Cap and Trade Tirade

I had been kind of mildly following the Cap & Trade bill over the past few weeks, but to be honest I had been too distracted by Iran and other things to notice that Congress "secretly" pushed up the vote on the bill to later this week. And they probably did it exactly because so much attention in the media is distracted right now. They are like a bunch of evil little kids, you turn your back on them for 2 seconds and they will use it against you.

Anyway, after my dad sent me an email today to let me know that happened (and after I sent a long reply back to him comparing Cap & Trade to, what else, Atlas Shrugged), I realized I needed to find out if my thoughts on the subject actually held water.

The big question I have is: Who does this actually help??

By putting (what amounts to) a tax on using energy, this is going to hurt everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, because there is probably not a single person in this country who does not rely on powered transportation of some kind (or on things that were produced/delivered by energy-using transportation). If you don't, good for you (and get away from me, weirdo).

The only way to justify this is to say it is in the interest of the "general public" or whatever....and that's where reason goes out the window.

Anyway, it looks like its probably going to happen, since a recent poll found that only 24% of people knew that Cap and Trade was an environmental plan (good job with the secretly deceptive naming, Congress)

Anyhow, if you want to know how much you might be paying for this idea, check out Nate Silver's analysis on 538. Seems pretty solid to me. Its kinda funny how the states with the lowest populations/more republicans seem to be paying more for it. I wonder if that is correlation or causation?

Andrew Sullivan has another pretty balanced analysis of the situation, saying that it will cost the average household an additional $1,100 per year. And after 100 years of paying that much (which equals $110,000 per household!!!!), the goal is to reduce global temperatures by one-tenth of 1 degree Celsius. Whats the cost-benefit analysis on that look like??

Finally, the political conclusions of Cap and Trade are drawn out by The Weekly Standard (and this is the only part of the whole thing with a tiny, little, silver lining). If this passes the House, one of two things will happen:

"One possibility is the Senate does nothing, in which case Nancy will have hung the entire Blue Dog caucus and a bunch of other moderates out to dry by forcing them to take a tough vote on cap and trade for nothing. Republicans will be able to hammer these guys in 2010 for voting against the interests of their own constituents for some pie-in-the-sky environmental program that even a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate wouldn't touch with a ten foot poll."

Sounds pretty good to me - no cap and trade law, and it makes Democrats in the House look foolish (which they mostly are).

Option #2 (also from The Weekly Standard):

"the Senate does pass cap and trade and saddles Americans with the most complex tax scheme in the history of the world. Their energy bills go up while the economy is still in the toilet. The left is out there claiming that this legislation will cost Americans the equivalent of one postage stamp a day. Good luck with that. The whole point of cap and trade is to obscure the costs, and Republicans will be telling voters that half their electric bill is a feel-good tax imposed by tree-hugging Democrats."

This is the more likely, and the more nightmarish, scenario. Democrats still end up looking foolish, maybe even being hated for it, but that won't mean much when you're being taxed out of existence. Things could get to the point where the combination of an on-going depression combined with a tax on energy would basically shut down transportation, and thus almost every business as well, across the country.

Meanwhile people won't be able to pay for electricity or oil to light and heat their homes (or if they do, they will certainly have less money to spend on other things) and the economy will be further crushed.

Not to mention that the cost of EVERY SINGLE ITEM you purchase in a store that got to that store by means of train, plane, or truck will be more expensive.

Not to mention that every single item that is manufactured, harvested with farm machinery, or made of plastic will also be instantly more expensive.

Not to mention that the costs of replacing/fixing the machinery in those factories and on those farms will go up as well, because the companies that make that machinery will have to be paying extra taxes to produce and ship the needed machinery to the farms and factories.

So production becomes more expensive, meaning that supply will either fall, or prices will go even higher to compensate.

And either of those scenarios creates a situation where people would probably buy fewer things, which is of course not good for anybody, really.

I understand this is going to hurt some people a lot more than others, and this is obviously a worst-case scenario, but the question remains:

Who is this actually going to help? And I want a reasoned, specific, answer. Not just environmentalist, collectivist crap.

One final point from the Standard:

"cap and trade strikes me as the Iraq war of the Democratic domestic policy agenda. It's the overreach moment. It's a massive program that no one is demanding, no one understands, and no one can explain."

I hope he's wrong. I hope its not going to be as bad for us as the War in Iraq. But I have to agree with the rest of the similarities. This is the progressives being progressive, simply for the sake of being progressive. But since no one can really understand it, explain it, and especially since there aren't a lot of people demanding it, not many people are going to stand up against it either. And that's too bad.