Liberal Congressional Leaders Buy Luxury Jets, Trash the Environment

Congress plans to spend $200 million on luxury jets for liberal House leaders, even though it earlier denounced the automakers for having corporate jets, and even though the luxury jets the House plans to buy emit vast amounts of pollution and greenhouse gases. Now they’ll be able to go on foreign junkets and hob-nob with wealthy lobbyists in style.

As Victor Davis Hanson notes, this excess and hypocrisy is typical of a House Speaker “Pelosi who rails about carbon footprints, but wants the biggest private-use jet she can get,” tax-raising liberal Congressmen like “Dodd and Rangel, who skip out on their own taxes, and find all sorts of immoral ways to finance and maintain second and third” homes, and Obama Administration nominees like Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and HHS nominee Daschle “who favor more taxes — if they can avoid taxes, or have tax-free limo service.”

The know-nothings in Congress are poised to waste billions more on the cash-for-clunkers program, even though most Americans oppose it. It will have no overall environmental benefit, note CBS News and Fox News commentaries, even though its sponsors falsely claimed it would.

The clunkers program was slated to cost a billion dollars for the entire year, but it ended up running out of money after just 5 days. (Now, these same geniuses claim they can overhaul the health-care system for just a trillion dollars in increased federal spending. Don’t believe them: it will raise taxes and harm the insured. Health care bills always cost more than predicted.).

The cash-for-clunkers program is monumentally wasteful and stupid, destroying perfectly good automobiles, cutting off the supply of cheap used cars needed by poor people, and rewarding people who bought gas guzzlers rather than fuel-efficient vehicles.

It also provides surprisingly little benefit to the Detroit automakers that it was intended to bail out, who have already received more than $70 billion from taxpayers, and it wipes out jobs at used-car and parts businesses.

Congressional leaders and Obama also back a huge cap-and-trade carbon tax that would do little to protect the environment, while costing the economy trillions. The cap-and-trade tax was pushed through the House before the text of the bill even became available. The bill was over 1090 pages long and contained special interest giveaways to a legion of big corporations and their lobbyists. At the last minute, 300 more pages were added to the bill that few in Congress had even read, and had to be manually inserted into the existing 1000 pages after the bill was passed, based on guesses about where those pages would fit in. Thus, the bill did not even really exist at the time it was passed.

In 2008, Obama privately admitted to a San Francisco Chronicle reporter that his cap-and-trade carbon tax would cause people’s electric bills to “skyrocket.” The cap-and-trade tax will do little to cut greenhouse gas emissions, since it contains so many special interest giveaways and environmentally-destructive provisions like protections for ethanol, which promotes soil erosion and deforestation. Meanwhile, Obama has thwarted more use of nuclear energy, which reduces greenhouse gas emissions, by blocking use of the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste disposal site after billions of dollars in taxpayer money had already been spent developing it.

The House has already passed $2 billion in additional spending on the wasteful cash-for-clunkers program, adding to more than $70 billion in wasteful auto bailouts. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) wants to ram more spending on clunkers through the Senate before rising public opposition makes that possible — the same way Congressional leaders rammed through the $800 billion stimulus package before the public learned what was in it.

Buried in the stimulus package were provisions that ended welfare reform. The stimulus package is now projected to cut the size of the economy “in the long run.” The Administration claimed it would deliver a short-run “jolt” that would quickly lift the economy, but unemployment rose rapidly after its passage, and the package has actually destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, as well as subsidizing welfare and waste.