Britain, BP, Kyrgyzstan, the human genome, and Iraq – this week’s newspaper combines the sobriety and idealism I love about this newspaper.
Oh, yeah right, it’s a British newspaper. But then there’s support for a carbon tax.
Sensible selective slashing along these lines could cut spending by 5% of GDP or so. That leaves up to 2% to come from tax rises. Labour left an unhappy soak-the-rich potpourri of income, national-insurance and other tax increases worth 1.2% of GDP; the government wants to trim it to 0.8%, but it is proposing further dubious tinkering with income-tax allowances and capital-gains rates. It would be better to raise consumption taxes, which don’t discourage people from working or saving.
This could mean increasing VAT a notch or two, but it is also a chance to strike out from shore and introduce a new carbon tax. Properly designed, such a tax could not just raise revenue but also help to cut greenhouse-gas emissions and encourage investment in alternative energy sources (see article). Since both the carbon tax and VAT hit the poor harder than the rich, some offsetting rise should be inflicted on the well-off. The best option may be to stick with some of Labour’s tax hikes.
For several reasons. The vitriol has a xenophobic edge: witness the venomous references to “British Petroleum”, a name BP dropped in 1998 (just as well that it dispensed with the name Anglo-Iranian Oil Company even longer ago). Vilifying BP also gets in the way of identifying other culprits, one of which is the government. BP operates in one of the most regulated industries on earth with some of the most perverse rules, subsidies and incentives. Shoddy oversight clearly contributed to the spill, and an energy policy which reduced the demand for oil would do more to avert future environmental horrors than fierce retribution.
Mr Obama is not the socialist the right claims he is. He went out of his way, meeting BP executives on June 16th, to insist that he has no interest in undermining the company’s financial stability. But his reaction is cementing business leaders’ impression that he is indifferent to their concerns. If he sees any impropriety in politicians ordering executives about, upstaging the courts and threatening confiscation, he has not said so. The collapse in BP’s share price suggests that he has convinced the markets that he is an American version of Vladimir Putin, willing to harry firms into doing his bidding.
Nobody should underestimate the scale of BP’s mistake, nor the damage that it has caused. But if the president does not stand up for due process, he will frighten investors across the board. The damage to America’s environment is bad enough. The president risks damaging its economy too.
About all I like here is the support for due process. But, the point, about the regulatory agency’s culpability, is also well-taken.
Kyrgyzstan’s neighbours will point to the recent bloody chaos as evidence of the importance of strong, authoritarian government. It is, rather, proof of the danger of bottling up tensions in the superficial calm that repression can temporarily impose. Democracy did not get Kyrgyzstan into this mess. It might just help the country escape it.
This is Russia’s mess. But, the world can’t trust Moscow to clean it up.
Genomics may reveal that humans really are brothers and sisters under the skin. The species is young, so there has been little time for differences to evolve. Politically, that would be good news. It may turn out, however, that some differences both between and within groups are quite marked. If those differences are in sensitive traits like personality or intelligence, real trouble could ensue.
People must be prepared for this possibility, and ready to resist the excesses of racialism, nationalism and eugenics that some are bound to propose in response. That will not be easy. The liberal answer is to respect people as individuals, regardless of the genetic hand that they have been dealt. Genetic knowledge, however awkward, does not change that.
The best course for Iraq would then be for a compromise candidate to be chosen as soon as possible. The Shias would be foolish not to give Mr Allawi and his Sunni supporters a clutch of decent jobs. And that means a coalition government with a shared vision, not just the familiar carve-up into ministerial fiefs corruptly dished out on a tribal, sectarian or ethnic basis, with militias lurking murderously in the background.
Outsiders can help, by creating a permanent “contact group” of neighbours, perhaps overseen by the UN, to set a monitoring and negotiating framework, much as Europe’s bigger powers, assisted by the United States, stabilised the Balkans in the 1990s. American influence in Iraq is dwindling but still matters. The UN has made progress towards calming nerves along the territorial “trigger line” dividing Arabs from Kurds. The Turks have been more sympathetic to Iraq’s Kurds. But the Syrians, if they want to play a bigger regional role, must do more to discourage the insurgency. The Iranians should stop egging on their fellow Shias to humiliate the Sunnis. And the Saudis should accept that Iraq, their beefiest neighbour, is bound to be dominated by Shias. A democratic election has been held in Iraq, the violence is down and the Americans look set to leave by the end of next year. But that must not be the end of the story. Too much blood has been spilt, Iraqi and American, for there to be a washing of hands.
And, this is why we invaded?
Powered by ScribeFire.
Filed under: News, Subscriptions Tagged: barack h. obama, bp, britain, human genome, iraq, kyrgyzstan, the economist
Recent comments