Governmental foolishness

I read the other day that the Taiwanese government had recently floated the idea of an energy tax. Of course an energy tax would be an excellent idea, as it would be a tool to reduce energy consumption and restrain pollution caused by the use of energy. If it were in the form of a carbon tax that would be even better, as it would then target the use of fossil fuels, the worst (and yet most common) form of energy. But unfortunately, the business-friendly KMT caucus in the Legislative Yuan opposed the idea, and the government is now saying that the “time is not right.” Of course given that next year is an election year for many local governments, the time will probably not be “right” then either. As one expert said in the news report I read, with that kind of attitude the time will never be right.

Taiwanese government officials also made themselves look foolish in the past few days when a team of international experts came to examine Taiwan’s adherence to two UN human rights that it ratified several years ago. They repeatedly referred to protections enshrined in law, rather than talking about the actual situation (even China has provisions in its constitution that protect individual rights; it just doesn’t put them into practice). Despite clear evidence to the contrary, they claimed that forced confessions don’t happen in Taiwan now. Apparently the international experts weren’t impressed with a lot of the government’s assertions.

Of course the US has similar foolishness in its government. Even the Obama administration hems and haws far too much about things like real measures to deal with climate change. But the worst idiocy is still in Congress, particularly the House. Aside from the resistance to common-sense gun control and the delays in renewing the Violence Against Women Act, the persistence of the Republicans in insisting on draconian cuts to social programs (but not the bloated defense budget) and no increases in taxes as their “plan” to replace the budget sequester is sheer insanity. Even more incredibly, they are trying to portray the sequester as Obama’s doing, even though it was Congress that passed it, and only as a compromise to prevent the Republicans from causing the US to renege on its debts. Twice in the past few weeks I have received mailings from senior House Republican Pete Sessions in which he referred to “the President’s sequester”, even though Sessions himself is more responsible for the existence of the sequester than Obama is. But considering that one of these mailings featured a constituent survey with questions so laughably loaded that they were like textbook examples of biased survey questions, perhaps his transparent efforts to shift responsibility onto Obama are not too surprising.