Cap-and-trade - 'Largest tax increase of all time'

Pete Chagnon - OneNewsNow - 3/30/2009 6:00:00 AM

Is the carbon dioxide that humans exhale a public danger? Yes, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The EPA has released an endangerment finding on carbon dioxide. The finding will allow the gas to be regulated under the Clean Air Act, something the Act was not intended to do when it was enacted over 30 years ago. Aggressive cap-and-trade measures are being debated on Capitol Hill and, if enacted, are rumored to rake in trillions of dollars for the federal government and raise the cost of living for Americans by thousands of dollars.

Dan Simmons, the director of state affairs at the Institute for Energy Research, calls cap-and-trade the largest backdoor tax in U.S. history.

"In the budget it said $646 billion. They then are telling people on Capitol Hill that it is going to be $1.3 [trillion] to $1.9 trillion," he points out. "That will make it the largest tax increase of all time of all American history and probably all world history."

He says the problem with cap-and-trade is that it makes all people poorer today in order to tackle an alleged problem tomorrow. Ben Lieberman with The Heritage Foundation says cap-and-trade would usher in a permanent recession.

"We might never really have a full recovery if we have to live with these tremendous constraints on affordable energy use," he adds, "so we would be talking about exactly the kind of thing that we are worried about now -- job losses, high energy costs -- these things being exacerbated and staying that way for years and years."

Lieberman believes that the EPA may be using the finding to force Congress into passing legislation instead of leaving the regulation to the EPA.