President Obama's budget outline released today includes
substantial assumed revenues from a new "global warming" tax,
the largest revenue-raising measure in U.S.
history - at $300 billion per year from
mandating then selling "cap-n-trade" carbon dioxide ration
coupons, vastly bigger than the tax to fight WWII even in
present dollars ($107 billion per year). It's spectacularly
larger than the last energy tax hike tried by the same crowd, the
proposed (and failed) 1993 BTU tax that Al Gore now says cost the
Democrats control of Congress ($47 billion as proposed). So much
for Obama studying the mistakes of the Clinton-Gore
administration's first year.
He plans on raising from the energy tax imposed in order to avert
the end of the world to pay for his social engineering agenda.
This adds a special twist to the old conundrum of "sin taxes" -
the demonized vice immediately becomes a virtuous, or at least
indispensible, contributor to the public purse. Now, the
(faltering) theory of catastrophic Man-made global warming is a
necessary catastrophe to claim he's averting: the Obama
administration needs the threat in order to offset, at the
bookkeeping level, much of his agenda.
But how, precisely, does he continue the revenue stream when he
succeeds at his express goal of this scheme, as told
during the campaign to the San Francisco Chronicle, to
"bankrupt" coal and those who try to burn it (to produce more
than half of our electricity) by ensuring that electricity prices
"skyrocket" for those who dare? That's a problem, but one the
tax-raisers will surely find a way around, in the form of raising
other taxes...a lot.
Another twist is found in various media
reports today of the Obama administration's line, that some
portion (up to 20%) of the annual $300 billion raised by the
global warming tax "would go to tax credits for lower- and
middle-income working families."
Don't forget what this largess represents. It is not aid to
improve their lot from current conditions but instead, as I have
previously
written, in the words of legislation recently floated to
implement such a scheme, "compensation, through the issuance of a
monthly rebate, for the loss in purchasing power resulting from"
imposing the global warming tax. It is an attempt to make some of
those hardest hit by this price-hiking and job-killing measure
closer to whole before imposition of the tax.
The transfer is a new entitlement and the global warming tax, the
largest hike in U.S. history, is in perpetuity, requiring
that government always proclaim that they are protecting you from
climate catastrophe, as without that premise the revenue source
for their social engineering is no more.
If opponents can't win this giant misstep, I am at a loss at to
what they can win in the fight to retain our system, more
successful than any of those we seek to emulate with the new rush
to a social democratic state.
