Yes, that George Shultz, President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State. But not everyone who served with Reagan was a Reaganite. Reagan’s VP, G.H.W. Bush, famously campaigned on a platform of “Read my lips: No New Taxes.” Not two years later he raised taxes in a 1990 budget deal that torpedoed the economy and sank his presidency.
Yesterday, in an interview puff piece penned by two associates, Shultz, a distinguished fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, called for a ‘revenue-neutral’ carbon tax. This is unsurprising. As the article reminds us, in 2010, Shulz, partnering with Tom Steyer, a Democrat, “led the successful campaign to defeat Proposition 23, a California ballot initiative to suspend the state’s ambitious law to curb greenhouse gases.”
Nothing in the article indicates that Shultz thinks a carbon tax should replace California’s cap-and-trade regime established by AB 32. Nor is there any hint that Shultz would condition the enactment of carbon taxes on repeal of the EPA’s court-awarded power to regulate greenhouse gases via the Clean Air Act.
This pattern is becoming boringly familiar.
George Shultz was also senior advisor/honorary chairman of Meg Whitman’s GOP Governor campaign – not to help her but to silence her and protect AB 23. He is a GOP old guard compromiser/insider. Why can’t we just get rid of those guys?
Shultz went feeble on us when he attacked Prop 23 and supported AB 32. After they get that way there is no coming back.