No thread on this bill? It has passed the house, so we have our modern day Smoot-Hawley. Hopefully this gets canned in the Senate.
Now my heating bills will skyrocket. Yay!! They are saying it will be harder for it to pass in the Senate so we'll just wait and see. Hopefully they stop it.
Shhh... The nation is too busy worshipping a gloved pedophile to pay attention to a 1500-page cap-and-trade rape: the biggest tax in American history! Even Pelosi even told ManBearPig to stay home! No sense talking openly about yet another yes yet another fornication of the American taxpayer; much less have a open thread on it... surely you jest... Ream it late Friday then maybe nobody will notice... Oh excuse me; was America assaulted this evening?
The people that can afford higher power bills will pay it. The people who can't afford to pay them will have them paid by the people who can afford them by raising their costs even more. It is only logical. I tried to get solar for my house years ago. Turns out I could get it, but I still needed elect and gas company to finish the job.
The congress gave a few minutes of silence to honor Jackson. Now you know why the congressional approval rating is 18% and falling.
Come on now, ITN. Barack Obama has kept us safe. We have not been attacked for his entire tenure. By GOP standards that makes him a complete success.
There is a lot of merit to cap and trade in terms of reducing CO2 emissions. Its too bad that CO2 emissions are not the goal of congress...they just want to get more money to play with. If they wanted to reduce CO2, they wouldn't have given away free allowances, and they would have set a high cap. Any congressman that says that this is to reduce CO2 is full of BS.
Because the bill imposes large regressive taxes on Americans and high tariffs on our trading partners at a time when our economy is contracting, that and the fact that the bill will have almost no impact on global temperatures. As noted earlier the goal is to raise revenue rather than reduce CO2 emissions.
No, I most definitely do understand cap and trade. I'm not going to bother explaining it to you, especially since wikipedia has an exhaustive and well written article on the topic. Come back to the discussion when you understand what you are talking about.
We've got a similar scheme going through Parliament here at the moment. I'm all for saving the environment and reducing carbon emissions, but I'm not sure this is the way to do it.
Gird your loins... Although energy companies' emissions would be capped under the bill, those same companies would be able to purchase rights to emit pollution at levels above their cap from other companies falling short of their allowed emissions (and you can count on this happening). In effect, cap & trade becomes simply a sin tax, a cost that will simply be passed on to consumers. For example, if an energy producer using coal-fired plants emits more gases than allowed, it could purchase further emission rights from another company, then pass that cost on to energy consumers in the form of higher electric and/or gas bills.
Furthermore, whenever you increase demand for anything with a limited supply you will see a subsequent increase in cost - unless this is regulated, expect companies to sell these for a pretty penny. As for who bears the burden of this new tax, despite any effort to prevent this from happening, anytime you increase taxes, a portion of that is transferred to the consumer, even if it's meant that the tax burden should be entirely the producer/supplier's to bear.
If the Billionaires who promote such rubbish as global warming really cared so much about the planet, they would live within their means a little more. Al gore owns an oil company and has how big of a house, Rockefeller's were the first billionaires in America due to oil. Why dont they spend their trillions of dollars to make more efficient technology rather than taxing people, while profiting from oil.
I have to say, it kind of amazes me how cap and trade, which was basically designed by conservative economists and which has been endorsed by AEI (I believe), Gary Becker, Richard Posner, Greg Mankiw, and I believe Kevin Murphy, has suddenly become the thing that Republicans hate most. Conservative opposition to a conservative proposal: all the evidence I need that there is no hope at all for the intellectual wing of the Republican party.
The cap and trade proposal we are seeing is not the cap and trade proposal that conservatives have proposed. I hope you would see the difference. I don't know about others, but Greg Mankiw was a fan of the carbon tax and has opposed other forms of taxation and regulation.
Are you sure about Mankiw? I may be incorrect. Thing is that the NRO crowd has opposed any form of cap & trade and not just the one being proposed, at least since Obama started his run for office. I feel pretty certain that they would have loved it had President Romney, for example, proposed it.
I stand corrected on Mankiw: he does support the tax. At least part of his objection to cap and trade, however, is that he doesn't want permits to be handed out for free. He sees the carbon tax as a means of generating revenue that would offset the payroll tax.