The cost of cap-and-trade

Congressional Budget Office numbers give a boost to climate-change legislation, but not everyone’s convinced

There are many sets of numbers on the economic impact of proposed cap-and-trade climate legislation, said Jeff Tollefson in Nature, but the “score that really counts” is from the Congressional Budget Office. And the CBO just came out with a price tag for the Waxman-Markey bill advancing in the House: the “remarkably low” cost of $22 billion a year, or $175 per average household—and low-income households will actually save $40 a year.

That's not how the Heritage Foundation sees it, said Nancy Thorner in American Thinker. According to its numbers, the Waxman-Markey “tax” will cost the average household $1,241 a year and destroy 1.15 million U.S. jobs. Even worse, the cap-and-trade “Ponzi scam” is unnecessary. Global warming is not the crisis its proponents claim, using “doctored data,” misrepresented research, and flawed simulations.

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