| Submit your comments on this article | ||
| Home Front: Politix | ||
| A Secret Cap and Trade Tax of $1,761 Per Family? | ||
| 2009-09-22 | ||
| ABC News' Jake Tapper and Matt Jaffe report: At the Values Voter Summit Saturday, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said of cap and trade legislation that "the Obama team had secretly calculated that his plan would cost the average American family $1,761 a year, the equivalent to a 15 percent income tax hike."
The Congressional Budget Office has concluded that the cap and trade legislation in the House would only cost the average taxpayer $160 dollars a year.
So where did it come from? Earlier this week, the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute posted excerpts from transition memo from the U.S. Treasury Department that CEI obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The Treasury document memo said that "given the administration's proposal to auction all emission allowances, a cap and trade program could generate federal receipts on the order of $100 to $200 billion annually." Declan McCullagh, a libertarian blogger at CBS News, wrote about this memo this way: He assumed that the costs of these fees paid by polluters to the government would be entirely passed on to consumers, and divided the number $200 billion by the number of households in the United States -- approximately 113.5 million according to the census. That came out to $1,761 per family per year. Or, as he put it, the "Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent." Politifact looked at the $1,761 figure this week and concluded that it was false "based on a blogger's incorrect assumptions and overly simple math. The estimate does not account for revenue that will be returned to consumers in the form of rebates and other efficiency measures." A Treasury official told ABC News that the $100 billion-$200 billion figure "was an estimate of auction revenue, not costs to households." The official said the "statement in question was not a reference to a 'price tag' of climate legislation, but rather an order of magnitude estimate of auction revenue if all allowances were auctioned. That is, we were communicating that auction revenue would not be on the order of millions, $1 billion, or $1 trillion, but rather on the order of $100 [billion] to $200 billion." | ||
| Posted by:Fred |
| #6 And who, pray tell, will be managing the trading of the crap and trade? [and getting fees for doing absolutely nothing of value] /rhetorical question |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2009-09-22 21:43 |
| #5 Taxing something as ubuiquitous (and harmless) as CO2, doesn't lower "pollution" it just moves who "pollutes"! This is Marxist redistribution with a veneer of green. i.e. A typical Melon idea. |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2009-09-22 11:10 |
| #4 Went back and looked at my notes. The $1600/family of 4 is at $20/ton CO2. That's the starting point. The Obamaists are talking of then gradually moving the cost up to $30 or $35/ton. That's $2400 or $2800/family/year. |
| Posted by: ed 2009-09-22 09:18 |
| #3 Betweem cap and trade, supporting the elitists in Washington, and forced health care insurance, there won't be enough left to eat unless it comes from a government breadline. Oh, maybe this is the plan. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2009-09-22 09:03 |
| #2 At $30/ton CO2, I calculated it will cost the family of four $1600/year. That's the same as every American family gifting a new car every 10 years to those government cronies selected to collect the wealth. |
| Posted by: ed 2009-09-22 06:41 |
| #1 It's actually worse that. The specific purpose of a cap and trade system as opposed to a taxation regime is to allow international trade in offsets. Depending on the level of the cap versus demand, at least tens of billions of $$ will flow out of the country. Ironically most of current money flows (under Kyoto) go to modernizing factories in China under the guise of reducing emissions of NO2 and a few other things. The Chinese must be laughing their arses off. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2009-09-22 01:38 |