American Missive

I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.
—Barack Obama, Dover, New Hampshire, September 12, 2008

ATLANTA— Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to make life easier for the middle man, cleaner for the environment and safer for the future. The above video of Barack Obama captures the argument against cap-and-trade in a nutshell: this legislation will significantly increase your cost-of-living. A government program which results in an increase in cost of living across all income levels is a taxation on society. And what Barack Obama does not properly explain is that this proposed increase in taxation will be of no tangible benefit to you.

The debate over cap-and-trade is enormously significant, given the incredible costs it will pose on the American people.  I personally am strongly opposed to this legislation.

Proponents of cap-and-trade may assert the argument that this is worth the cost, given we will be preserving the environment and fighting global warming.  My response is that there is no way that can be assured.  Even if you assume that the plan were to meet its objectives, and that every other industrialized nation followed a similar path (fairly heady assumptions!), the decrease in global temperatures over the upcoming 40 years would be at best only 0.5 Celsius.  That is a substantial amount in global terms, but not enough to offset the 0.8 degree increase in the last century.  Is that worth it?

The scary part to me is that those figures assume everything remains constant, except the consumption of certain types of energy.  Who is to say other factors contributing to the supposed warming would not increase (or decrease) irrespective of these plans?

Additionally, those assumptions do not even consider the possibility that there is a good chance cap-and-trade will not work as designed to reduce emissions.  Similar policies have not worked with any degree of effectiveness in Europe, despite being in place since the early part of this decade.  Europeans have either not reduced consumption, or they have outsourced work that involves high levels of emissions to less regulated foreign countries.

The only thing we can be certain of in this debate about cap-and-trade is what Barack Obama says above- that it will significantly increase the costs of basic energy (electricity, gasoline, etc).  This, coupled with loose monetary policy at the Federal Reserve and excessive deficit spending under Mr. Obama’s budget, will excite general price inflation in ways we have not endured in this country in three decades.   In his first one hundred days, through pushing cap-and-trade and through pushing massive deficit spending, Mr. Obama is laying the ground-work for big-time inflation.

I am a global warming skeptic.  I am not convinced the globe is going to continue to warm indefinitely, and I in fact believe there are strong arguments these temperature increases may have plateaued and could be on the way down.

What can we do about the environment?  Change personal energy consumption habits, recycle, and teach children and others to do the same.  But let’s leave top-down, massive government energy price inflation (with its huge costs and unverifiable benefits) off the table.