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“History is made by intense, compact minorities,” says Washington Post columnist George Will, who believes that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) “and her squad or cohort have the energy in the Democratic Party. A lot of people say, ‘Gee whiz, I did not know Joe Biden was this far left. He’s not left, not a progressive, he’s a Democrat. And he goes where his party is being pulled.” Will says that starting in the mid-1960s, followers of Sen. Barry Goldwater (R–Ariz.) had the same effect on the Republican Party, eventually leading the recasting of the GOP as the party of small government and the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980.

In 1973, Will was a young academic coming off a stint as a Senate staffer when he began writing columns for National Review and The Washington Post. Since then he has churned out “6,000 or so” pieces (his count) on a weekly schedule, calling to mind the longevity and endurance of Cal Ripken Jr., who played more consecutive baseball games than anyone in history and whose work ethic was lionized by Will in his 1990 bestseller, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball.

Will’s newest book is American Happiness and Discontents, a collection of columns from 2008–2020 that covers the Great Recession and the Obama years to what he calls the crybaby presidency of Donald Trump and the rise of identity politics as a major force in contemporary America. Of special interest are his columns drawing complicated lessons from the World War II era, when the country triumphed over authoritarianism and genocide abroad even as it practiced racial apartheid at home. Will’s analysis of and love for America is unabashedly patriotic but it is never jingoistic or untroubled by tough historical truths.

Though he started out firmly on the conservative right, Will has become more and more libertarian, especially in his insistence that mere politics should never be the all-consuming passion of human endeavor and that America remains a place dedicated to a future that is better than the present. “If we can rein in our appetite for government to dispense benefits,” he says, and replace it with a government “that defends the shores, fills the potholes, and otherwise gets out of the way, we’re going to see again, the creativity of the American people.”

Photo Credits: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash; Reason, 1978; Photo by Luke Stackpoole on Unsplash; Albin Lohr-Jones/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Albin Lohr-Jones/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Jeff Malet Photography/Newscom; Steve Sanchez/Pacific Press/Newscom; GEORGE BRIDGES/KRT/Newscom; Jeff Malet Photography/Newscom; William Reagan/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Everett Collection/Newscom; Tom Williams/Roll Call/Newscom; Roger L. Wollenberg UPI Photo Service/Newscom; 1987 Commercial—Mrs. Smith’s “Pie in Minutes”; Photo by Nelson Ndongala on Unsplash

Music Credit: “December,” by Still Life

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Our Kind of People. Fox. Tuesday, September 21, 9 p.m.

Two ancient and thoroughly regrettable television themes recur tonight as broadcast TV’s anemic fall roll-out of new shows continues. One is the inexplicable CBS affection on dullard police-procedural shows about the FBI. The addition of FBI: International makes three of them on the air at the moment. Advance screener episodes weren’t provided to critics, so I can’t say with absolute authority that it’s a dog—but anytime a network turns down free publicity for one of its shows, it’s a strong indicator of canine DNA.

The other elderly chestnut being reroasted tonight is that of costume dramas about the tragic problems of the one-percenters. From Dallas to Downton Abbey, from Succession to Billions, TV keeps trying to expand upon F. Scott Fitzgerald’s oh-so-insightful remark, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” (Rather less effort has been expended on Ernest Hemingway’s rejoinder, “Yes, they have more money.”) This has mutated from a trend to an obsession: There’ve been five versions or spinoffs of Beverly Hills 90210, four of Dynasty, and various incarnations of Upstairs, Downstairs tyrannized the BBC for more than four decades.

Admittedly, some of these expeditions into gilt and glitter have been fun. I watched both The O.C. and the original Gossip Girl to their Jordache-ripping finales. Alas, Fox’s new addition to the genre, Our Kind of People, doesn’t quite rise (or is it sink?) to that level. Its main appeal is novelty—the show’s cast is entirely black. That may win it some audience loyalty, but better plotting and more interesting characters would have been a better approach.

Fox’s publicity for the show says it’s based on Lawrence Otis’ sociological study Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class. Actually, a more direct influence was probably ABC’s 2011-2015 drama Revenge, in which a trailer-trash teenager infiltrates the idle-rich beach resorts of the Hamptons to wreak bloody havoc on a family she thinks framed her father for a crime that sent him to prison.

The infiltrator in this case is Angela Vaughan (Yaya DaCosta, a veteran of all three of Fox’s Chicago-brand cop and medical dramas), who plays an aggressive black hair-care entrepreneur who comes to the posh black beach resort of Oak Bluffs in Martha’s Vineyard in hopes of joining an influential business sorority that will help her launch her new products. Vaughan claims her mother used to be a plutocratic summertime regular in the Bluffs, though the ladies know better: The mom was actually a maid with a rap sheet.

That runs Vaughan head-on into the new president of the sorority, corporate ball-buster Leah Franklin-Dupont (Nadine Ellis, BET’s Let’s Stay Together), who has just ruthlessly ousted her own father from the family business. Put off by Vaughan’s naked ambition and correctly sensing that her own family is somehow a target, Franklin-Dupont accelerates into full bitch mode in record time.

There are plenty of annoying distractions in Our Kind of People, particularly the heavy and pointless use of 1970s cop-show camera gimmicks like wipes and split screens. It can also feel more than a little schoolmarmish. Is it really necessary for Vaughan to deliver a lecture on the ethnic importance of hair care (“A black woman’s relationship with her hair starts well before she can even walk”) directly into the face of Franklin-Dupont—who is herself black? And a lot of Vaughan aphorisms are just plain idiotic, like “A woman who can do her own hair is not dependent on anybody.” Try telling that to somebody in the middle of a blood transfusion.

But mostly the problem with Our Kind of People is its silly parlor-game sensibility. A woman with a zillion-dollar new process for black hairdos would rushing it into the marketplace rather than trying to muscle her way into the Cool Girls Club. As Alexis Colby once said when an enemy called her a bitch, “If I am, take a lesson from me. You may need it in life.”

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Taxing vacant homes as a means of improving housing affordability is a hot idea right now, despite mounting evidence that it wouldn’t do much good.

Earlier this month, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—whose Liberal party is coming out ahead in yesterday’s parliamentary elections—tweeted that “houses shouldn’t sit empty when so many Canadians are trying to buy a home. So, we’re going to ban foreign ownership in Canada for the next two years, and tax the existing vacant, foreign-owned properties.”

Houses shouldn’t sit empty when so many Canadians are trying to buy a home. So, we’re going to ban foreign ownership in Canada for the next two years, and tax the existing vacant, foreign-owned properties.

— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) September 7, 2021

That national tax would duplicate local measures in Canada. In 2016, Vancouver, British Columbia, became the first city in North America to impose a tax of 1 percent of a property’s assessed value on empty homes. This year, the tax increased to 3 percent.

Here in the U.S., a number of California cities have adopted or are considering adopting vacancy taxes. Oakland voters approved a vacancy tax in 2018, which charges the owners of empty or undeveloped properties between $3,000 and $6,000 a year. The Los Angeles City Council will put a vacancy tax on the 2022 city ballot.

The idea behind these vacancy taxes is two-fold. First, the financial penalty would incentivize the owners of empty homes—supposedly real estate speculators holding out for higher rents—to put their properties on the market. Second, the revenue from the tax could then be spent on affordable housing programs.

A vacancy tax “would help deter speculative vacancy, mitigate the harms of speculative real estate investment, and deliver necessary financial resources for community-centered programs to address evictions, housing instability, and houselessness,” reads a 2020 report from a coalition of Los Angeles social justice groups.

Yet a new report published on vacant properties in San Diego—one of the cities that is now considering a vacancy tax—suggests that any levy on empty units would do little to raise revenue or boost housing supply.

That report, published by the city’s Housing Commission (SDHC), used utility records to determine how many units in the city were left vacant for six months or more. (The study considered a unit unoccupied if its utility usage fell three standard deviations below a 60-month average.)

The SDHC obtained gas and electric records for 468,352 individual units from 2014 to 2019. During those five years, between 1,500 and 3,700 units were vacant for six months or more, giving the city a long-term vacancy rate of between .32 percent and .79 percent.

When examining water records, the SDHC study found 2,183 out of 252,324 units were potentially vacant for six months or more—a vacancy rate of .85 percent.

Contrary to what some politicians think, there isn’t a mass of hoarded homes that would be pushed onto the market by a vacancy tax.

We can see this in the performance of Vancouver’s vacancy tax too. Bloomberg reported in August that the city had hoped its vacancy tax would affect 10,000 empty or “underutilized” units in 2017, but discovered only 2,538. The number only fell by 625 units over the next two years—which the authors call “a rounding error in a housing market of nearly 200,000 properties.”

The tax is credited with encouraging condominiums to be converted to long-term rentals. Nevertheless, rents in the city have continued to rise.

Indeed, if one wants to see housing affordability improve in hot real estate markets, more vacant units would be something to shoot for. The collapse in rents in ultra-expensive cities during the worst of the pandemic is closely linked to a rising number of empty units.

That’s a phenomenon that predates the pandemic.

“Although the relationship is imperfect, there is a clear trend to the data: higher vacancy rates are associated with lower [rent] inflation,” wrote Nicolas Buffie in a 2016 article for the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “The concept here is relatively simple: when a large number of rentals are vacant, rentiers must set prices relatively low in order to compete for potential renters.”

Taxing vacant units is obviously politically popular. It’s easy for politicians to make a scapegoat of real estate speculators or absentee foreign buyers.

But leaders interested in more than demagoguery should consider trying to boot affordability through expanding the supply of new vacant units, which will put downward pressure on prices across the board.

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If you got your pediatric COVID news from New York Times science and public health correspondent Apoorva Mandavilli, you might be under the mistaken impression that (as Mandavilla asserted Monday) “the reopening of schools has fueled the [recent] surge,” and that “children are as likely as adults to transmit the virus to others, and more likely to do so than adults older than 60.”

Neither of these claims are supported by the evidence.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the rise in U.S. COVID hospitalizations began on June 28 (when the rate was at 0.56 per 100,000 residents), or precisely when most schools were closed for the summer. The rate then steadily climbed to 3.73 per 100,000 on August 27, at which point three-quarters of K-12 schools had flung open their doors. Now that the remaining 25 percent of schools have started the 2021-22 school year, hospitalizations are steadily sinking, down to 2.94/100,000.

As for children being “as likely as adults,” and more likely than senior citizens, to transmit the virus, that sentence would be balderdash even after inserting the woefully missing qualifier “infected.” As the CDC lays out in its school recommendations, students, proportionately, are not the ones spreading COVID inside school buildings: “[S]taff-to-staff transmission is more common than transmission from students to staff, staff to student, or student to student,” the agency noted. “Findings from several studies suggest that SARS-CoV-2 transmission among students is relatively rare.”

Mandavilli’s shoddy article, dissected at hyperlinked length in this Twitter thread, deployed such pediatric scaremongering in the service of adding outside pressure to the Food and Drug Administration process of approving under-12 vaccinations. But a more accurate depiction of COVID and schools could be used to fix a policy error that’s negatively affecting families right now: excessive school quarantine policies.

As has been clear since August, the single most important dataset involving kids and COVID would be coming out of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), which is testing a half-million combined students and staff each week, regardless of vaccination status, at a cost of $350 million in 2021-22. Far from fueling any surge, let alone showing evidence of “superspread,” these numbers overwhelmingly indicate that schools are safe and being overcautious.

The “baseline” rate of infection, taken from the two weeks before school, was 0.8 percent for students, 0.6 percent for staff. From that low starting point it has inched steadily down, as have pediatric hospitalizations, and overall community spread. No fuel, no surge.

To the contrary. A study released on September 16 by Los Angeles County contains two remarkable findings: 1) Students, most of whom are not vaccinated, have a lower positive rate than teachers and staff, most of whom are. And 2) the positive test rate among students who are quarantined because a classmate tested positive is a microscopic 0.2 percent. Here is the relevant section:

In K-12 school settings countywide, between August 15 and September 13, 7,995 student cases and 1,193 staff cases were reported, with the vast majority occurring at LAUSD, which tests everyone weekly. With more than 1.5 million students and 175,000 staff countywide (by last year’s counts), 0.5% of the student body and 0.7% of staff have become infected since school districts reopened. This is slightly higher than the 0.4% rate of infection experienced overall in the County. Given the massive testing of asymptomatic individuals at schools, this very low rate of infection affirms the safety provided to students and staff at schools.

Close contacts that are not fully vaccinated, are subject to quarantine for up to 10 days after exposure to a case. Between August 15 and September 13, 15,655 student contacts and 1,056 staff contacts have been reported, with an additional 22,650 close contacts of unknown status reported, most of them suspected to be students. In total, nearly 2% of all staff and students countywide have been identified as a close contact of a case. Data to date indicates that very few of the identified close contacts have subsequently tested positive. As of last week, among the almost 30,000 people quarantined, 63 tested positive; this amounts to an overall secondary attack rate of 0.2%.

(Note: L.A. County, with its 88 cities, is home to 10 million people, 4 million of whom live in Los Angeles proper. The LAUSD includes some kids from outside city limits, and educates a bit more than 40 percent of the county’s students overall. Also, Southern California governance is a confusing mess.)

In response to this overwhelmingly good news, the county has announced a “modified quarantine” system, whereby potentially exposed students can stay in class if they are asymptomatic and test negative twice within the ensuing seven days. This “test to stay” protocol treats quarantining as a problem more of information than infectiousness, while acknowledging the educational inadequacies and familial disruptions of remote learning.

Such insights, perhaps coupled with anxiety over declining (albeit aggressively unreleased) enrollment numbers, prompted New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to announce Monday that unvaccinated asymptomatic kids will no longer have to automatically quarantine after exposure, in part because testing of the non-vaxxed will be ramped up to weekly. “We saw enough quarantining that we thought this is something we want to get ahead of, and make sure that only those who really need to quarantine are quarantining,” de Blasio said.

In both NYC and L.A., the biggest critics of the test-to-stay policy change are the same who did the most to keep public schools closed for most of 2020-21: teachers unions.

“We strongly disagree with the mayor’s plan to limit the quarantine process only to some children rather than an entire classroom,” New York’s United Federation of Teachers (UFT) tweeted yesterday. “Children—particularly the youngest who are most vulnerable to the Delta variant—need more protection than the Mayor is offering with this recent, ill-considered decision.”

United Teachers Los Angeles, meanwhile, has not indicated whether it will agree to L.A. County’s modified quarantine policy, even though the district is alone among all big-city systems in mandating vaccines for all eligible students.

It is astonishing, at this very late date, that so many Americans are unaware what an outlier the United States is on school reopening and masking young children. It is appalling that people who certainly know better, such as the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy Director Michael Osterholm, are saying such scaremongering nonsense as, “the fact of the matter is that this is killing kids right now at a rate much, much, much higher than our worst severe influenza years.” (The 2017-18 flu season killed an estimated 172 children in five months; COVID has killed 146 children since April.)

And it is a miserable reality, if no longer quite surprising, that some elite journalists have done such a piss-poor job giving families and policymakers usable, contextual, and numerate information on which to base crucial decisions. At some point this school year, test-to-stay policies will replace excessive quarantining in all but the most union-dominated of districts. When our kids’ 18-months-and-counting nightmare finally comes to a close, here’s hoping a whole bunch of adults take a good long look in the mirror.

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When Democrats took control of Congress earlier this year, there was a lot of talk about ending the legislative filibuster. Broadly speaking, the argument was that the filibuster gave a recalcitrant GOP minority the power to block policy changes favored by the majority party. 

Looked at one way, the situation in the 117th Congress was ripe with possibility for the left: Democrats had won 50 seats (including Bernie Sanders, an Independent) in the upper chamber, plus a tie-breaking vote from the vice president—a narrow but clear majority. But the Senate procedural rule, in current usage, effectively requires a 60-vote supermajority to pass legislation, which in this case would necessitate finding 10 Republican votes along with a unified Senate Democratic caucus.  

The reconciliation process, which allows for the passage of some legislation with a simple majority, offered some exceptions, but those exceptions were subject to various rules and requirements themselves—notably that reconciliation bills could only consist of provisions germane to the budget, which put certain sorts of social legislation off limits. But Democrats argued that the particulars of this process were tilted toward Republican priorities, like tax reductions, and that the underlying situation was inherently undemocratic. 

If Democrats scrapped the legislative filibuster, reconciliation rules would no longer apply. They would be able to pass any legislation they wanted with a simple majority. 

You can see how this notion appealed to a certain sort of seize-the-moment progressive, in that it presented a huge opportunity for sweeping change without having to negotiate with Republicans. During the Trump years, progressives had solidified control of much of the party’s political infrastructure, and they had an expensive, expansive wishlist for the next administration. Eliminating the legislative filibuster was seen as an aggressive power play—a way to advance the agenda by ditching old, supposedly broken rules and norms. 

But as it turns out, the primary obstacle to the Democratic party’s agenda this year isn’t Republicans, and it isn’t the filibuster. It’s moderate Senate Democrats—most notably Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W. Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D–Ariz.), but perhaps a handful of others as well. 

Following the passage of the roughly $2 trillion American Recovery Plan in March, Congress has been locked in a debate about a pair of bills that are best thought of as a pair of linked pieces of legislation. Recovery funds aside, these two bills represent, in a real sense, the entirety of the Biden administration’s first term domestic policy agenda. 

The first is a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that calls for about $550 billion in new spending. For better or for worse, this bill has clear bipartisan support in the Senate. 

The second is a $3.5 trillion package that is still taking shape, but in all versions is heavy on social spending. This bill is being moved through the reconciliation process, meaning it is intended to pass entirely with Democratic votes—which in this case would mean that every single Democratic senator would have to sign on to the entire package. In other words, either every Democrat in the Senate agrees on everything, or nothing passes at all. 

The all or nothing nature of this proposition was always going to make this an arduous negotiating process, since any one Democratic senator could conceivably kill the bill.  

But the widespread assumption throughout most of the year was that eventually they would come together on something that roughly resembled the $3.5 trillion plan that the Biden administration had put forth—perhaps at a slightly lower topline number, perhaps with some funding levels and priorities tweaked around the edges. But since no Democrat would get anything unless they all agreed on something, the expectation amongst Congress-watchers and insiders alike was that something would eventually pass. 

But within the last week or so, that’s become far less certain. A large reconciliation bill may still pass, either this year or next, but it no longer seems quite as guaranteed. And the reason is that it’s less and less clear that Manchin and Sinema will sign on at all. 

Manchin recently called for a “strategic pause” and reportedly even suggested in semi-public remarks that he would like to see the reconciliation bill put on hold until 2022. That’s not quite a rejection of the bill. But a months-long pause would sap its momentum and create time for intra-party disagreements to fester. 

Sinema, meanwhile, has said she simply won’t support a bill at $3.5 trillion, bucking progressive Democrats who already view $3.5 trillion as far too small a package. She also reportedly doesn’t support the prescription drug price controls that are currently in the mix. 

Without Sinema or Manchin on board, no reconciliation bill can pass. Their votes—and their demands—will determine its final shape, or if it even passes at all. 

I have said all along that this would be like the Obamacare votes, where everyone had seemingly incompatible demands but caved at the end. I am less sure today. https://t.co/D2SCGCW3Rd

— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) September 20, 2021

And while Sinema and Manchin are the public faces of the opposition, they are probably not alone. It is reasonably likely that there are at least a few other Senate Democrats who are privately uncomfortable with the current bill as well, but who don’t want to be as outspoken about it. 

This brings us back to the filibuster. The problem that eliminating the legislative filibuster would solve is that the filibuster institutes an effective 60-vote threshold in the Senate, giving Republicans the ability to block legislation that could garner 50+1 votes from a Democratic majority. 

But the problem that Democrats have right now isn’t Republicans or Senate procedure. Instead, it’s that they’re having trouble mustering even a simple Senate majority from within their own party. Perhaps in a world without a filibuster, Democrats could pass some chunks of the reconciliation package on party-line votes, but that still returns us to the central issue: Senate Democrats can’t agree amongst themselves on their own agenda. There may not even be a simple majority for everything President Biden and Congressional Democrats want to do. 

The push to end the filibuster was always a power play by the ascendant Democratic left, who have come to view themselves as both purveyors of a broadly popular policy agenda and the rightful owners of the entire Democratic party political apparatus. 

While it is true that progressives have amassed considerable influence within the party in recent years, and the party as a whole has by most measures moved distinctly to the left, especially on economics, Democrats remain far from unified on these issues. 

The slimness of the Democratic majorities in Congress, meanwhile, suggests the limitations of the party’s broad appeal. Democrats, it’s worth remembering, actually lost seats in the House last fall, and only squeaked out 50 seats in the Senate by winning two unlikely runoff races in Georgia—races they might not have won had former President Donald Trump spread rumors of election malfeasance that likely depressed GOP turnout.  

Yes, Democrats won control of both chambers fair and square, but their victory was hardly overwhelming, and did not necessarily suggest a definitive public mandate for the sort of ambitious “cradle to grave” social spending agenda that the $3.5 trillion represents.

So at least where this year’s reconciliation bill is concerned, this is not really a story of undemocratic Senate rules or GOP obstructionism. It’s a story of progressive overreach. 

The filibuster, then, was a convenient scapegoat for the party’s legislative troubles; the real problem, it increasingly seems, is that even amongst their own, there may not be enough support.

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A new paper from the Niskanen Center explains why “carbon pricing” is a better way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than traditional emission control regulations. As study authors Suting Pomerlau and Ed Dolan explain, setting a price on carbon (such as through a tax) allows for the more efficient reduction of greenhouse gas emissions because the costs of emission reductions can vary widely across sources. The result is more cost-effective emission reductions and the imposition of fewer constraints on economic dynamism. Moreover, carbon pricing regimes more readily accommodate changes in technology over time than do centralized regulations.

One common complaint about carbon pricing, and a carbon tax in particular, is the potential regressive effect of increasing energy prices. Yet as Pomerlau and Dolan note, such regressive impacts can be readily addressed by rebating carbon tax revenues.

While the potentially regressive effects of carbon pricing are widely discussed, there is relatively little attention paid to the regressive impacts of other proposed greenhouse gas policies. As Pomerlau and Dolan note:

On purely theoretical grounds, there is no reason to believe that the impacts of environmental regulations are any less regressive than those of a carbon tax. Since regulations tend to raise the cost of doing business, they can be expected to raise prices of goods, with a disproportionate impact on the purchasing power of low-income households.

While traditional regulatory measures of greenhouse gas emitters are also likely to increase energy prices, such measures do not generate a revenue stream that could be rebated to offset the potentially regressive effects. Thus it is a mistake to assume that carbon pricing is more regressive than regulatory alternatives.

Another reason to prefer carbon pricing to traditional regulations is that carbon pricing is easier to adopt and less vulnerable to legal challenge and delay. As I explain in this paper (originally published by the Niskanen Center as well), traditional regulatory approaches to greenhouse gas emission control face substantial legal and administrative obstacles, even if expressly authorized by Congress.

Where I differ with Pomerlau and Dolan is with the extent to which they characterize carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems as largely equivalent approaches. This is common in the economic and political science literature, but I believe it is a mistake. While price and quantity instruments can be modeled as equivalents, they are quite different in operation and in terms of political economy. While Pomerlau and Dolan acknowledge some of the differences, I think they understate the reasons why one approach (a carbon tax) is vastly preferable to the other (emission trading).

Supply constraints, such as those that are created for tradeable permit systems, tend to produce significant price volatility, which can discourage investment in low-carbon technologies. Further, cap-and-trade systems, in practice, often require regulators to engage in many of the same quantification and assessment measures required under traditional regulations. This is why even a relatively simple cap-and-trade system imposed on a limited number of sources, such as that which was used for acid rain-causing emissions under the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, required years to put in place. By comparison, British Columbia adopted and imposed its carbon tax system in a matter of months.

The political incentives created by the two approaches are also quite different, as are the rent-seeking vulnerabilities. Imposing a supply constraint creates the sort of fixed-pie allocation problem that accentuates the demand for rent-seeking. Further (as a I discuss briefly in my paper linked above), implementing a cap-and-trade system requires far more of the administrative process than does imposing a simple price or tax, and greater complexity creates greater vulnerability to rent-seeking. In short, each discreet determination regulators must make is an opportunity for rent-seeking, and the implementation and adoption of cap-and-trade systems require far more such determinations than does the adoption of a tax or price system.

The problem, of course, is that a carbon tax or other carbon pricing system would almost certainly require action by Congress, and that seems quite unlikely. This could change with the election of a conservation-minded Republican, or a sudden Democratic willingness to consider the adoption of a carbon tax through reconciliation, but neither seems all that likely right now. Thus for the moment, the best greenhouse gas emission policies are those the United States seems least likely to adopt.

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