Destroying Our Nation, One Bill At A Time

Joe Lieberman and John Warner's (the man is a republican for goodness sake!) horrible cap-and-trade bill has already been discussed in depth, on NRO especially. My favorite is Ben Lieberman's five myths and Lawrence Solomon's Selective Precaution. It was also discussed on many other blogs, so I am going to try to take a slightly different tact and try to use a case study. I can only hope it works. Rockford, Illinois is a very industrial city. Until the 1980's, it was widely known as "screw city" because of the massive hardware industry located there. Rockford never really recovered from the massive recession of 1980-81. Rockford suffers from 7.2 percent unemployment, the highest in the state. This went up by 1.7% in the last year. It is well above the state average of 5.4 % (link). Some of the biggest employers in the Rockford area, in no particular order. are Hamilton Sundstrand, Woodward Governor, Chrysler, and GM. The first two corporations produce parts for aircraft and heavy machinery, and I hope everyone knows the latter two produce cars. GM is very likely to announce that they are closing their Janesville WI (which is very close to Rockford) plant. This means a loss of some 3300 jobs. These are high paying jobs which will be hard to replace, and the loss of wages will hurt the entire area economy. (link) This city of 150,000 will be absolutely devastated by losing the other three industries, which would lose a huge amount of business, be forced to lay off workers, and possibly close. There are similar cities all across the nation. Cap-and-trade would destroy these cities. Oh yeah, and it would give all the porkers something to squeal about in Washington. High unemployment directly correlates to high crime rates, broken families, and dissatisfied populations.