Yet now the whole concept has been watered down. The so-called "cap-and-trade" permits probably won't go into effect for years, and will likely be phased in even then. And there's good reason to believe that there may be enough opposition among some moderate Democrats in the Senate to stall or even kill the legislation outright.
As for another round of stimulus money, you can forget it. Public opinion polls tell us that the federal debt being amassed is scaring people; so much so that polls also say that Americans now trust the clueless, leaderless GOP on economic and fiscal issues more than they do the Democrats.
President Obama himself remains popular. The latest RealClearPolitics average of his approval ratings is holding around 60 percent. But both his approval and disapproval ratings are moving slowly toward the middle.
I believe the president is being weighed down a bit by the over-actions of the Democratic Congress. They seemed to have taken many of his ideas and disappeared with them somewhere way beyond the left-field foul line. And the public has too little attention to always properly distinguish between Obama's and the Congress's words and actions.
Remaining is what may be the most pernicious White House proposal of all -- to tax overseas revenue of corporations as soon as they are recognized in whatever foreign country they may be earned in. This could result in whole corporations moving their headquarters out of the United States. Microsoft has already dropped a hint that it might.
Unfortunately for these companies, this proposal hasn't been widely canvassed in media yet, probably in part because it's complicated and in part because Obama has done an effective job of branding many of these multinational companies as "tax dodgers."
What a cruel irony if most of the Democrats' policy proposals that could potentially retard economic growth were to fall apart this summer, only to have a potentially devastating new tax trip us back into recession because no one understood or cared about the issue enough to combat it.