I Disagree With Paul Krugman

In his latest post, he thinks that Barack Obama gave too much credit to the Republicans in his Fox interview.

I agree with him on that. The ideas in question have been floating around in academic circles, and have been proposed by politicians on both sides for years.

What I disagree with is his classification of emissions trading as a successful policy.

Emissions trading is not a success relative to a tax of some sort.

They've never been shown to be more effective than a tax on emissions, they reduce revenues available to government, and they are more difficult to administer, which increases the regulatory load, and hence costs to taxpayers.

Additionally, if you think that mortgage backed securities are a morass of corrupt arbitrage, just wait until Wall Street gets its hands on actual dirt.

Carbon trading is a solution, it's just a bad one.