1. They are economic optimists and expect their policies to work over the course of the next few years.
2. They like to spend. Rather than reining in expensive entitlement programs they are expanding them and creating new ones.
3. They are deficit doves and plan to continue deficit spending long after the current crisis is resolved.
All of these are disturbing to conservatives, but for me the most problematic is this:
4. They are serious about climate change and not just because of environmental concerns. They see a massive cap and trade system as a major source of government revenue in the future. In a very real sense environmental reform will be a huge tax increase on the American people, but also by making the government dependent on ever more stringent environmental restrictions they will guarantee not only the permanence of their system but its future expansion. And this comes even as the the scientific consensus upon which environmental reform is based starts to crumble.
Writing in the Telegraph Christopher Booker notes that the political determination to adopt environmental legislation runs precisely counter to the best current science which holds that:
Sea levels are not shooting up but only continuing their modest 3mm a year rise over the past 200 years. The vast Antarctic ice-sheet is not melting, except in one tiny corner, the Antarctic Peninsula. Tropical hurricane activity, far from increasing, is at its lowest level for 30 years. The best correlation for temperature fluctuations is not CO2 but the magnetic activity of the sun.Read it here.
But then the Left never really cares about "science". To them environmentalism is only an excuse for expanding the intrusion of government into the lives of Americans and expanding its revenue base by inflicting more taxes on them.
