It takes plenty of smoke and mirrors to pretend that an “anti-global-warming” bill in the U.S. Senate would help cut our outrageous federal budget deficits.
The Congressional Budget Office is estimating that the bill would cut the deficit by an average of $1.9 billion each of the next 10 years.
Even if that figure is accurate, it is not very impressive. When you consider that our alarming annual deficit spending is now in the range of $1.5 trillion — with a total national debt of $13.2 trillion — a $1.9 billion cut is peanuts. It is not a serious attempt to reduce dangerously high spending.
But even if we buy the claim that the bill would slightly cut federal deficits, it would wind up harming the economy by shifting massive costs onto industry and by raising household utility bills. That’s shuffling costs, not eliminating them.
For example, the CBO said the anti-global-warming bill in the Senate would raise federal revenue by $751 billion over the next decade. How? The money would come “mostly though the sale of carbon credits in a so-called cap-and-trade plan to be applied to utilities and other sectors of the economy,” The Associated Press reported.
“Cap and trade” would force industry to buy allowances to emit more than a certain amount of “greenhouse gases.” Those are the gases that environmental activists blame for supposedly catastrophic “global warming.” But cap and trade amounts to a huge new energy tax on utilities and businesses, which would pass along at least part of that tax to consumers in the form of higher utility bills and higher prices for goods and services.
An estimate by the Environmental Protection Agency said each U.S. household would pay as much as $146 more per year if the Senate bill became law. But The Heritage Foundation found that a related, 1,400-page, Democrat-backed bill in the House of Representatives would cost $436 per household starting in 2012, rising to $1,241 by 2035! And those are only estimated direct costs, which do not include higher prices for goods that the bill would make more expensive to produce.
Pretending to cut federal spending while putting a high-tax stranglehold on industry and hitting consumers with higher costs is no bargain.