Political Irony

Above all else, I believe in pragmatism. Laws and policies should be evaluated not by ideology, but by whether (or not) they work. As such, it has been very interesting to see results from things like marijuana legalization in (first) Colorado and now Washington state, or the availability of free or low-cost contraception on teen pregnancy and abortion rates in Colorado.

And here’s another one, but this time from Canada, and it is rife with irony. I’m sure most Americans don’t know it, but the current Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, is a conservative (similar in some ways to conservatives in the US). For example, he has repeatedly claimed that a carbon tax to fight climate change would “destroy jobs and growth”. Sound familiar?

There’s just one big problem. One of Canada’s largest provinces, British Columbia, has had a carbon tax for the last six years, and rather than being a “job killer”, BC’s economy has outperformed the rest of Canada over the same time. How? The carbon tax was designed to be “revenue neutral” — by law the funds raised by the carbon tax must be matched by cuts in other taxes (similar provisions have been included in carbon taxes proposed in the US). In fact, the province has cut more in income and other taxes than it has raised from carbon taxes. As a result, BC now has the lowest personal income tax rate in Canada and one of the lowest corporate tax rates in North America. And BC’s GDP is doing better than the rest of Canada.

And that doesn’t count the health and economic benefits from reducing pollution caused by burning fossil fuels.

How has the carbon tax done in reducing carbon emissions? Extremely well actually. Since the tax was enacted, fuel use in BC has dropped by a stunning 16%, while in the rest of Canada fuel use has gone up 3%. To put that in perspective, Canada’s Kyoto accords target was a 6% reduction in 20 years, but BC managed a 16% reduction in just six.

To borrow (and mangle) a phrase from Obama, I’m not against taxes, but I’m against stupid taxes. I think our taxes are completely wrong. We tax things that we should be encouraging, like income and sales, while not taxing things that we should be discouraging, like pollution and the consumption of scarce resources. A carbon tax that offsets income and sales taxes has always seemed like an good idea to me. It is heartening to see strong evidence that it actually works, with excellent results.

The state of Colorado has been offering free birth control to low-income women for over five years. The results?

Their teen birth rate dropped 40%.

According to the governor, “This initiative has saved Colorado millions of dollars. But more importantly, it has helped thousands of young Colorado women continue their education, pursue their professional goals and postpone pregnancy until they are ready to start a family.”

Even more interesting is that the teen abortion rate dropped 35% in the counties served by the program.

So can somebody explain to me why some groups that are trying to reduce abortion are also against all forms of contraception?

One of my favorite political blogs, Eclectablog, points out an interesting statistic:

When Bill Clinton left office and George W Bush was sworn in, the number of people without health insurance in the US stood at 38.4 million (a number which would have been zero if the Clintons had succeeded in passing single-payer health insurance). By the time Bush left office that number was 46.3 million, an increase of 20.6%, or nearly 8 million people. Most of this was due to Dubya’s Great Recession causing people to lose their jobs, and thus their health insurance.

But using numbers from a new Gallup Survey, between 10 to 11 million Americans gained health insurance in just the first half of 2014. And this includes only people who now receive health insurance for the first time.

That’s right. It took only 6 months for Obamacare to (more than) reverse the health insurance disaster from Dubya’s eight years in office.

So of course the GOP wants to take this away from us.

While it is probably way too early to make a definitive assessment, it has been six months since marijuana became legal in Colorado, and so far all the signs are looking good:

• Overall crime has dropped 10% from this time a year ago, and violent crime has dropped 5.2%.
• In the first four months, the state received over $10 million in tax revenue from retail sales.
• In addition, the state estimates it will save $12-40 million over the first year just by ending arrests for possession.
• Unemployment has dropped because of new jobs created.
• Polls show that a majority of the state residents think making marijuana legal was a good thing.

Libertarians should be rejoicing. Marijuana became legal and the sky didn’t fall. I expect that other states will follow suit, albeit slowly.