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In Part #1 of the cap and tax bill, the meaning of the bill's name was explained. The government will use this bill to regulate carbon emissions and supposedly help the environment and global warming (even though recent studies show that global warming isn't as inconvenient as Al Gore says it is). The implementation of cap and tax in Europe was also investigated, where it has resulted in massive unemployment in Spain and even higher levels of carbon emissions in Germany. Now let's take a look at the consequences that will come with cap and tax in America, if it passes in the Senate.
Here's why cap and trade is really just cap and tax. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the bill would raise taxes an additional $845.6 billion over the 2010-2019 period. That represents an increase of approximately $4,000 per American household over the same 10-year period (1). Unfortunately, the CBO research is seriously inaccurate, according to the Heritage Foundation (2). Taxes would, in fact, increase by over $4,600 annually for a family of four by 2035. This is due to energy prices that will undoubtedly go through the roof. Even President Obama himself stated that "under [his] plan, electricity rates will necessarily skyrocket" (3). But it wouldn't just be electricity prices that would "skyrocket," but almost every kind of energy source. Electricity costs go up 90 percent, gasoline by 58 percent, and natural gas by 55 percent by 2035. "The cumulative higher energy costs for a family of four by then will be nearly $20,000" (4). None of this takes into account decreased GDP, but I'll save that for later.
While Barack Obama was on the campaign trail, he promised the American people that no family making less that $250,000 a year would see any form of tax increase (5 and 6). Well, he already broke that promise with the implementation of a new smoking tax, but he would take lying to a whole new level with a new bill that is essentially 1,500 pages of new taxes. Some may say, "It's not a tax... The energy companies are the ones increasing prices." As I've said before, the real story is that cap and tax is simply disguised as a bill from your energy company. Any universal cap on emissions would clearly cause increased cost to energy companies. This cost will simply be passed on to the consumer in order to maintain profitability, resulting in massive price (tax) hikes.
Cap and tax is exactly what it sounds like. A tax on every single American that breathes. The 1,500 page Waxman-Markey bill will do absolutely nothing to help the nonexistent issue of global warming. (Even under ideal circumstances, the bill would lower the global temperature by nine-hundredths of a degree Fahrenheit by 2050.) The bill is riddled with new taxes, all proving President Obama's campaign promise of no new taxes to be a lie just as serious as George H.W. Bush's "Read my lips, no new taxes." Except, in this case, the media is completely ignoring the statement. The bill would cause countless other problems, including a dramatic increase in unemployment in the midst of a serious economic recession. I think the New York Times put it best when they said cap and trade is "almost perfectly designed for the buying and selling of political support through the granting of valuable emissions permits to favor specific industries and even specific congressional districts" (7). Sounds to me like cap and trade will bring anything and everything but the supposedly needed help for the environment.
Sources:1. http://www.thenewamerican.
2. http://www.heritage.org/Re
3. http://blog.heritage.org/2
4. http://www.heritage.org/Re
5. http://www.barackobama.com
6. http://www.breitbart.com/a
7. http://www.nytimes.com/200
http://masterresource.org/
http://www.rnc.org/news/Ne
http://www.westernroundtable.net/mail/util.cfm?gpiv=2100037119.124182.44&gen=1
ARC
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