Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Ah, thanks. Looks to me like no one *gave* Chrysler to the UAW (rather, it bought 55% of Chrysler, the price being that the UAW gave up its claim to $10bn that Chrysler owed it for healthcare payments or something of the kind) and it's perfectly permissible for a company in chapter-11 bankruptcy to sell assets to whoever will buy them. It seems unconventional for a company in chapter 11 to be selling debts that would have lower priority than those of its senior creditors, but it seems to be legal (the case has, after all, been before multiple courts, and none of them has objected). So, strange though the Chrysler deal is, it doesn't seem to involve "overruling bankruptcy law".

Still, just as it's unsurprising when politicians try to take credit for popular actions and deflect blame for unpopular ones, it's unsurprising when political partisans try to describe the actions of politicians they dislike in negative terms...

Expand full comment
Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

> A carbon tax would make price blame clearer, so they are going with tradable permits, which also lets them play more favorites with who gets permits.

How do you figure that? Countries with a carbon tax will still need to protect trade exposed industries in the short term, so the problem of who gets the tax breaks is virtually the same as the free permits problem.

> Permits also make it harder to notice if they actually cut carbon, vs. preserving business as usual.

The 'cap' in 'cap and trade' makes it dead easy to notice if carbon has actually been cut (illegal emissions aside). That's the whole point of a cap. Predicting the effect of a centrally fixed carbon price (which is what a tax amounts to more or less) is a much harder problem. You would get the same short term blame dodging with a tax too - start low, forcing future governments to ramp it up in order to meet long term targets.

Expand full comment
12 more comments...

No posts