America. Do you think that if the Big Three didn't outsource they would still be able to pay such high wages to their UAW workers?
ReplyDeleteTry for once to think outside the box.
ReplyDeleteHey Bruce According to your World there wont be NEED for HIGH wages CAUSE LIBS will give Everything to Everybody! With the Redistribution of WEALTH EVERYBODY will be the Same.
ReplyDeleteSame Mortgage
Same Health Care
Same type Green Cars
Same Pay
Hell your World there wont be NEED for ANYTHING but Government so whats your POINT?
Stossel is fantastic. Obama needed a jobs summit so somebody could explain the birds and the bees to him about where jobs come from. The Community Organizer in Chief still thinks the stork delivers jobs.
ReplyDeleteIt is becoming increasingly likely – indeed, possibly inevitable without either massive public outcry, a little luck, or both – that Americans will get a massive lump of coal in their stocking for Christmas this year – in the form of Washington-run healthcare.
ReplyDeleteSure, it is possible that Democrats will fail to pull together 60 votes – getting trapped between watering down the public option enough to earn yes votes from the Independent Joe Lieberman (CT) or (supposedly) Republican Olympia Snowe (ME), and keeping the public option strong enough to maintain yes votes from admitted socialist Bernie Sanders (VT) and like-minded liberals who refuse to admit they are actually socialist, such as Sherrod Brown (OH).
But, given the pressure coming from the President, the lack of response from Senate Republicans and a building compromise among liberal and moderate Democrats to hide (but not really eliminate) the public option under a “trigger” or an “OPM-managed” plan – the Senate may well pass a bill which Speaker Pelosi could take up and pass “as is” and send to the President to sign on Christmas Eve.
All of this is even more likely for one simple reason… it is Christmas. The American people have a funny way of actually focusing on family, friends, gift-giving and – oh, I don’t know – the birth of Jesus this time of year. In other words… all the good things – which means anything but what the fools in Washington are doing.
This Christmas, however, we owe it to those generations before ours who have passed down this great Republic to us, to those brave men and women fighting to protect our freedom overseas, and most of all, to our children and the generations to come, to pay attention… and to fight this healthcare bill with everything we have.
Have you called your Senator? Have you told a friend to call his? Have you called the office of Senators Lincoln, Nelson, Landrieu, Webb or any others and told them you will contribute to their opponent in their next election if they vote for the bill?
Failure simply is not an option. If this bill becomes law, it means:
Mandatory health insurance – or face jail time;
Washington, D.C. bureaucrats have control over your healthcare and the lives of your family;
Rationing of healthcare – including doctor shortages, waiting lines, and overuse of “free” healthcare;
More expensive healthcare for everyone – especially the young and healthy;
Bankrupting the U.S. Government (to the extent it is not already);
Long term lower standards of care – in other words… less progress, fewer life-saving treatments, less life-saving medicine, less innovation…
No – what I want for Christmas is for the American people to rise up and say no to socialized medicine - and for Senate Republicans to have the courage to help them.
Chris, are you smoking something. That's the most twisted logic I ever heard.
ReplyDeleteWages have been stagnant in real dollars for years and the fact that Chinese wages are affecting wages here and wages in Mexico is evident everywhere.
Look at the two-tier system in the UAW now. New workers are earning half what older workers are earning.
Prove it Bruce. Prove it prove it prove it. Where is the proof Bruce? Because you said so, I think we have established, only means that it is a LIE. Typical lieberal Hypocrat.
ReplyDeleteWow, this Barack Obummer supporter is apoplectic about the lies that Obummer has been telling! BWAAAHAHAHAHA ... this guy is talking some sense, a rare thing for a Hypocrat:
ReplyDeleteCourtesy of the HuffPo:
Robert Scheer
Dear Barack, Spare Me Your E-Mails
Barack Obama's faux populism is beginning to grate, and when yet another one of those "we the people" e-mails from the president landed on my screen as I was fishing around for a column subject, I came unglued. It is one thing to rob us blind by rewarding the power elite that created our problems but quite another to sugarcoat it in the rhetoric of a David taking on those Goliaths.
In each of the three most important areas of policy with which he has dealt, Obama speaks in the voice of the little people's champion, but his actions cater fully to the demands of the most powerful economic interests.
With his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, he has given the military-industrial complex an excuse for the United States to carry on in spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined, without a credible military adversary in sight. His response to the banking meltdown was to continue George W. Bush's massive giveaway of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street, and his health care reform has all the earmarks of a boondoggle for the medical industry profiteers.
Health reform was the subject of Obama's Tuesday e-mail, which proclaimed in its heading, "We will not back down." Addressing me by my first name, which I assume is in acknowledgment that I, like the millions of other suckers with whom he so intimately corresponds, had contributed to his campaign, he began with a clarion call for yet another contribution, this time to donate.barackobama.com/FinalStretch.
"As we head into the final stretch of health reform, big insurance company lobbyists and their partisan allies hope that their relentless attacks and millions of dollars can intimidate us into accepting the status quo. So I have a message for them, from all of us: Not this time. We have come too far. We will not turn back. We will not back down."
But we, following him, have already backed down. Does the president not recall that he began his health care reform effort by ingratiating himself with the insurance lobbyists in taking "single payer" off the table on day one? The insurers are not really upset with what may survive as a minuscule public option, for they have won the big prize: Everyone must buy insurance from them under penalty of law, and there will be no built-in requirement for cost control. Their so-called opposition to the current plans has to do with fine-tuning the president's guarantee of their future profits.
Part 2/2
ReplyDeleteThe same contradiction between progressive rhetoric and big-business giveaways was on display, also on Tuesday, when Obama addressed the economic crisis. Speaking at the Brookings Institution, an Establishment think tank that helped craft the radical financial deregulation of the Clinton years, Obama blamed Republicans for the mess. He thundered against "an opposition party, which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that led to the crisis, decided to hand it over to others to solve."
Rubbish. It was Bill Clinton--in his trademark triangulation of progressive rhetoric with the big-business agenda--who presided over the passage of banking deregulation that led to the mess. Obama knows that full well because he laid out that sordid record in a major speech on economics during the primary campaign, in March 2008 at Manhattan's Cooper Union:
"Under Republican and Democratic administrations, we failed to guard against practices that all too often rewarded financial manipulation instead of productivity and sound business practices." He specifically cited the New Deal protections of the Glass-Steagall Act and other legislation that Clinton's radical deregulation legislation had swept away. Inexplicably as a matter of logic, or all too predictably given the political power of Wall Street, Obama as president turned to the same pro-deregulation Clintonistas to run his economic "reform," led by Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.
As for "solving" the banking problem, Obama simply followed the lead of his Republican predecessor. The throw-money-at-Wall-Street solution for which Obama takes credit is the one crafted by Bush's treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, and it was fully endorsed by then New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner, whom Obama named to replace Paulson. The buying off of the financial hustlers was blessed by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who has been renominated to that position by Obama.
The solution that Obama boasts of has left us with trillions more in debt, one out of four children poor enough to qualify for food stamps and, as Obama conceded in his Tuesday speech, "more than seven million fewer Americans with jobs today than when this recession began."
I do agree with one line in Obama's e-mail to those of us who hoped for the best from his presidency: "the opponents of reform will not rest." But I didn't expect him to be one of them.
John, I'm sure you won't consider this proof, because no matter what source I quote you say it's not credible, but I'll give it a try.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.epipolicycenter.org/blm-stagnant_wages_and_rising_inequality.pdf
Bruce why do you libs always blame others for what you yourselves do? You always question the source and then say it isn't credible. It sucks when someone plays the liberal rules for radicals game back on you?
ReplyDeleteWell Bruce, your source is fine if mine is. And please, spare me. You NEVER, until this very moment that is, provide a link or a source. You're a hack that way. WE always provide links, invariably without being prompted. We aren't afraid of the truth, or of having our facts held up to scrutiny, because we know they WILL hold up. Not like you libertard Hypocrats that live in a fantasy world.
ReplyDeletehttp://mises.org/daily/2847
This is a long article, so here is part of the conclusion:
This truly massive body of material also suggests that the actual explanation for the stagnation in real wages is precisely an ever-growing burden of government intervention in the economic system. The intervention is in the form of policies that undermine genuine saving and in numerous other ways undermine capital accumulation and the rise in the productivity of labor. Personal and corporate income taxes, the inheritance tax, the capital gains tax, and government budget deficits — all entail the taking away of funds that, if left in the hands of their owners, would have been heavily spent, indeed, overwhelmingly spent, in the purchase of capital goods and labor services. Instead, those funds are diverted into financing the consumption of the government and those to whom the government gives money.