“John Kerry, Why the Long Face?”: Maybe Because He Doesn’t Believe His Own Dubious Assertions in Defense of Cap-and-Trade
In one of the official state media organs, John Kerry musters an attempt at a rebuttal of Sarah Palin’s Washington Post Op Ed against Cap-and-Trade.
I don’t have enough information to say unequivocally “John Kerry lies.” Wait. Sorry. What am I doing. Hang on a sec, lemme give my head a shake and cast off the “lawyer” speak, I’m not practicing law here. He’s totally lying. Please.
(I might note that a couple weeks ago Kerry publicly wished that Palin would “go missing.”)
Number one, Kerry’s assertion that global warming, is “the basis of all our actions” is laughable- the typical cynical pandering we expect from any politician from Massachusetts (whose residents vote as badly as they drive). The “basis for all their actions” over in the Senate is greed, not global warming.
Number two, Kerry writes:
She says that, “The Americans hit hardest will be those already struggling to make ends meet.” That’s incorrect: The Congressional Budget Office’s analysis says, of the measurable costs, “Households in the lowest income quintile would see an average net benefit of about $40 in 2020, while households in the highest income quintile would see a net cost of $245.”
Governor Palin also states of energy reform legislation: “It is an enormous threat to our economy.” Once again, this is just wrong. Palin confidently claims job losses are “certain,” she somehow neglects to mention that jobs in our emerging clean energy economy grew nearly two and a half times faster than overall jobs since 1998.
The only Congressional Budget Office analysis that I’ve seen that’s around is from 2007, and I’m sure he’s quoting a current one since I can’t find his statistics in the 2007 analysis. A 2007 analysis is bound to be more honest, however, because there wasn’t the political pressure in 2007 to push Cap-and-Trade like there is now. But the 2007 analysis of a cap-and-trade system says:
Consumers would be likely to bear most of the burden.
Researchers conclude that much or all of the allowance cost would be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.
Those price increases would disproportionately affect people at the bottom of the income scale.
For example, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the price rises resulting from a 15 percent cut in CO2 emissions would cost the average household in the lowest one-fifth (quintile) of the income distribution about 3.3 percent of its average income. By comparison, a household in the top quintile would pay about 1.7 percent of its average income (see Table 1). That regressivity occurs because lower-income households tend to spend a larger fraction of their income than wealthier households do and because energy products account for a bigger share of their spending.
Please go look at the CBO analysis. Those are the exact words. That is what it says.
How do we get from a 2007 CBO analysis that says this to a 2009 analysis that predicts a “net benefit” for poor people as Kerry says?
The 2007 analysis also predicts that “lower wages, job losses, and reduced stock values” will result from a cap-and-trade system.
Regarding his “green jobs” b.s., they tried this in Spain and it didn’t work.
Every “green job” created with government money in Spain over the last eight years came at the cost of 2.2 regular jobs, and only one in 10 of the newly created green jobs became a permanent job, says a new study released this month. . . . President Obama, in fact, has used Spain’s green initiative as a blueprint for how the United States should use federal funds to stimulate the economy.
I wrote a anti-cap-and-trade petition that lists sources for the facts behind Cap-and-Trade. This site was particularly helpful.
THIS IS HIS *PROMOTIONAL* PHOTO BY THE WAY (SHEESH):
