My column for today takes on spending when there's no money to spend:

Do the middle class and the working poor realize what the Democrats are doing to them right now? Check out this Cap-n-Trade calculator that shows how the new taxes will affect people based on income. This policy is a regressive tax aimed straight through the heart of the middle class [more here]. It will destroy job creation and limit business growth.

MaxedOutMama, an economist, is horrified:

It's the inane nature of this bill that astounds me. We just cannot do it. Growing the food necessary to feed even our own population would emit more carbon than the final goals in the bill, even if every household in the USA was burning candles for light and had returned to the lifestyle that Paul Ehrlich used to recommend.

Okay, so in pursuit of a goal that's nonsensical, for a problem that is international and that will not be addressed internationally (India and China, for example, are refusing to starve their people to death), we adopt legislation that either sets up an iron wall of tariffs or drives half the nation into poverty in about 15 years. This is the most bizarre thing I have ever seen in my lifetime.

Let's hope it can be stopped in the Senate. Even if it is, our nation has lost something here, and that something is the principal legislative body's grasp on reality. It is as if the House of Representatives suddenly passed a vote to reduce gravity by 10 percent in order to lessen the costs of obesity to putatively cut Medicare costs in the future. Truly amazing.

Please go read the whole thing.