(H/t Craig) You know that $3,100 per household cap & trade tax guys like Boehner and Pence keep going on about? It’s fabricated. The author of the study upon which it’s purportedly based explained that the numbers don’t say what they say they say. The real number, he estimates, is about $340 per household.
It’s almost as if they were bending the facts to fit the policy. That worked out pretty well with Iraq, so I guess it’s o.k. And, of course, the whole global warming thing is a myth. Like the estimate of the earth being 4 billion years old. And the heliocentric model of the solar system.
It’s not just Pence – Burton is getting in on the nonsense, too. We’ll see if the rest of the Indiana GOP delegation picks up this blatant lie as well.
Actually, Howey has Buyer repeating the same lie. Souder missed the memo, as one of the audio commentaries on his website relates the cost as around $600/year in “direct taxes”, but $3500 in “indirect” costs.
When anyone on the Republican side starts out with “bad for business” or “tax on the (fill in the blank)” I tend to ignore them.
They’ve been using the same line since the 1980s. It’s as old as they are.
If “business” and “tax cuts” were going to help us, we’d be living in an economic boom after 8 years of the Republican Jesus.
We knew this last month. Is it possible that someone is waiting for every Republican to go on record with this bogus stat, before shooting it down? Unfortunately, it’s almost made it to “everybody knows this as a fact” territory, just from the repeating.
But what if it did cost $3100? What was each person’s share of the Iraq War last year? How much do people spend on beer and cigarettes in a year? How much does it cost to get a new cell phone every eighteen months? We’re perfectly willing to pay for all of those things, but when people see the pricetag for “let’s not try to kill the planet” power, everyone’s all “to hell with that!” Or at least that’s what the Republicans think.
People did surprisingly pretty ok last year when gasoline was marked up 100% over the current price.
The fact that the real price is purported to be 10% of what the Republicans claim should be icing on the cake.
“If “business†and “tax cuts†were going to help us, we’d be living in an economic boom after 8 years of the Republican Jesus.”
Doesn’t work like that.
Remember, ceteris paribus. Those tax cuts were what kept the current situation from being worse than what it is now.
Yeah, and now we have to deal with the “Democrat Lucifer”.
Whichever number you use to estimate the cost of the Waxman bill, don’t forget that the number represents a national average. The real impact will fall far more heavily on states that rely on CO2 emitting fuels (coal, natural gas, petroleum, etc.) as their main source of electricity…such as Indiana and much of the central and southern parts of the nation. States with a high percentage of heavy industry (Indiana, Ohio, etc.) will be further jeopardized.
Conversely, states that have access to large amounts of hydroelectric power (i.e. California, New York, Washington, Oregon) will be comparatively little affected by the bill because big hydro is reletively inexpensive and emits no CO2. Put another way, hydro states (and many nuclear states, for that matter)don’t have very far to go to meet the new standard.
Ironically, wind and solar are such a tiny percentage of the nation’s electricity supply that they really aren’t a factor in which states will be economically harmed by the bill and which states won’t.
I suspect the $600 per year in direct costs figure Buyer uses is far too high an estimate for hydro-rich and/or nuclear rich states. But it may be a pretty fair estimate for Indiana.
Mitch Daniels is probably close to the truth when he says that electricity bills could double for some Hoosiers (mostly low-income)and could chase many manufacturing jobs out of the country. And Mike Pence, while certainly guilty of talking-points overload and painful hyperbole, isn’t wrong when he suggests that Midwestern and Southern states will bear the brunt of CO2 regulation while many West Coast and Northerstern states escape with little further cost.