Replies

The U.S. should provide incentives for entrepreneurs to develop new ways to provide power while also helping people who work in industries that could be left behind, such as coal mining, Romney said.

One idea that has merit, he said, is a carbon tax — a fee based on each ton of carbon dioxide emissions that some major oil companies have adopted. A portion of the tax revenue could go to workers in rural communities who would suffer financially from the move to cleaner energy sources, Romney said.

How could the USA have survived without the 17th Amendment? /sarc

"Congress, he said, should explore ways to incentivize the research, development and deployment of clean technologies."

FR: Never Accept the Premise of Your Opponent’s Argument

While Sen. Romney’s heart is in the right place, misguided Romney should have gotten himself elected to a state government, not the constitutionally limited power federal government and its likewise limited power to appropriate taxes.

“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
”From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.

As a leader in his state government, Romney would be able to use 10th Amendment-protected state powers to experiment with his energy and environment-related ideas, ultimately depending on what his state’s legal majority citizen taxpayers are willing to pay for.

Justice Brandeis had put it this way about unique state powers to serve the people.

"It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose [emphasis added], serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” —Justice Brandeis, Laboratories of democracy.

(Note that constitutional limits on states as laboratories of democracy is that states cannot establish privileged / protected classes or abridge constitutionally enumerated rights, and must maintain a constitutionally guaranteed republican form of government.)

Remember in November 2020!

MAGA! Now KAG! (Keep America Great!)