Obama’s Plan For Deficit Reduction: Factor In Revenues From Taxes That Don’t Exist Yet

We all know that even by the rosy forecasts for economic growth and tax revenues put out by the Obama administration, our future budget deficits look grim. But they’d be even more grim if the Obama administration weren’t already calculating in revenues from the proposed massive cap and trade tax on everything in the economy.

A trade publication is reporting this afternoon that President Obama’s 2011 federal budget proposal will assume receipt of billions of dollars in revenue generated from the cap-and-trade program even though that proposal appears now to be all but dead in Congress.
“The White House told Sen. John Kerry’s office that the president plans to assume revenue from the controversial climate policy approach. Kerry aides said they had assurances the revenue won’t be designated for issues unrelated to energy policy and combating climate change.
“Obama last year proposed in his fiscal 2010 budget that a cap-and-trade program would raise some $650 billion over 10 years via a full auction of emission credits, with the money primarily going to pay for middle-class tax cuts and development and deployment of clean energy technologies,” Energy and Environment News senior reporter Darren Samuelson wrote in the publication that is subscription-only.

Now, you could argue that Democrats plan to pass the tax on 2010 and thus make Obama’s budget an honest one (at least so far as this issue goes). The problem is that Democrats in the Senate have already given up on passing cap and trade this year.
So Obama’s budget, and thus his budget deficit calculations, are going to reflect a tax revenue situation that does not exist. One that presumes revenues that will not be coming in.
It’s fiction. A lie. And not a lie by omission or a simple accounting mistake, but a calculated deception intended at giving this President the appearance of some desperately-needed deficit reduction without actually, you know, doing the spending cuts that would reduce the deficit.