The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News
1. ENERGY
Wisconsin’s governor proposes a special tax on oil companies amounting to over $270 million.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis on why a tax on oil companies is merely a tax on energy use:
“All targeted tax hikes on energy-company profits are energy taxes no matter how they’re labeled. As every policymaker should know from Economics 101, when government taxes something, the economy produces less of it, and when supply falls relative to demand, consumer prices go up. Thus, “windfall profits” taxes or their accounting-gimmick equivalents are bound to make energy less affordable. Yet the leading proponents claim to be ‘consumer advocates.’”
2. BUSINESS
Arizona’s recent minimum wage increase leads to widespread layoffs for teenage workers.
CEI Experts Available to Comment: Editorial Director Ivan Osorio on the politics of the minimum wage:
“Politicians love the minimum wage. It is a perfect issue on which to demagogue, since it promises benefits to the public while requiring no tax dollars to be spent, because the costs fall entirely on private businesses. And its costs on workers are hidden — there is no organized political pressure group of people who would have occupied jobs that an increased minimum wage kept from coming into being. But policies that create good political opportunities for populist grandstanding are often bad policy, and that’s true with the minimum wage. It is economic nonsense, premised on the idea that government can mandate a free lunch: It would be nicer for everyone to make more money, so there ought to be a law!”
3. ENVIRONMENT
New research suggests cosmic rays may be responsible for much of global warming.
CEI Experts Available to Comment: Adjunct Analyst Steven Milloy on the details behind the science:
“Just last week, Mr. Svensmark and other researchers from the Centre for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Centre published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A—the mathematical, physical sciences and engineering journal of the venerable Royal Society of London—announcing that they had experimentally verified the physical mechanism by which cosmic rays affect cloud cover. In the experiment, cosmic radiation was passed through a large reaction chamber containing a mixture of lower atmospheric gases at realistic concentrations that was exposed to ultraviolet radiation from lamps that mimic the action of the Sun’s rays. Instruments traced the chemical action of the penetrating cosmic rays in the reaction chamber.”