President Obama, an increasingly leaky White House tells us, fears irrelevance. I am still relevant, the president all-but declared at his recent press conference. And to prove it, he told us about his constitutional authority to issue executive orders and to veto bills that he finds in conflict with his progressive agenda. Perhaps.
But he is taking too narrow a view of his relevance. It is important to the nation that he establish that relevance not only here but to an increasingly belligerent China, which is mocking America by shoring up Putin with pre-payments for natural gas and oil, challenging our allies’ territorial claims, refusing to rein in North Korea’s expanding nuclear arsenal, and otherwise treating our president as if he is, well, irrelevant, a man with a pivot about as threatening as that of a ballerina.
I leave it to military experts to advise the president how to do that: they know the ways and he has the means, plus John McCain will be in the chairman’s seat at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to back him up.
Here is another way he can show the Chinese that when he has a goal he intends to pursue it, and if they try to thwart him, they will pay a high price indeed.
Obama has always favored putting a price on carbon -- a carbon tax -- as the most efficient way to achieve his goal of reducing emissions that he believes threaten life on the planet. I am not as certain as the president and his environmental supporters, and so-called emerging countries, whose beliefs on this front might just be affected by the piles of cash they want transferred to them from the likes of us, that we are at such great and immediate risk. After all, basing policy on the predictive ability of models did not ensure the enduring health of the financial system. But neither can we be certain that the climate change believers are wrong, especially when they worry that if we go forward with this sensible policy, our domestic manufacturers will be at a further cost disadvantage to Chinese exporters. Besides, here is an opportunity to replace growth-stifling taxes on work and risk-taking with a tax on pollution at a time when oil and gasoline prices are so low that a modest increase in the tax on fossil fuels would hardly be noticed.
The president can say to his Chinese hosts, who showed their contempt for him by having their controlled press attack him as a spent political force, “insipid, banal” -- not a nice way to treat a soon-to-arrive dinner guest who could be the leader of the free world if he chooses to reverse his past policies, something like this: “I am going to attack emissions. We are the world’s two largest polluters, and I am hoping you will follow my lead and impose similar emissions taxes, instead of forcing residents of Beijing to limit the refueling of their cars, and forgo the traditional use of firecrackers at their weddings, to drive only on alternate days, and to get out of town so that I can safely inhale while I am here. But if you don’t, and try to use our new tax on carbon to grab a competitive advantage, I will stop you by imposing what we call a border tax adjustment so that your goods will hit our markets as if you had imposed carbon taxes. After all, you have already imposed a tax on coal imports to reduce pollution in China, so you can hardly object if we impose a tax on your imports to protect ourselves from the effect of the pollution created by your export industries.”
He could then add: “You might call me what you will, and if my State Department translators are right, you have used some pretty disrespectful language, of the sort you usually reserve for leaders of countries powerless to make an effective response. I call me ‘relevant’. Refuse to cooperate and you will make my day -- and the last two years of my presidency.”