Trickle Up Poverty (25 page)
What’s more, even if global warming wasn’t an alarmist fictional invention hatched in Al Goreleoni’s mind, not one politician can tell us how much CO2 reduction will actually occur for our money. Even the corrupt Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates a mere drop in global temperatures of 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100.30 But of course they can’t say that with certainty because while America may attempt to cap carbon output, China, which is the biggest carbon polluter on the plant, “has no intention of capping greenhouse gas emissions” for the foreseeable future.31
Ditto for India and several other countries. Do you know what that means?
Polluting companies in America will just move jobs offshore to China.
Let’s look at a few examples of the projected price tag for this charade. The Congressional Budget Office estimated an increase of $175 a year per family for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-tax bill (which passed on June 26, 2009, by a vote of 219–212 in the House of Representatives and is pending in the Senate).32 The Dems aren’t the only ones complicit in passing this nightmare for the middle class, by the way. Eight Republican turncoats in the House of Representatives went along with this folly.
You might think, “Well, Michael, $175 doesn’t sound like that much money.” Let me put it to you this way. Why fork any amount of money over to the government to solve a problem that doesn’t exist? Not to mention that the $175 figure doesn’t factor in the decrease in gross domestic product (GDP), and higher cost of goods and services resulting from the cap.
Don’t believe for one minute that cap-and-trade will cost you $175 a year.
Obama’s own budget director, Peter Orszag, pegs the number much higher. He estimates the average American family will pay $1,300 per year in higher utility costs33—and that’s supposedly buys us a mere reduction of 15 percent in CO2 emissions, a far cry from the fanciful targeted reduction of 80 percent in carbon impact over the next number of years. To obtain that lofty goal of cap-and-trade, using Orszag’s numbers, your out-of-pocket spending would ultimately be $6,933 per year by 2035.
Senator James Inhofe, one of the few outspoken global warming detractors in Congress, puts the initial cost of cap-and-trade at $3,200 per family per year, almost triple the figure used by Obama’s budget operative. Inhofe didn’t make up his numbers out of thin air—hot or otherwise. He cited several studies including those by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Wharton School of Economics to arrive at this figure.
The scholars at the Heritage Foundation did a careful review of the Waxman-Markey bill with an eye on the long-term implications. They project the cost to the average family of four for cap-and-trade would rise to $ 6,800 by 2035. Some perspective is in order. Obama’s plan will require you to shell out more than the average American family spends annually on clothing, shoes, furniture, appliances, and select groceries (meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy, fruits, and vegetables) combined!34
You might want to read that again.
There’s a dirty little secret in all of this.
As the Wall Street Journal points out, the Demoncats structured the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade proposal 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.”35 In other words, in order to get the thing passed with minimal resistance, they presented the proposal in the best possible light and then, years later, the most confiscatory provisions kick in which will soak the middle class with an incredible tax burden.
None of these estimates includes the cost of high gas prices at the pump—predicted to be $5 to $8 per gallon. One Harvard study reports in order to meet President Obama’s goal of slashing greenhouse gas and carbon emissions from cars, Americans better get used to paying $7 a gallon.36 The idea here is that the more you, the middle class, must pay for auto fuel, the less you’ll want to drive. With fewer cars on the road, there will be fewer emissions, which will lower the impact on global warming. The other goal of high fuel costs is to drive you to spend $30,000 on an electric car with a top speed slower than a galloping horse.
What’s more, there’s an incredible financial burden on the middle class associated with the loss of millions of U.S. jobs that will be outsourced overseas. While pinpointing how many million jobs will be lost, or what the dollar value of those lost jobs represents is difficult, the Heritage Foundation provided this analysis. As mentioned previously, they determined that if six hundred hurricanes slammed our shores, they wouldn’t cause as much economic damage as would the cap-and-trade legislation Congress is considering:
In the first 20 years, Lieberman-Warner [an earlier version of a cap-and-trade bill] would have destroyed nearly 3 million jobs, caused some manufacturing sectors to cut jobs by 50% and generated up to $300 billion per year in government revenue while reducing income by nearly $5 trillion. For comparison, this is equal to the economic damage done by over 600 hurricanes … and the Markey-Waxman bill is worse37 [emphasis added].
Are you starting to get the picture? Cap-and-Trade is really Cap-and-TAX.
What’s more, the preachers of the global warming myth are using the alleged crisis to line their pockets. Yes, this is nothing less than a massive tax on energy to enrich a handful of carbon-offset investors. We’re seeing unrestrained fraud overseas where a version of cap-and-trade is already being abused by fat cats who have made millions in profits and stand to make billions. Lakshmi Mittal, the richest man in Great Britain, comes to mind. As WorldNetDaily reports, Mittal “stands to gain a £1 billion windfall, not from the operation of his ArcelorMittal steel company, but from carbon credits given his company—at no cost—by the EU emissions trading scheme.”38
In Europe, the top ten largest polluters on that continent reaped carbon permits in 2008 “worth 500 million euros.” One report estimated these same firms “stand to collect surplus CO2 permits that—at current market rates—could be worth 3.2 billion euros ($4.3 billion dollars) by 2012” and, making matters worse, noted “little or no actual ‘effort’ toward emissions reductions need have taken place, yet these companies will be able to literally bank the profits.”39
The temptation to engage in this swindling is overwhelming, especially when $31 billion in carbon credits are being traded on the European Climate Exchange. As one columnist points out, “Unlike other commodities, like wheat or coffee, you can’t ship a boxcar-load of carbon dioxide to the purchaser. The trades are done strictly on paper. The intangible nature of carbon credits provides the perfect opportunity for international fraud.”40
Beyond the profiteering, what the sheeple seem to forget is that cap-and-trade presents a bonanza of opportunities for those in political power to court favor and extract cash from business. Even the leftist Old York Times admits the cap-and-trade measure “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.”41
In spite of these abuses, in spite of the clear and mounting evidence that global warming is nothing more than an elaborate house of cards constructed out of trumped-up pseudo-science, Obama wants to increase—not decrease—spending your tax dollars! Like a drunken poker player who doesn’t know when to leave the table, he’s doubling down on the expansion of the federal climate science program. In 2009, the Congressional budget included $2 billion in funding for the Global Change Research Program. In 2011, Obama’s federal budget calls for that figure to jump to $2.6 billion.42
The timing of such wasteful, unnecessary and, yes, immoral spending couldn’t be worse. The middle class is already breaking under the weight of the deepest recession in their lifetime. Thanks to this lack of leadership or, should I say, because of these arrogant corrupt politicians, the very real crisis of trickle up poverty is guaranteed to mushroom. If the Senate passes the Waxman-“Malarkey” bill, millions will lose their jobs to outsourcing to countries without caps. The cost of home electricity and heating oil will skyrocket.
Prices at the pump will jump.
The hit to your pocket book is monumental and permanent.
Some rich will get richer. The middle class will get poorer.
I am angry. You should be, too.
Read My Lips: No New Taxes
President George H. W. Bush failed to be reelected largely for violating a campaign promise not to raise taxes. During his campaign for president, candidate Obama repeatedly said something strikingly similar: “But let me be perfectly clear. If your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.”43
That is false on so many levels it’s laughable.
It’s a well-known fact that the middle class pays a significantly higher proportion of their income on energy bills (electric, gas, oil, gasoline) than do wage earners in the upper tax brackets. For example, if your salary is $3,000 a month and your utility bill is $300, that means 10 percent of your income is used to pay for this expense. However, if your salary is $9,000 a month, then just 3.3 percent of your income goes to this expense. As such, in order to meet a government mandated cap on CO2 emissions, the net effect of higher costs to heat and cool your home, or fuel your car, will be steeply regressive.
In other words, Obama misled the middle class when he promised not to raise their taxes “one single dime.” Look at what the man predicted would happen to the price of your utility bill in light of a cap-and-trade energy tax program. Barack Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle in January, 2008:
When I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, you know, under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say
about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.44
He just said your electricity rates would “necessarily skyrocket.”
Actually, your utility bills don’t “necessarily” need to do anything if the government would stick to the things they are constitutionally mandated to do. Defending our national borders—not defending an indefensible, manufactured, straw man crisis like cap-and-trade—comes to mind.
What Obama and his cadres want you to believe is that cap-and-trade is nothing more than a “market-based approach” toward cutting back emissions. That’s more than misleading. It’s an outright lie. Myron Ebell, Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, rightly notes, “Cap-and-trade subordinates markets to central planning. It takes the most important economic decisions out of the hands of private individuals acting in the market and puts them in the hands of government.”45
Pause there for a moment.
Central planning?
Does that ring any bells?
Central planning was exactly what Vladimir Lenin attempted to implement when he seized control of the farming sector. And, as I’ve already demonstrated, the concept of Marxist-Leninist centralized planning has been a disaster everywhere it’s been tried. Ebell concurs, saying, “most centrally-planned economies collapsed towards the end of the last century … if enacted, Title III’s cap-and-trade regime would be the single largest government intervention in the economy and in people’s lives since the Second World War.”46 Time will tell whether this scheme or the newly passed Obama socialist medicine bill will prove to be the greater intrusion of government into our economy and the lives of the middle class.
Enough has been said about the costs.
The fact remains, we don’t know what it will cost.
What can be said with certainty is that cap-and-trade—or whatever Obama and his senior policy advisor David Axelrod eventually call it—is just another way for the government to trample on your freedom and further impoverish your standard of living. When did it become the role of government to legislate the kind of energy you can consume, or how much you use, or whether you want to use fluorescent or incandescent light bulbs in your closet? Is this suddenly a low watt republic?
Adding insult to injury is the fact that you and I will be forced to pay for something that we completely disagree with, something that we know to be false. That was never the intention of our Founding Fathers. In the words of President Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence: “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.”47
Make no mistake: Obama’s energy policies are a federal tyranny.
Think about the incredible loss of personal freedom that comes when the government tells you, in effect, what size car to drive (small), what kind of food not to eat (meat from methane producing cows), or what temperature to run your heater during the winter (the lower the better). Don’t you see your liberties are at risk? Can’t you see that the proposed energy legislation is nothing more than a gigantic expansion of power in the marketplace? The global warming farce is nothing more than a Trojan horse for more federal regulation! In the ex-Soviet Union and currently in Cuba, electric power is only turned on twice a day.
For only a few hours.
By the central government.
While there’s an abundance of electricity in America, there’s a shortage of good energy policy ideas coming out of the Obama administration. Look no further than how the Waster-in-Chief blew $5 billion on an empty “stimulus” scheme to weatherize homes in 2009. What were the results of this much trumpeted, federally run, home energy-savings and stimulus plan? Disaster. According to the Associated Press:
In Indiana, state-trained workers flubbed insulation jobs. In Alaska, Wyoming and the District of Columbia, the program