PrintMay 15, 2010
The American Power Act: A Bitter Pill
Bad things are said to happen on Friday the thirteenth. This year the thirteenth fell on a Thursday in May but that did not stop the gremlins on Capital Hill from creating mischief. The two gremlins hardest at work are Senators Lieberman and Kerry. They have introduced a nine hundred and eighty-seven page bill called the American Power Act; but it should more aptly be called the American Power Grab.
Both Lieberman and Kerry know that the bill is a sugar coated version of Cap and Trade and both men know that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has said that that this sort of bill is a job killer. The sugar coating is a few concessions to offshore drilling and nuclear power. These men know that this bill is a bitter pill and needs a lot of sugar for anyone to swallow it.
The premise for this bill is that the industrial emissions of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) are causing global temperatures to rise and to prevent global catastrophe the industrialized world must reduce its emissions of CO2. Given the revelations from the investigation into Britain's Climate research Unit (CRU) and admissions of scientific error from the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this theory is, at the very least, questionable if not entirely discredited.
But no matter how many times good science is used to drive a wooden stake through the heart of this theory the political left seemingly brings it back to life like a bad version of a Friday the Thirteenth movie.
So why has this bill been re-introduced? It's not about saving the planet, and it's not about energy independence; in Washington it's always about the money. The original Cap and Trade bill was supposed to net the federal government $846 billion of revenue. And the CBO identified who will be paying for the bill:
"Households account for the bulk of total spending, and they would bear an estimated 87 percent of the compliance costs. The federal government and state and local governments would bear the remainder of compliance costs (an estimated 13 percent)."
This is a classic quote from the Beltway Bandits; where do they think that the federal, state and local governments get their money from? So if we do the math and divide the $846 billion by the estimated one hundred-nine million households in America the ultimate burden of this bill is an average of $7761.00 per household per year. The CBO estimated the lost jobs as a result of this bill will be in the millions nation wide; and you thought 9.9% unemployment was bad.
But what kind of jobs will be lost, well the CBO has at least a partial answer for that as well.
"The industries that produce carbon-based energy-coal mining, oil and gas extraction, and petroleum refining-would probably suffer significant employment losses over time. Reductions also would be likely to occur in industries that use those forms of energy intensively or purchase emissions-intensive inputs to their production process from other industries, including chemicals, primary metals, minerals mining, nonmetallic mineral products, transportation, and construction."
Ok so who was left out of that list, oh that's right politicians. Well If the Beltway Bandits think that voters don't know about Election Day this November second, then they are delusional; which is a possibility. There's a pill for that, but it's a bitter one.
