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Obama Cap and Tax: $1700 Per Family Per Year
Written by on September 24, 2009, 02:59 PM
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY, 9/16/09 Climate Change: A Treasury Department analysis says a cap-and-trade law could cost American families more than $1,700 a year. No wonder administrators tried to keep the study secret. The House narrowly approved by seven votes the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in June over complaints that it would be an undue financial burden to American families. It passed after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi strode to the chamber floor and claimed that "this legislation means jobs, jobs, jobs and jobs. Let's vote for jobs." Even some of the bill's supporters had to roll their eyes at the assertion. It was a talking point intended to convince those who have not been paying attention to the legislation's severe shortcomings, not wise and experienced lawmakers who know better. Throughout the debate, the bill's defenders said Waxman-Markey would cost "less than the price of a postage stamp per day," a small price to pay, they declared, for saving the Earth from global warming. Their evidence: a Congressional Budget Office report that estimated the cost would be $175 per household a year. But, as is often the case in While the House debated and eventually voted, filed away within the walls of the Treasury Department was an internal estimate that projected a cap-and-trade law would cost Americans up to $200 billion a year in new taxes. These taxes won't be levied directly but will be paid when power providers and other carbon dioxide producers buy CO2 emission allowances from the federal government and then pass the costs on to customers as will inevitably happen. Overall, the costs would be "the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15%," Declan McCullagh reports on his "Taking Liberties" blog on CBSnews.com. "At the upper end of the administration's estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year," McCullagh wrote. Had it not been for the efforts of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the analysis would have likely remained a guarded secret. A handful of Treasury documents related to cap-and-trade, carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases were made public Tuesday, but only after CEI's Christopher Horner used the Freedom of Information Act to force its disclosure. "In short," Horner wrote on National Review's "Planet Gore" blog, the Treasury documents are "a candid snapshot of what they're admitting to each other, while telling you a, ah, different story to your face." But the government is allowing only so much candor. The estimated cost of a cap-and-trade program in terms of higher energy prices has been, unsurprisingly, edited out of one of the Treasury documents. A thick black line follows the sentence that opens with "While such a program can yield environmental benefits that justify its costs, it will raise energy prices and impose annual costs on the order . . . ." In two other documents, passages explaining the "significant costs and potential revenues" generated by "domestic policies to address climate change" were covered by black ink. The only logical conclusion is that the figures are so staggeringly large that bureaucrats, and possibly elected officials, feel that they have to hide them from the public. Treasury's censors weren't able to expunge everything, though. A separate administration transition memo drafted two days after the election notes that the "Economic costs will likely be on the order of 1% of GDP, making them equal in scale to all existing environmental regulation." In other words, under cap-and-trade, the economic costs of environmental regulation would double overnight. Horner has said he'll ask the courts to force the government to release the redacted references to increases in energy costs as well as other parts that have been blacked out. We wish him the best. The country needs more people like him and fewer government officials who, for political purposes, conceal information that the public has a right to know. New Comment |
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