Palin Facebook on Cap and Trade: THE STUPID! IT BURNS!

After Sarah Palin was endlessly criticized by the left, the middle, and part of the right for her poorly-researched Washington Post article damning the “cap and tax” legislation, one would think she’d steer clear of articles pointing out her errors. Such a strategy would at least let her passionate followers think she’s clever.

I track Sarah Palin on Facebook. Imagine my surprise tonight:

Palin's Facebook Post

The Fact Check says her statement is “Mostly True”. That’s good, right? Something to trumpet to her 667,760 Facebook supporters?

Not so fast.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been making waves in the blogosphere with a recent op-ed on cap-and-trade.

Her critics say Palin’s July 14, 2009, piece in the Washington Post gets it all wrong. It “displays an ignorance for the subject so profound it’s almost gutsy,” Conor Clarke wrote in The Atlantic. Keith Olberman said on Countdown that she uses “the sky-is-falling tactics.”

We’ve explored other aspects of the cap-and-trade bill before, including how much it would cost lower-income consumers (Palin says it would hit them hardest, but the independent Congressional Budget Office predicts it would actually put money in the pockets of the poorest), as well as how much of an impact the bill would really have on climate.

Today, we’re tackling this claim from Palin’s op-ed: “Job losses are so certain under this new cap-and-tax plan that it includes a provision accommodating newly unemployed workers from the resulting dried-up energy sector, to the tune of $4.2 billion over eight years. So much for creating jobs.”

Well, now I see why she wanted to draw attention to it. After all, she received reviews glowing with words like “. . . so profound it’s almost gutsy”!

Sure, she was a tiny bit off on her projections about who would be most heavily impacted (by “a tiny bit off”, I mean “exact opposite of right”), but that’s not a big deal. At least she was right on her key point about a $4.2B program for workers displaced from the “old energy” sector. Right?

Palin and other Republicans say they are concerned that the transition will be costly to industry — particularly companies in the energy sector — and that workers will lose their jobs as a result.

The authors of the bill are also concerned — so much so that they included the program Palin refers to. Should workers lose their jobs, they would get 156 weeks of benefits, including 70 percent of their average weekly wage, help paying for health insurance, job training and employment search assistance.

So, Palin is correct that the bill has a program for displaced workers.

Funding for the program would come from selling those pollution allowances we mentioned earlier.

Supporters of cap-and-trade argue that Palin’s statement is misleading because she makes it seem like, overall, the bill is killing jobs . . . Bracken Hendricks, a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress, says,

In an economic shift from pollution to clean energy, some sectors will see impacts. But this policy isn’t about job loss, it’s about anticipated growth… The expectation is that there will be a net job creation [1.7 million new jobs].

So, back to Palin’s claim. She’s correct that there is a program in the bill that would help displaced workers, but she paints a narrow view of how the bill will affect employment. Yes, some workers will be displaced and need to be retrained, but some experts are projecting growth and new jobs in industries that benefit from the new policy. We rate her claim Mostly True.

Yes, something to champion.

I question whether she read and/or comprehended the words before deciding to trumpet this to her Facebook followers. Maybe it was the closest she could find to something positive. Either way . . . THE STUPID, IT BURNS!

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Jenny Donati is webmistress and co-editor of Secular News Daily. Jenny is an outspoken secularist who believes firmly in the separation of church and state. She demands evidence to support arguments, and holds herself to the same standard. She doesn't write about herself in the third person . . . but there's a first time for everything.

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