March 09, 2009
Obama To Tax Evil McHitleraburton Customers AKA YOU
Via WSJ:
Cap and trade is the tax that dare not speak its name, and Democrats are hoping in particular that no one notices who would pay for their climate ambitions. With President Obama depending on vast new carbon revenues in his budget and Congress promising a bill by May, perhaps Americans would like to know the deeply unequal ways that climate costs would be distributed across regions and income groups.And not the political pundits defending Obama keep talking about the soak the rich increases in capital gains and the upper bracket income tax increases. Mr. Gingrich had to keep reminding the liberal panelists on MTP yesterday about this. You should read all of Mr. Gingrich's points at MTP, but I've quoted the main points below the fold.Politicians love cap and trade because they can claim to be taxing "polluters," not workers. Hardly. Once the government creates a scarce new commodity -- in this case the right to emit carbon -- and then mandates that businesses buy it, the costs would inevitably be passed on to all consumers in the form of higher prices. Stating the obvious, Peter Orszag -- now Mr. Obama's budget director -- told Congress last year that "Those price increases are essential to the success of a cap-and-trade program."
Hit hardest would be the "95% of working families" Mr. Obama keeps mentioning, usually omitting that his no-new-taxes pledge comes with the caveat "unless you use energy."
REP. GINGRICH: I want him to learn new policies. So I--but I think Mort's distinction between popularity and credibility is very important, because what he's doing is undermining his credibility while retaining his popularity.But let me disagree, I guess, directly, about two things. This is not a moderate budget. This is a radical budget. This budget has a $1300 per family tax increase for energy, which means electricity, it means heating oil, it means gasoline. That will be massively unpopular. And then to try to do that in the middle of a recession--they haven't decided if their number one job is get economic growth, or their number one job is redistribute America. Second...
MR. GREGORY: To be fair, though, they're saying that a lot of that--the tax increases occur by 2011, where they're assuming some recovery.
REP. GINGRICH: No, no, no. But I'm, but I'm talking about the energy tax increase will make us permanently more expensive as an economy.
But the second point is if you're successful--I mean, you may not agree with this--the language of this administration, the tone of this administration has, in fact, helped freeze capital in a significant way.
