Senate Contact Info

Cap-and-Trade Tax is a Job Destroyer

By Bob Ellis on May 4th, 2009

By now most Americans should have heard about the global warming cap-and-trade tax the liberals in Washington want to impose on the American people.

Oh, they’re putting the cap-and-trade tax into the proper politically correct language to make it as palatable as possible to the American people (”We’re just going to stick it to those evil electric and other companies, not our beloved ‘little guy’.”).

When rational people highlighted the fact that the cap-and-trade cost these companies get “stuck” with will get passed along to the consumer, the liberals had an answer for that, too: “We’ll we’ll give you a rebate after we take the money from those evil companies.”

What many may not realize is that they would likely have to wait a year or more before getting a rebate (which does you a lot of good when your electric bill has gone up 40% and you have to pay it right now), if you ever see such a rebate from sticky, inefficient government fingers at all.

Worshippers of the Religion of Anthropogenic Global Warming also want you to believe this economic and taxpayer straight jacket will be a good thing because it will supposedly create jobs in the environmentalism sector.

The merits of creating “jobs” that don’t do anything useful or produce anything useful is debatable, but then, so is the contention that any net jobs will be created at all.

The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis predicts job losses resulting from the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade greater than 900,000 in some years.

Members of the Congressional Western Caucus and House Committee on Natural Resources are gearing up to fight this legislation. They will be working with Professor Gabriel Calzada Álvarez, author of the Spanish Green Jobs study, to address proven flaws in the Democrats’ model for U.S. green job creation. Spain’s programs resulted in a net loss of jobs.

According to a recent release from Congressman Rob Bishop (R-UT)

Dr. Calzada’s study, along with others, has conclusively shown this claim to be false. In reality, cap-and-tax proposals would lead to over three million net jobs lost by 2025, even after factoring in any new ?green jobs created in the renewable energy sector. Republicans offer energy alternatives that will create long-term, high-paying jobs through affordable domestic energy development.

The release also says that 9 out of 10 “green jobs” created in Spain over the last decade are now gone. What’s more, Spain spent $753,778 to create each job, including subsidies of $1,319,783 per wind industry job.

Such costly “jobs” may prove hard for the American taxpayer to sustain–especially when he’s already busy paying the existing tax burden and repaying the trillions our government has borrowed in the past three months or so.

Fortunately, according to a recent article from the Wall Street Journal, Democrats may not have the votes they need to get this socialist job-destroying legislation out of the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment.

Let us hope that remains the case, and this bill may remain there until it dies. It is based on a socialist fantasy, is hostile to the American economy and the American taxpayer, and deserves to die an ignoble death.

But even if it does die in subcommittee, Americans must remain vigilant against resurrections of this attack on their prosperity.

Liberals are nothing if not persistent.