2009.06.25

Fox News Video on Cap and Trade

Cap and Trade is a bad thing. Cap and trade should be called what it really is... a tax. This tax seeks to punish anyone that emits carbon-dioxide. Every time you exhale, you are exhaling carbon-diooxide. Essentially, the government now plans to tax every breath you take.

Some folks are waking up to how bad of an idea this tax is. The NY Times published a brief article (click here) indicating that the citizens do not want this legislation.

My understanding is that the cost of cap and trade per person is between $1,100 and $3,000 in the first year.  

How are farmers going to afford a new more efficient tractor?  I lived on a farm in Iowa.  We had 4 big tractors.  They were 40, 30, 25, and 10 years old.  Farmers do not trade in tractors on a yearly basis.  It isn't like a car dealership.  The purchase of a new tractor is a $100,000+ investment. This new tax is going to bankrupt a lot of farmers and manufacturers.

As for solar panels... According to the limited research I have done, it would cost anywhere from $35,000 to $72,000 (to fully supply the home with energy) to install solar panels in the AVERAGE U.S. home. The low end cost are for places like Arizona and California that have more sunlight per day than places like Columbus.  The median cost for the AVERAGE home would be $56,000.  To me, $56,000 is cost prohibitive.  (source)

Here are my "cap and trade" sources:
Dr. Winegarden notes that “Cap-and-trade has been such a dramatic failure in Europe, including forcing even “green” factories to fire workers. When asked whether America could learn enough from Europe’s mistakes that we could implement a cap-and-trade system that made sense; Winegarden’s answer was a resounding “no”.  “Cap-and-trade is the politically expedient solution – it has great political merit but no economic merit. We’ll be revisiting this because, like Sarbanes-Oxley, it will create more problems than it will solve”, not least of which will be dramatically increased volatility of energy prices. (source)

To a rough approximation, the distribution of the allowances does not affect the total amount of the costs of reducing aggregate emissions, just the allocation of those costs across different sectors (i.e., which industries pay what). To the extent that allowances are auctioned and the revenues go to the United States Treasury, the stockholders and consumers of existing energy companies would pay more and taxpayers would pay less. Some estimates suggest that the amount at stake for the taxpayers is over $3,000 per person. (source)

Friendly estimates indicate the cap-and-trade approach is the equivalent of a permanent tax increase for the average American household, which was estimated to be at least $1,100 in the first year and would rise to $1,437 by 2015, to $1,979 in 2030, and $2,979 in 2050.  Reviewing a host of recent studies, Buckley and Mityakov show that estimates of job losses attributable to cap-and-trade range in the hundreds of thousands. (source)

This bill is suppose to be modeled after the UN cap and trade policy and just how much has that policy reduced Co2 emissions? Uh, not working very well according to this recent article found in the Guardian “Billions Wasted on UN Climate Programme.” (source)

30,000 scientists (9,000 PhD's) seek to sue Al Gore over the scam that is man-made global warming.  (source)