The Department of Energy released its analysis of the Lieberman-Warner Climate change bill late yesterday. The study shows that under this bill in 2030 the high cost scenario would drive natural cost prices up 40 percent to almost $19/mcf and electricity generation up 34 percent to almost $12/kWh. This comes on the heels of other studies of the bill performed by the EPA, MIT and the NAM and ACCF that also show devastating economic consequences of this legislation.

Senator Domenici said it best:

4 out of 4 major studies now agree–Lieberman Warner will increase energy costs and decrease economic growth. At a time when Americans are increasingly concerned with the rising costs of energy and the state of the economy, it is rather shocking that Congress would seriously consider measures which will send us on the wrong track on both.

NAM press release on the study available here.

Raelyn Campbell had her 15 minutes of fame but lost out on the $54 million she claimed she deserved. A Washington, D.C., Superior Court judge has dismissed her lawsuit against Best Buy (a fact we have not seen reported elsewhere).

Campbell is the D.C., woman who sued the electronics retailer after she took her laptop in for repairs to the Tenleytown store (that’s a neighborhood in northwest D.C.) and the computer went missing. According to her account, Best Buy wasn’t up front with her about losing the device and then tried to buy her off with coupons and settlement offers. That and her supposed concerns about identification theft led her to file a $54 million suit in D.C. Superior Court last November.

The very ridiculousness of the amount — which mimicked the $54 million suit by D.C. Judge Roy Pearson against his drycleaners for misplaced suit pants — undermined any legitimacy of her grievances. But the $54 million certainly gained Campbell publicity. She started a blog — Best Buy vs. Consumer Protection Blog — recounting her tribulations as a modern consumer. There was the NBC Today Show appearance, an interview on MSNBC, and articles in major newspapers like the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, trade publications like ComputerWorld, and activist blogs like The Consumerist.

In February, we called the suit outrageous, arguing, “The more time the court spends on her litigation after Best Buy made a serious settlement offer, the more taxpayer money the judicial system spends and the more economic resources are wasted on unproductive uses.”

Campbell has been quiet lately — her last blog post was February 15th — a sensible silence given the fact Judge Natalia M. Combs Greene dismissed her lawsuit on February 28th. (The Superior Court’s civil division has an online search function, which led us to the docket after about 10 minutes of work. The suit is 2007 CA 007641, Campbell v. Best Buy.Com, LLC.)

Best Buy has been seeking sanctions against Campbell for her lawsuit, several request rejected by the judge. However, the February 28th docket entry notes: “Deft. Atty. awarded 2 hours attorney fees as sanctions.” Campbell’s website provides her point of view about defense’s motions challenging the service of summons and other mishandled procedural steps. But in the end, the judge dismissed the suit.

What a waste, an expensive waste. Take a look at that docket, all the orders, hearings, appearances, summons, motions — months of work and tens of thousands of dollars (taxpayer dollars included) expended because of what, self-promotion? A legitimate complaint taken to absurd ends? Perhaps it started with a company that might have done better by a customer, but the ultimate source of all this waste was yet another American acolyte of “jackpot justice.”

Addendum: The case was dismissed two months ago. Funny how the news hadn’t been reported yet. And we did attempt to contact lawyers for both sides and Best Buy’s corporate headquarters this morning, but have not heard back as of yet.

Addenda: This blogger has bought one laptop from Best Buy, the Tenleytown store, and has had several service interactions with the company. No complaints, at all.

UPDATE (1:53 p.m.) A Best Buy spokeswoman, Dawn Bryant, responds (before this post went live) via e-mail that the company cannot comment at this time, but there was no settlement in the suit.

From the Bureau of Economic Analysis:

Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an annual rate of 0.6 percent in the first quarter of 2008, according to advance estimates released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter, real GDP also increased 0.6 percent.

Nothing to burst out in joyful shouts about, but the reality is: Two quarters of growth in a row do not amount to a recession.

UPDATE (3:18 p.m.): James Pethokoukis at Capital Commerce:

Out: Recession. In: Expansion. That’s my quick take on today’s first-quarter gross domestic product number, which showed that the economy grew 0.6 percent in the first quarter. Now that’s not a robust number by any means, but it’s not so bad given all the worry out there that the economy is headed off a cliff. Before you declare a recession, as many economic pundits have, shouldn’t the economy, well, actually recess a bit—if only for a quarter?

Americans for Prosperity, a free-market, small-government advocacy group with many state chapters, is launching its national hot air balloon tour in Kansas City today, highlighting the costs of climate-change legislation. (Relaunching? There was a D.C. event on April 21.) There’s a website: HotAirTour.org, and the basic point:

“Elected officials at all levels of government are converting global warming alarmism into policies that will have devastating consequences for our economy,” said AFP President Tim Phillips. “We think American families need to know what these proposals will cost them – lost jobs, higher energy prices, and less freedom. We’re launching this Tour to educate citizens on unaffordable climate change schemes.”

Bon voyage!

The Commerce Department recently released new figures that show an increasing trend of more American jobs that depend on trade. The jobs of almost six million Americans now depend on trade and that number is growing. From 2005 to 2006 the report documents that 290,000 more jobs were linked to the export of manufactured goods. This means that in 2006, 19.9 percent of all manufacturing jobs depended on the export of manufactured goods. That’s up from 18.6 percent the year before. These figures show that, aside from contributing 41 percent of our economic growth last year, more manufacturing workers’ jobs depending on selling foreign goods outside of the United States.

If you need a reason to support Free Trade Agreements, we’ll give 6 million.

Harold Meyerson, the Washington Post’s most socialistic op-ed columnist, writes a piece today, “Landing the White Whale,” on the necessity of Democratic politicians winning white, male, working-class voters to have any hope of gaining the presidency. How to achieve that goal? Reunionize!

For decades, as union membership declined from 35 percent of the workforce in the mid-1950s to 12 percent today (7.5 percent in the private sector), Democrats stood by and failed to strengthen workers’ rights to organize. By the late ’90s, John Sweeney’s AFL-CIO had impressed upon Democrats that their inaction amounted to slow-motion suicide. Today, the party is united behind the Employee Free Choice Act, which, by enabling workers to join unions again without fear of being fired, would also greatly help Democratic prospects at the polls.

What is it, again, that card check, i.e., the Employee Free Choice Act does? It enables workers to join unions again without fear of being fired? Really? How?

We suggest an alternative formulation: “[The] Employee Free Choice Act, which by destroying secret ballot elections in the workplace, would enable labor organizers to pressure and intimidate workers into joining a union against their will, effectively using anti-democratic means to expand the ranks and warchests of organized labor.” But as we’ve noted repeatedly, card-check’s supporters don’t want to deal with the odious details.

To his credit, Meyerson’s column is otherwise bluntly honest: Card check is nothing more than a politically motivated mechanism to push a labor and partisan agenda.

Maine is the latest state to embark on a broad expansion of government paid by taxes targeted on a very narrow industry and retail segment, based on a bogus “but it just seems right” nexus: Soda pop = bad health. From the Tax Foundation:

Back when cigarette tax increases were justified by politicians on the grounds of paternalism (even though they really just wanted more money), critics argued that the same argument could be applied to other unhealthy activities and products like candy bars or soft drinks. But such criticisms were dismissed as being scare tactics and unrealistic. But now the nannies at groups like the totalitarian Center for the Science in the Public Interest are having their voices heard in the push towards even more state control over our lives (largely through tax policy), much like the American Cancer Society has done over the past two decades on cigarette taxes. Of course, all of this is in the name of public health. (You as an adult aren’t smart enough to make up your own mind about what to drink.)

Policymakers in Maine are the latest to succumb to this pressure of raising money by targeting specific products. This time it goes beyond the usual suspects of cigarettes and alcohol. If you drink soda, you’re now going to pay as much as 22 cents more for a 2-liter bottle. Yes, 22 cents more on that 2-liter bottle of Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, or even generic Sam’s Choice Cola (assuming Wal-Marts are allowed in Maine). This extra revenue is designed to help pay for health care for self-employed individuals and small business owners. Such a policy has basically no justification in sound public finance. Such a policy is likely even regressive given that the tax will disproportionately be borne by low-income Maine residents in order to finance a spending program that disproportionately benefits upper-income residents (those who own businesses and are self-employed).

And extra thanks to the Tax Foundation’s Gerald Prante who makes the connection between more, arbitary taxation and the loss of individual freedom. Someone needs to make that connection. Maine’s legislators sure aren’t.

(Hat tip: Jim Morrell.)

From NJBiz:

Gov. Jon Corzine will sign the paid family leave bill into law on Friday in a statehouse ceremony, the governor’s office told NJBIZ. New Jersey will become the second state, after California, to offer workers six weeks of paid leave to care for newborns or seriously ill immediate family members.

Supporters of the bill say it will help workers balance their work and family life. Business lobbyists and other critics argue that employers—especially small ones like doctors’ offices and car repair shops—cannot afford to lose key workers for up to six weeks at a time. The critics say that becoming the first state in the region to mandate paid leave would further damage the state’s image as a place to do business.

The New Jersey Business Matters blog comments:

In 2007 New Jersey added just 3,700 private-sector jobs, growing only 0.1%. That put the Garden State 41st in the nation. Meanwhile, NJ has already lost 10,000 private-sector jobs in 2008. Adding mandates unique to the state only worsens that trend. Call it subtraction by addition.

The bill is AB873. Here’s the legislature’s description and fiscal analysis. Only $100 million a year. For now.

Washington Post columnist and Newsweek editor Robert Samuelson’s dispassionate economic analysis leads him to a clear conclusion in today’s paper, a column entitled, “Start Drilling.”

What to do about oil? First it went from $60 to $80 a barrel, then from $80 to $100 and now to $120. Perhaps we can persuade OPEC to raise production, as some senators suggest; but this seems unlikely. The truth is that we’re almost powerless to influence today’s prices. We are because we didn’t take sensible actions 10 or 20 years ago. If we persist, we will be even worse off in a decade or two. The first thing to do: Start drilling.

It may surprise Americans to discover that the United States is the third-largest oil producer, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. We could be producing more, but Congress has put large areas of potential supply off-limits. These include the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and parts of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. By government estimates, these areas may contain 25 billion to 30 billion barrels of oil (against about 30 billion barrels of proven U.S. reserves today) and 80 trillion cubic feet or more of natural gas (compared with about 200 tcf of proven reserves).

What keeps these areas closed are exaggerated environmental fears, strong prejudice against oil companies and sheer stupidity. Americans favor both “energy independence” and cheap fuel. They deplore imports — who wants to pay foreigners? — but oppose more production in the United States. Got it? The result is a “no-pain energy agenda that sounds appealing but has no basis in reality,” writes Robert Bryce in “Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of ‘Energy Independence.’ ”

Thinking more about the Reuters analysis yesterday that reprised the old argument, drilling in ANWR brings no immediate benefits, etc. (and remember, President Clinton vetoed ANWR legislation in 1995), we speculate about the future:

(Washington, D.C., April 30, 2022) — Opening the Alaska’s North Slope to energy development will do nothing to ease $16 a gallon gasoline, analysts agree, calling for increased conservation and smaller vehicles to help control fuel costs.

“True, the years of additional energy costs has hurt America,” said Clich E. Thinking. “The manufacturing sector is down to Pete in Virginia and that little company in Texas. Turns out the green jobs went abroad with everybody else. But with conservation, we can at least spare the pain at the pump.”

And the expected analysis, hauled out regularly on occasions like this.

WASHINGTON, April 29 (Reuters) – The Bush administration says the United States would be less addicted to foreign oil and fuel prices would be lower if Congress had only opened up Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

But that claim doesn’t reflect the long lead time to develop the refuge’s huge oil reserves, which would not be available for several more years and initial volumes would still be small if Congress in 2002 had approved the administration’s plan to drill in ANWR, energy experts say.

This line of thinking invites paralysis: “Since that extra week of overtime won’t pay enough to buy a new car by June, I shouldn’t do the work, even though it might help raise the funds by November.”

Other points:

Finally, with energy costs rising and reliance on foreign supplies growing, the argument for ANWR has only gotten stronger. It’s quite surprising that elected officials previously opposed to ANWR have not reassessed their positions given the serious consequences of inaction.