Cap and Trade or Cap and Tax

The Obama administration is now pushing its cap and trade bill through congress. It sounds harmless enough, but the effects it will have on middle class Americans is staggering. There seems to be a never ending battle to take more and more of your money for all of the projects the current congress has slated, but this one will impact your wallet in a way most people never saw coming. Global warming, global cooling or climate change all mean the same thing; get ready to pay. Global temperatures have gone down for the last three years and most Americans no longer believe the hysteria, but that isn’t going to stop the government from implementing sweeping reforms that put you on the hook.

Cap and trade essentially puts a cap on the amount of carbon dioxide that any company can produce. The problem is that the biggest offenders are power generation facilities that we all get our energy from. They well exceed the limits that congress would like for them to stay under, so they will need to pay a hefty tax for everything they produce beyond the cap. I’m sure this sounds like a great idea to the extreme environmentalists out there, but power companies aren’t just going to pay the tab. In order to remain profitable, they will need to pass that expense on to their customers and we will end up paying for their extra taxes.

We the people don’t have a choice in what company produces the energy that we use in our homes, so this new tax will hit us square in the face. It’s still far too expensive to convert everything we use to renewable energy, so the power bill will go up considerably. The standard rate for electricity and natural gas is expected to double in the next couple of years, and it will come strait from us to the power company, then to the government. Everything we use and buy in the United States is produced using power and shipped around using power, so the cost of everything else will rise along with it. The government knows this is going to happen and they say it’s acceptable because it will FORCE us to use less, but should the government really be telling US what to do?

For years the hype over global warming has had major repercussions in our way of thinking. A recent poll showed that three out of five children now believe the world will no longer exist when they grow up. Scientists have told us that major sea level rise and melting polar ice caps would devastate our shore lines and make the earth unlivable, but then the earth began cooling again and nothing happened. Obviously we don’t know as much about how these things work as we would like to think we do, but the government is going to bankrupt us based on a guess. Over the last several thousand years, there have been times when the world was MUCH hotter and much cooler; but here we all are thinking the end is next week.

The government, the people and companies are all out of money, but we keep getting squeezed for more. Healthcare reform will bankrupt us because the government won’t use free market solutions like Ameriplan. Social security will bankrupt us because the government won’t make tough decisions. Inflation will kill us because the government just keeps borrowing more money, and now cap and trade has come along to put the final nail in our coffin. At some point the people of this country are going to have to stand up and say enough is enough; we tell you what to do and how much to spend, not the other way around!