German Ingenuity?

You can bet the White House is watching the goings-on in Germany, where Chancellor-Elect Gerhard Schroeder has decided to form a majority government by blending the Greens with his Social Democratic Party (SDP). (The Greens got 6.7 percent of the vote.)

As a premium for giving the SDP a majority, the Greens have demanded that Germany’s nuclear power plants be shut down. They also want to raise the already hefty ($4 per gallon) price of gasoline threefold (that’s $12 per gallon—$300 to fill up the Mercedes).

The main reason, say the Greens, is to fight global warming.

This level of carbon discouragement isn’t really much different from what we have to do to meet the Kyoto protocol—we’ll just stretch it out in more "hidden" places, like the electric bill.

The pundits tell us the SDP won because Germans are tired of double-digit unemployment. No doubt the White House is watching to see how they will tax their way out of this problem and promote prosperity. Kyoto fans know President Clinton is on record saying that if we fight global warming the right way, we will "grow the economy."

This German experiment is confounded by the collapse of most of the world’s financial markets, including the German stock exchange. Where this capital is going to come from, the Greens only know.