Playing With Semantics: Senator Kerry Tries To Claim That Senate Climate Bill Isn’t Cap And Trade
Liberals love playing word games. On health care, when it became clear that the opposition to the “public option” had risen to the level as to make any bill including it radioactive they switched their semantics around to include “health care co-ops” which are really just the “public option” by another name.
The same is true with another contentious issue the Democrats are trying to jam through Congress. “Cap and trade” has been (rightfully) castigated as a tax on pretty much everything in the economy. A gigantic new burden we a) don’t need and b) can’t afford. And that criticism has born fruit. Though Democrats managed to eke out a successful vote on cap and trade in the House their margin of victory was tiny, and the potential for success of that same bill in the Senate was even tinier.
So now that the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has released its version of cap and trade, Senator John Kerry (who was instrumental in shaping the legislation in committee) is claiming that it’s not a cap and trade bill but rather a “pollution reduction bill.” Which, I guess, is intended to make us think that the bill wouldn’t tax us even though it will.
Kerry last week sought to change the vernacular surrounding the climate bill and sell its concepts more broadly, insisting it is not a “cap and trade” proposal but a “pollution reduction” bill. “I don’t know what ‘cap and trade’ means. I don’t think the average American does,” Kerry said. “This is not a cap-and-trade bill, it’s a pollution reduction bill”.
The Environment and Public Works Committee’s version of this bill hasn’t been made public yet, but according to the article Democrat aides are saying that it will include “emission allowances” for businesses and industries. That means arbitrarily-set government limits on how much carbon a business can emit. And to go above that limit a given business would have to pay a fine or a tax, or I’m assuming that business could buy allowances from other businesses who aren’t using their full allotment.
That’s cap and trade. That’s a tax. And it would be a burden that would inflate the cost of pretty much everything in our economy from gasoline to books to candy give that in the course of its creation and transportation every product requires the emission of carbon.
There’s nothing different here. Democrats are just calling it something different.
