Can You Afford 'Cap And Trade'?

If someone takes $4,000 out of your bank account without your express permission, is it going to make you feel any better if you learn that they gave the money to the poor, or to a park?

No, me neither.

But that's the argument that an MIT professor made in defending the per household costs of carbon cap and trade legislation proposed in Congress. The explanation via the Heritage Foundation:

The controversy centers around a study by MIT professor John Reilly that shows a carbon cap and trade would cost the average American household $3,900 a year. $800 of that figure comes from, according to Reilly, “the cost to the economy [that] involves all those actions people have to take to reduce their use of fossil fuels or find ways to use them without releasing [Green House Gases].” No one disputes that $800 a year cost. It’s the other $3,100 that Reilly, the St.Pete Times, and CAP (Center for American Progress) want to disappear.

Reilly admits that cap and trade policies would cause energy prices for the average American family to rise by $3,128 a year. Reilly also admits that “Those costs do get passed to consumers and income earners in one way or another.”

But here is where Reilly gets creative. Reilly believes that since those extra energy taxes will be collected and then spent by the government in some way, they should not count as costs to the American family. He told the Weekly Standard:

It is not really a matter of returning it or not, no matter what happens this revenue gets recycled into the economy some way. In that regard, whether the money is specifically returned to households with a check that says “your share of GHG auction revenue”, used to cut someone’s taxes, used to pay for some government services that provide benefit to the public, or simply used to offset the deficit (therefore meaning lower Government debt and lower taxes sometime in the future when that debt comes due) is largely irrelevant in the calculation of the “average” household.

Got that? Anytime the government takes your money, whether it be in the form of an income tax, or payroll tax, or capital gains tax, according to Reilly and CAP, this actually does not cost American taxpayers anything because eventually the government will spend your money on something anyway.

Glenn Beck pointed out today that MSNBC's Keith Olbermann was citing $31 as the total cost, and used Reilly as his source. Obviously, Olbermann is either using out-of-date information or he is simply cutting and pasting numbers from his own fevered brain, which would not be out of character. Even Reilly admits the number is $3,928.

If you believe that the federal government is going to raise your expenses by roughly $4,000 a year in direct and indirect hikes in the cost of energy, and then cut you a reimbursement check at the end of the year, you will believe anything. You probably even believe you got a $13 a week tax cut this month, when in reality all that changed were the withholding tables, not the tax code.

By the way, that $400 "tax credit" -- even if it were real -- is only 10 percent of what they want to hit you with cap and trade.

Let's take a moment, too, to say a little something about the Center for American Progress (CAP), an organization pushing the cap-and-trade legislation. Founded in 2003 and espousing the progressive policies of Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR, it is funded in large part by George Soros and mortgage billionaires Herbert and Marion Sandler. Due to the large number of CAP personnel who have been appointed to positions in the Obama administration, Time magazine declared that there is "no group in Washington with more influence at this moment in history." In other words, CAP is hip deep in the Obama White House AND in cap-and-trade.

Nice to know.

How much farther down the rabbit hole do you want to go?