Congressman Waxman (D-CA) has been pulling out all the stops in trying to get more Democrats to sign onto this monstrosity – now up to 1,200 pages. Shades of the Porkulus bill – which is pretty much what it is! The Porkulus is going to tax us way beyond belief as the debt kicks in. This bill is going to be a second KO in the future as well!
Once again from Hot Air and once again, our Congress Critters are about to lay down a foundation by which they will control our energy usage (think behavior modification vs taxes). And it is going to SLAM the middle class (as always, the rich can afford it and the poor will have it paid for by taxpayer money – poor middle class gets to pay for their neighbor’s energy use; emphasis mine):
Democrats have hailed the CBO estimates of the costs per family of their new cap-and-trade carbon-emissions scheme, which show an impact of only $175 annually. What they don’t tell voters, the Wall Street Journal explains, is that those costs begin to sharply escalate in ten years. Democrats also fail to mention that the cost estimates of the CBO come just from the trading mechanism and nothing else:
To get support for his bill, Mr. Waxman was forced to water down the cap in early years to please rural Democrats, and then severely ratchet it up in later years to please liberal Democrats. The CBO’s analysis looks solely at the year 2020, before most of the tough restrictions kick in. As the cap is tightened and companies are stripped of initial opportunities to “offset” their emissions, the price of permits will skyrocket beyond the CBO estimate of $28 per ton of carbon. The corporate costs of buying these expensive permits will be passed to consumers.
The biggest doozy in the CBO analysis was its extraordinary decision to look only at the day-to-day costs of operating a trading program, rather than the wider consequences energy restriction would have on the economy. The CBO acknowledges this in a footnote: “The resource cost does not indicate the potential decrease in gross domestic product (GDP) that could result from the cap.”
The hit to GDP is the real threat in this bill. The whole point of cap and trade is to hike the price of electricity and gas so that Americans will use less. These higher prices will show up not just in electricity bills or at the gas station but in every manufactured good, from food to cars. Consumers will cut back on spending, which in turn will cut back on production, which results in fewer jobs created or higher unemployment. Some companies will instead move their operations overseas, with the same result.
When the Heritage Foundation did its analysis of Waxman-Markey, it broadly compared the economy with and without the carbon tax. Under this more comprehensive scenario, it found Waxman-Markey would cost the economy $161 billion in 2020, which is $1,870 for a family of four. As the bill’s restrictions kick in, that number rises to $6,800 for a family of four by 2035.
Yup we will all end up as wards of the state. Free choice? Self-determination? No problem, Obama and the Dems have your choices all mapped out fer ya! Silly little people, thinking they elected people that would watch out for them. This is all about Statism – Government being in control and not the individuals. This is all about bigger and bigger Government.
You don’t like this? Consider this as an action item:
NoWaxman-Markey will get a vote, perhaps as early as tomorrow, in the House. Call your Congressman and explain that we don’t want to throw away our economic future for the pleasure of a few statists exploiting an unproven theory as a means to gain control of energy production. This fight, though, will be won or lost in the Senate.
