Sweltering DC humidity arrived on schedule this morning, but it brought with it a truly lousy jobs report. I give the full low-down here, but the punchline is that the unemployment rate leapt up a big half-percent in May, from 5% to 5.5%, the largest monthly increase since the mid-1980s, and the highest unemployment rate since late 2004. Payrolls contracted for the fifth month in a row, down 49,000, led by job losses in most industries, including construction, factories, offices, and retailers.

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Robert Samuelson's oped in today's WaPo is workin' my last good nerve.

The basic argument is that a cap-and-trade carbon tax is anti-growth, and he cites lots of numbers to make it sound terribly expensive and painful. But what Samuelson fails to do, and this is far too common in this work, is to consider the benefits side of the equation.

When assessing environmental policies, if you fail to consider the economic costs of doing nothing, everything sounds horribly expensive and distortionary. That is, you can claim, as does Samuelson, that the cost of the tax on industry or households amounts to $X, and since you neglect to factor in any of the environmental benefits of X's impact, X ends up looking awfully problematic.

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