Say Anything Blog

A few weeks ago the GOP released some numbers on Obama’s cap and trade policy which were based on a study done by MIT.  The liberals jumped on the GOP, claiming that the numbers were bogus, with even the Wall Street Journal piling but.

But as it turns out, the numbers are actually sound.  John McCormack explains:

Many congressional Republicans, including members of the GOP leadership, have claimed that the plan to limit carbon emissions through cap and trade would cost the average household more than $3,100 per year. According to an MIT study, between 2015 and 2050 cap and trade would annually raise an average of $366 billion in revenues (divided by 117 million households equals $3,128 per household, the Republicans reckon).

But on March 24, after interviewing one of the MIT professors who conducted the study on which the GOP relied to produce its estimate, the St. Petersburg Times fact-check unit, Politifact, declared the GOP figure of $3,100 per household was a “Pants on Fire” falsehood. The GOP claim is “just wrong,” MIT professor John Reilly told Politifact. “It’s wrong in so many ways it’s hard to begin.” …

During a lengthy email exchange last week with THE WEEKLY STANDARD, MIT professor John Reilly admitted that his original estimate of cap and trade’s cost was inaccurate. The annual cost would be “$800 per household”, he wrote. “I made a boneheaded mistake in an excel spread sheet. I have sent a new letter to Republicans correcting my error (and to others).”

While $800 is significantly more than Reilly’s original estimate of $215 (not to mention more than Obama’s middle-class tax cut), it turns out that Reilly is still low-balling the cost of cap and trade by using some fuzzy logic. In reality, cap and trade could cost the average household more than $3,900 per year.

The $800 paid annually per household is merely the “cost to the economy [that] involves all those actions people have to take to reduce their use of fossil fuels or find ways to use them without releasing [Green House Gases],” Reilly wrote. “So that might involve spending money on insulating your home, or buying a more expensive hybrid vehicle to drive, or electric utilities substituting gas (or wind, nuclear, or solar) instead of coal in power generation, or industry investing in more efficient motors or production processes, etc. with all of these things ending up reflected in the costs of good and services in the economy.”

In other words, Reilly estimates that “the amount of tax collected” through companies would equal $3,128 per household–and “Those costs do get passed to consumers and income earners in one way or another”–but those costs have “nothing to do with the real cost” to the economy. Reilly assumes that the $3,128 will be “returned” to each household. Without that assumption, Reilly wrote, “the cost would then be the Republican estimate [$3,128] plus the cost I estimate [$800].”

So, really, the cost to we end consumers of energy could be as high as $4,000/year.

Do you have an extra $4,000 sitting around that you can afford to spend on energy?  I know I don’t.

But this is what the liberals want.  They want to drive up the price of energy to the point where we can’t afford it.  This then justifies them offering government assistance to help us pay for the cost of energy that they inflated in the first place.  Then, once they’ve got us all on the government dole, they can use their control over our energy consumption for their own purposes.

They’ve done the same thing with health care.  Government interference drives up the cost of health care.  That drives more people to dependence on the government for health care.  And then ultimately, the health care industry is nationalized and the government controls everything.

If the Republicans do one thing this session of Congress, they need to kill cap and trade.