Thirty years ago, on this day, June 8, 1993, President Bill Clinton runs up the white flag on BTU tax
President Bill Clinton and his allies in Congress confirmed the obvious on Tuesday: There will be wholesale revisions in his five-year budget plan, including major changes in a proposed energy tax.
Negotiations are continuing with dissident Democrats in the Senate over the details as the president fights to collect enough votes from his own party to pass his plan.
Despite the impending changes, which will include more spending cuts and fewer taxes, none of the Senate’s 43 Republicans is expected to vote for the plan, their leaders said.
On the chopping block is Mr. Clinton’s proposal to tax the heat content of fuels – the so-called Btu tax.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 359.6ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Clinton and Gore had underestimated the strength and guile of the opposition to the BTU. And key Democratic senators had been flipped.
What I think we can learn from this is that the bad guys are very good at what they do. Money buys the smartest people, or the ones with the best low cunning.
What happened next
Congresspeople who had voted for it lost in the 1994 elections “got BTU’d”. Did the Australian bad guys learn from this? Never saw it mentioned but I wasn’t looking.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.