“Under my plan of a cap and trade system electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Businesses would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that cost onto consumers.”
Senator Barack Obama
Speaking on Cap and Trade
San Francisco Chronicle
January 17, 2008
Barack Obama admitted last year that cap and trade legislation would cause electricity prices to skyrocket.
Obama admitted that cap and trade will likely cost $700 to $1,400 dollars per US family per year:
Obama also promised that cap and trade would decimate the coal industry.
Now it looks like the cap and trade price tag will be even worse than expected.
The New York Post reported:
The report shows that the cap and-trade bill the White House is pushing in Congress — in which companies have to buy “allowances” for carbon emissions — is far more expensive for Americans than advertised.
Sure, everyone knew the firms would pass these costs along to customers. But supporters of the bill claimed that consumers would face only “nominal” increases — barely $200 a year.
Wrong. The Treasury analysis puts the actual nationwide cost of cap-and-trade at some $200 billion a year — or $1,761 per household. That figure is very close to the $1,870 amount estimated by the Heritage Foundation prior to the vote in the House.
Families will be hit with a steep climate-change tax, after all. And that will certainly include working- and middle-class folks who make less than $250,000 a year.
Second, the analysis was kept secret and only recently leaked. That directly violates President Obama’s vows of transparency.
Even so, the bill barely passed in the House, 219-212, with 40 Democrats voting against it. It’s facing difficulty in the Senate, too: Ten Dems there urged that it be dumped in favor of a carbon tariff. (This is called compromise, Democratic-style: Instead of a job-killing cap-and-trade tax, they settle for a job-killing import tax.)
This bill needs to die in the Senate.