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US House May Pass "Cap & Trade" Bill
jamie found this roundup on the status of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, which is about to be voted on by the US House of Representatives. (The article notes that if the majority Democrats can't see the 218 votes needed for passage, they will probably put off the vote.) The AP has put together a FAQ that says, "[The bill, if passed,] fundamentally will change how we use, produce and consume energy, ending the country's love affair with big gas-guzzling cars and its insatiable appetite for cheap electricity. This bill will put smaller, more efficient cars on the road, swap smokestacks for windmills and solar panels, and transform the appliances you can buy for your home." The odds-makers are giving the bill a marginal chance of passing in the House, with tougher going expected in the Senate.
And energy rationing, by this name or any other, spells death for the economy. They might as well call it the "starve and freeze" bill.
The problem of too much cheap electricity is about to be solved.
Well that right there is where the problem inherently lies. This is just a plain old tax, but instead of seemingly coming from the government, most people gets the impression that it is from the 'evil' corporations. Damn those car makers and electric companies raising the costs! If the government wants to generate revenue, RAISE THE TAXES and suffer the consequences, don't try to shift blame to corporations.
This post may or may not contain cancer causing materials.
Why not call it what it is? A tax increase for the entire nation based on how much energy you use. The EPA finally released a censored study last night that pointed out how much the EPA has been ignoring the real science of the matter. The EPA's 'endangerment' study was completely politicized. One of the e-mails from a superior to the employee who had worked at the EPA for 35 years and wanted the study released: "The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision... I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office." Look it up, you'll be disgusted as I am after hearing how many times people have said "The science is settled" to try and pass this extra tax.
Put a cap on the emissions that industry can output, then create a market where companies can trade the right to pollute. Cap and Trade.
The big question is, what is this Change going to do to the US economy?
While all of cap-and-trade appears very poorly thought out, Pres. Obama actually fully intended this to happen, as interviewed almost a year ago. So, hold on to your wallet, change is coming...
No real impact
I think you couldn't be more wrong.
We've already seen with $4 / gallon gas prices, people will dramatically shift the types of cars they drive. Cap and Trade could raise the cost of gas well above this. Only the uber rich will be driving SUV's.
Raising the cost of electricity is inflationary in nature and will raise the cost of everything. We saw this already when oil and natural gas skyrocketed to unseen levels only a year or so ago. Given this fact, the hardest hit will be on the poorer side of the scale as even the smallest increases in costs take a much larger percentage of income. There will be a lot less wide-screen TV's being purchased, and most of them being in the homes of high-middle income earners.
What citizens haven't learned is that Washington politics are beholden to their lobbies (both sides of the isle) and this idea of cap and trade is scandalous right to the core. What good is cap and trade on global warming when all you do is tax manufacturing and jobs out of the US (which has some emissions controls) to other other countries (that have little to none)? You won't be doing the world any favors by pushing factories to another part of the world. You'll just be hurting your own country by destroying it's economy and probably destroying the world faster since those other countries allow you to pollute more as well as all goods will now have to be all shipped back to the places they use to be manufactured.
This has laws of unintended consequences all over this and your ignorant idea that "this will change nothing" couldn't be farther from the truth.
This will be the longest 4 years in America's history.
There isn't anything particularly crazy or stupid about using the cheapest available resource. Peak oil mongering is often based around the implied assumption that the decline will come in the form of a shock, requiring us to immediately replace all of the cheap oil in one fell swoop. Reality suggests that the price of oil will go up as it becomes more difficult to extract, leading to the gradual replacement of oil consumption over time (and each time someone comes up with a price viable replacement, it reduces the demand for the remaining oil, further smoothing out the transition).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Obama promised that taxes would not go up for 95% of Americans.
Congratulations. You are no longer an American, but a Citizen Of The World (tm).
Here's you new tax bill.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sorry you're stupid enough to believe that mentioning fox is some kind of magic word that lets Obama off the hook.
Take a look at the scoreboard: he claims that he's entitled to violate the right of habeus corpus. He promised an end to the DEA raids on medical marijuana dispensaries; what he actually delivered was a one-week hiatus. He has made no move to investigate (let alone prosecute) anyone for torturing prisoners. He's done precisely squat about his campaign promises regarding gay rights. He appointed a member of the Federal Reserve board of governors as the secretary of the treasury.
As for the economy, he's continued and compounded all of Bush's mistakes. Bush was a failure as a businessman; Obama never even attempted any endeavor where he had responsibility to investors, employees and customers.
Face it, the man is an empty suit. He's Mitt Romney with a better-sounding script in the teleprompter.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I think your missing the forest for all the trees.
When gas prices raised and you think you saw habits change, most of those habits were actually reflections of people losing their jobs from the economy going stagnant because all disposable income was going into the gas tanks.
There is a point in which people cannot trim their gas usage any lower. Going to and from work is mandatory if you want to keep a job, regardless of what anyone thinks of public transportation, it's non-existent in many if not the majority of places.
Surcharges work only when you don't care about the impact it has on the people. Losing their jobs, their homes, choosing between food and gasoline, none of that is an acceptable option to me but it's exactly what happened when gas went to $4.00 a gallon so that you could see the change in habits.
You need to get over yourself and look at what is actually happening.
While I don't expect a Chomsky fan to have any reasoning abilities found outside of a college sophomore with a chip on his shoulder, I'll respond anyway for other readers.
Whether or not we have a 'right' to cheap energy is besides the point. The bill will be completely inneffective while gutting our economy.
1) China and Russia are laughing at us. This act will artificially drive up the price of cheap-carbon based fuel in the US, reducing US demand. Reduced US demand will lower the global price, making oil and coal MORE attractive options for the rest of the world. Their increased use will more than offset any possible reductions we could do, with this bill or any other.
2) Folks like you are willing to spend billions of dollars and eviscerate our economy on the trillion dollar scale in a futile and arrogant attempt to turn back the clock. None from your side has ever talked about how we would deal with increased global temperatures, how we might mitigate any rising sea levels, or what the potential upsides to global warming are.
(These first two points are valid regardless of whether or not you're a global warming believer)
3) The climate is always changing, even before we started emitting massive amounts of carbon or anything else. Go look up climate history and see that the best reconstructed information we have, in recorded human history and prior, shows the climate has been significantly warmer and significantly cooler than it is now.
The term 'global warming' lately has even been replaced with the term 'climate change.' This should tip off any prudent observer that it's all a blatant move to grab money and power. The climate is always changing, and as such, in the 'Climate Change' political environment, will always serve as a convienent excuse to expand taxes and the suffocating regulatory state.
The problem isn't carbon emissions, the problem is folks like you who think they're infinately wiser than their fellow man and the free market, and see no problem with grasping all the money and power they can in order to force their good intentions on the rest of us.
And don't you dare talk to me like I favor large smoke stacks bellowing thick black smoke over American cities, and dumping nasty chemicals into rivers. We solved those problems decades ago and I'm fine with that sort of regulation. Now we've got arrogant do-gooders on a mission with nothing good to do, and we'll all suffer for their hubris if not stopped.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
They sunk that low a long time ago. It's just that the people who should have been calling them on it were too caught up in their Bush-bashing frenzy to care. They were just happy that the media was so biased in their favor. It won't be long until we see the real fruits of a media that doesn't question authority, and instead revels in a sycophantic love fest with said authority.
The media should be questioning Cap and Trade, Health Care Reform, voter fraud, and yes, even presidential eligibility (if only for the purpose of laying the issue to rest) with the same zeal that they showed for mocking Bush every time he mispronounced a word. Mispronounced words don't ruin lives and economies, but these things just might. Where's the in-depth analysis? I don't see it -- for or against. Where's the investigation into winners and losers? We sure heard enough about "big oil" during the Bush years.
The Freedom of the Press was to safeguard their ability to question authority. What they're doing now is betraying that sacred trust and, in my opinion, endangering it by allowing the government to empower itself further and further without resistance or investigation. When the government decides that a free press is too dangerous to allow, the media will probably not have the influence necessary to fight it. They're already at record low levels in viewership because people just don't care about them anymore. Most people see their propaganda for what it is and are getting their news elsewhere -- from blogs if need be -- because at least those sources are genuine and up-front about their biases. The recent "infomercial" and White House-controlled media events are only a further indication of the future path of independent (non-government-run) media.
YES, real, unbiased reporting is just about dead, replaced by the new generation of pundit-reporters who thinks that it's their job to convince people rather than report the facts of the matter. I'm just waiting for these "reporters" to start crying that their business is dead, when it was them that held the pillow over its face.
"I know that every word that man just said is true, because it's EXACTLY what I wanted to hear." -- Space Ghost
Complete the following sentence: The USA needs 25% of the world's energy because...?
...the GDP of the United States (13.84 trillion USD) is close to one-fourth of the world's GDP (54.62 trillion USD).
The complaints against this bill have nothing to do with the spirit of it and everything to do with the structure of it. Taxes, any taxes, have distortionary economic effects. Some of these effects can be good, such as discouraging the use of carbon emitting fuels. Others are bad, such as making goods and services more expensive for consumers. Ideally, the government would enact a carbon tax and offset the tax by reducing personal income and corporate taxes proportionally. This leads to a marginal cost increase on burning fossil fuels without increasing the overall cost of goods and services to consumers and businesses.
But this is not what's happening. Instead of viewing this as an opportunity to enact beneficial legislation, our congressmen have instead opted to see it as an opportunity to increase government revenue. The pitfalls to the proposed system are numerous. As previously mentioned the first drawback is that consumers and businesses will immediately see prices on nearly all products go up. There has been discussion of granting permits to selected firms for free at the beginning. This is a fools bargain. See here for a detailed explanation why, but the net effect of such legislation is to essentially pass the proceeds from a carbon tax directly to the firms granted the permits. Not to mention that it opens up the entire system to immense potential for corruption, as permits will very likely be traded as political favors to campaign contributors, and it puts the government in the position of essentially selecting which companies to grant a massive competitive advantage to.
Yes carbon emissions and dwindling fossil fuels are serious problems, and we as a nation need to take steps to mitigate their effects. But this bill is quite possibly the worst was to do so. It incorporates nearly every unnecessary drawback to such legislation. It's a poorly written bill from top to bottom that accomplishes as little as possible. And it will pass, because the average American is too blinded by the promise of such a law to notice how absolutely terrible the details of it are, and any congressman who wants to be reelected would be a fool to vote against it.