Payne: Hoffa turns clock back to 1867

In a rambling speech in Washington, DC Thursday that variously compared Mitt Romney to Pol Pot and the tea party to the John Birch Society, Obama supporter and Teamsters President James Hoffa claimed that Republicans want to “roll the clock back to about 1890.”

Fact check, please. Yes, there is a political party that wants to roil back the clock to the 19th century – 1867 to be exact – bit it’s not the Republicans.

As noted climatologist Patrick Michaels (“Watts up? Who killed climate change” Forbes, January 27, 2012) has pointed out, Democrat cap-and-trade bill legislation passed in 2009 – echoing the demands of United Nations green zealots – would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 83 percent over the next four decades with the result that, by 2050, “the average American would be allowed the same emissions produced by a citizen in 1867.”

That is, since CO2 emissions closely track economic growth, Americans would be reduced to the agricultural-economy, per capita income of 1867 – before the U.S. transitioned to an industrial society and saw its fastest economic growth ever.

This means that carbon-intensive industries in which Hoffa’s labor constituents are represented – autos, steel, trucking, and contruction equipment – would be decimated. That a labor chief would embrace a party with a radical, anti-manufacturing green agenda like the Democratic Party is a scandal.

And it is also revealing as to who would really turn back the hands of time on the greatest economy in world history.