Rarely does Congress get to do something so sweeping as what they are doing today. It’s usually destruction through evolution as small little things get introduced over time. But not today. Today, they are voting on the Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade bill, better known as The American Clean Energy and Security Act. This bill will mark a black line in the sand where America went from being a leader in the industrialized world to a second tier country. Think that’s hyperbole? Read up on Waxman-Markey any at all and you’ll start to understand.
From the Investors Business Daily:
The Heritage Foundation projects that by 2035 it would reduce aggregate gross domestic product by $7.4 trillion. In an average year, 844,000 jobs would be destroyed, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by almost 2 million. Consumers would pay through the nose as electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, as President Obama once put it, by 90% adjusted for inflation. Inflation-adjusted gasoline prices would rise 74%, residential natural gas prices by 55% and the average family’s annual energy bill by $1,500.
Hit hardest by all this would be the “95% of working families” Obama keeps mentioning as being protected from increased taxation. They are protected, that is, unless they use energy. Then they’ll be hit by this draconian energy tax.
And what would we get for all this pain? According to an analysis by Chip Knappenberger, administrator of the World Climate Report, the reduction of U.S. CO2 emissions to 83% below 2005 levels by 2050 — the goal of the Waxman-Markey bill — would reduce global temperature in 2050 by a mere 0.05 degree Celsius.
Jim Manzi at The American Scene has been writing about this non-stop and has a post chock evidence detailing how horrible this bill will be for America.
This bill would implement draconian regulation in an effort to cripple America, send wealth overseas and all in exchange for a possible lowering of global temperature 41 years from now of .05 degrees Celsius. It’s a disaster. I urge you to contact your Representative in Congress and ask them to vote against this bill.
wow. i’m not for this bill either, but i’m completely unwilling to write a letter to anyone based on the absurdly creative math the heritage foundation does. these guys are the creationist movement of the economic world.
Jim Manzi has been doing plenty of work on the effects this bill would have over at The American Scene, including a decent shot at a Cost Benefit Analysis based on the estimates from the EPA and CBO. It’s not just the Heritage Foundation that thinks this stinks to high heaven.
see, now this is why i should always write then come back and read and edit, never just post. this thing does stink to high heaven, and i think the CBO and EPA numbers bear that out. my point was supposed to be that the heritage foundation’s numbers are ridiculous, but that the things still smells. turns out i just took a shot at the HF and never bothered with the rest of my thought. i give up.