By Dennis Mitchell
I view this from a somewhat unusual position in that my professional history has two overlapping components as a Certified Public Accountant, and a Qualified Environmental Professional.
You would be surprised to learn how similar tax compliance and environmental compliance are, in structure and function.
First, the Supreme Court of the United States managed to add to the chaos yet again, by upholding the behemoth health care law as a tax; even though the government stated firmly and often, “It is not a tax!”
Further, it was a tax originated in the senate instead of the House Ways and Means Committee. The government had actually argued both for and against the bill as a tax, then incompetently chose the “not a tax” for very clumsy presentation before SCOTUS, only to lose the battle to the tax argument and inadvertently win the war of constitutionality!
All of this reminds of the voice of the famous actor Jim Backus as Mr. Magoo’s cartoon face is the government in action bumbling along while a trail of mayhem and destruction is in the wake.
Please, remember two things about this healthcare law, if - it is allowed to survive repeal: First, at least 16,000 new IRS agents will be hired to enforce this health law. Do your own math but this will add about $2 billion per year in the IRS budget. Spin it as you will, but your current health insurance premiums will accelerate even more, and, your access to medical care will deteriorate.
You will lose control of being able to plan your own future.
This scenario is a dream come true for collectivists who prefer serfs in bondage, rather than free citizens.
Second, in bad news for the week of infamy, we had another judicial failure with the Appeals Court concurrence that EPA can, and will, regulate greenhouse gases by means of the existing Clean Air Act.
Back in 2007 we had an absurd ruling of the Supreme Court in the case Massachusetts v. EPA - where a group of non-scientist justices remanded the case back to the EPA, requiring only that the agency review its contention that it has discretion in regulating carbon dioxide, then turning the case back to an inferior court.
I wonder if they realize their logic means oxygen would be a pollutant under the same criteria?
Although it has been buried by slick campaigns of obfuscation, the EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, stated unequivocally that agency will need to add 230,000 additional employees -just to handle the Greenhouse Regulation. This will add about $25 billion per year to the EPA budget. In case you think that number of 230,000 was a misprint, let me assure you this is the MINIMUM number they think they need to add to the existing 18,000 or so current EPA battalion. This will make up a full regiment for making war against productivity.
Isn’t it curious as to how we, as a country, became so disoriented both scientifically and legally?
Let me offer a possibility of the path to destruction that we have been on, and why it came to be.
Astrophysicist, Gordon Fulks, made me aware of a recent article about Antarctic ice shelves; the ones media people have been wringing their hands over for years. You know, the ones that are used to raise billions of dollars for various NGO’s in spite of the fact that net ice has increased.
In this case, it was the Fimbul Ice Shelf that was, with direct measurements, determined that it is not melting.
Fulks sent the article out to a large group of interested folks, as I suspect he is fairly sure (euphemism for “knew darn well from past experience”) the results would never show up for the public at large.
The article (derived from peer reviewed published work in the journal Geophysical Research Letters) exposes yet another example of contrived consensus position being bannered entirely without any measurement data- just presumptions. Instead, the “melting consensus” was based solely on modeling that was apparently designed to give a contrived answer to then be reported as fact. No data, no metric, no measurement, no facts, just a lot of hot air that was very much anthropogenic in origin. Now defenders of this voodoo warmist science will argue that this non-melting ice shelf issue was just one paper against a consensus of modelers. However, that one paper represents the only factual, real time, metric that exists… and yet it is considered less valuable that the wild guess from the cash gobbling global warming magicians.
The problem is - alleged consensus.
Alleged consensus is typical of what is substituted for science these days. Furthermore, it reveals something about how our judicial system has been steeped in this kind of nonsense. Garbage in-garbage out seems to be as true in the judicial world as in the scientific realm.
We now have generations of people (including law schools) who tend to accept politically designed model projections - without scientific data calibration! These fantasia models, via the media, have become surrogate facts, and the people (including the law students) are told authoritatively the issue is factual and settled. Those former law students have now become our judges. They may be great jurists of letters, but the numbers tend to elude them; much to our peril.
Everything from the smoke and mirrors of the middle 1990’s so-called federal surplus( which only existed in a most ridiculous Pollyanna projections), to irresponsible and outrageous claims by EPA about mercury (in spite of the real world measurements), to the absurdity of hockey stick run away global temperatures which have to be, in a covert fashion, continually moved ( for two decades now)further into the future. Why? Because of those pesky measurements that belie their Holy Grail models and endanger the mountains of cash generated by them.
We hear the green machine’s constant phony wail alleging oil or coal money is paid to independent scientists to arbitrarily (Their words, not mine!!) argue against their sacred modeling.
That’s a laugh, because mega-big bucks flow in the *AGW ever growing fountain of taxpayer cash!
The lack of any correlation for the carbon dioxide driven models is apparently not a problem for these people, for they rake in the cash by selling such snake oil.
A thoughtful financial retirement plan is also a model. However, just because your financial planner told you back in 1999 you needed to have Enron in your portfolio, is that any reason to believe him in the first place?
Secondly, why would you stick to that model projection when the facts turn out to be contrary?
There is a close parallel of believing in Anthropogenic Global Warming from models which have lacked any calibration from the real world of measurements, and betting your future on Enron. It takes the same kind of ethical lapse of the cash grabbers and confederacy of dunces.
So, what now grows in our petri dish of democracy is two-fold: Coerced science that applies only to futures that do not exist; and, rules for avatars… instead of real people.
We have a judiciary that because it appears to know little of the real world as it functions, recklessly applying fictitious facts to interpret law.
And that’s exactly how we got here.
The question is, will we have the courage to get out of this quagmire, or will we just sink into the muck?