Cap and Trade in a Nutshell

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7 responses to “Cap and Trade in a Nutshell”

1. 

   Benjamin Ficker

   July 1, 2009

   Besides the month­ly ener­gy costs, the costs for just about every­thing relat­ed to own­ing a home (land­lords own and would have to pass the costs on to ten­ants) are incred­i­ble. I’m in real estate and this bill will will def­i­nite­ly affect my clients. Check out this out from JamieWear­ing­Fool

   Beyond what it will do to our econ­o­my, at the end of the debate House GOP Leader John Boehn­er took to the floor and start­ed read­ing from the 300 page amend­ment that the Democ­rats draft­ed and dropped on the leg­is­la­tures at 3 AM, there was lit­er­al­ly hun­dred of items to impose fed­er­al con­trol over your life. Here are some highlights.

   Want to replace a win­dow? Not so fast. First you must pay for an appraisal of your house to mea­sure its ener­gy effi­cien­cy and receive cal­cu­la­tions of both before and after the pro­posed change. Hey, it may be a great excuse for those guys try­ing to avoid putting in that big bay style win­dow that the mis­sus has been bug­ging you about.

   Are you hav­ing a new house built? Back up, Skip­py. This bill includes lan­guage that tells you exact­ly where you can put your elec­tri­cal outlets.

   Did you know that for one sort of appraisal ser­vice relat­ed to deter­min­ing ener­gy effi­cien­cy there is only one com­pa­ny you can use? Yup, it is right in there along with the name of the com­pa­ny. How is it that this one com­pa­ny man­aged to land the only con­tract to ser­vice 300 mil­lion Amer­i­cans? Who is this company?

   I wish I could answer those ques­tions, but all of those pro­vi­sions and more, Rep. Boehn­er went on for almost an hour cit­ing them and still didn’t get through the whole 300 pages, is not avail­able. You see because of when the Democ­rats dropped this amend­ment at 3 AM the text of it is not avail­able. So much for that trans­paren­cy. The total bill runs on for more then 1500 pages and it con­trols every aspect of your life, from what type of car we will be able to pro­duce and buy to what type of appli­ances you have in your house.

   Under some of these pro­vi­sions you won’t be able to sell your house. Got your eyes and a quaint lit­tle place out the way and off the beat­en path? For­get about it. By the time you went through the time and expense to get it up to the new code pro­posed in this leg­is­la­tion that lit­tle place in the woods will resem­ble some­thing out the Jetsons.

   So for those who were at work and get­ting ready for their week­end, and were sim­ply tired of the wall-to-wall cov­er­age of Michael Jack­son, you came just one more step clos­er to being less free today then you were yes­ter­day. And by the way, Con­gress has blown town for a two-week vaca­tion. It is hard work turn­ing a Repub­lic into a Social­ist state. This must be stopped in the Senate.

   My biggest fear now, how­ev­er, is if the Repub­li­cans couldn’t stop this, a bill that will throw hun­dreds of thou­sands if not mil­lions out of work as the com­pa­nies they work for go bel­ly up or leave the coun­try and imposed what amounts to a nation­al home­own­ers asso­ci­a­tion on all of us, what chance do they have of stop­ping the nation­al­ized health care?

   Error hap­pened.

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2. 

   John

   July 2, 2009

   My Repub­li­can Con­gress­man says Cap and Trade will be good for America.
   And, he caught the Green Riv­er Killer.
   Did you catch the Green Riv­er Killer?
   No, no you didn’t.
   You can hear his inter­view here.

   http://www.mynorthwest.com/?nid=194&sid=184941

   Dave Reichert SPEAKS: says Cap and Trade will be good for America
   He argued that the expense would not be what the Heart­land Insti­tute, Her­itage Foun­da­tion, and Wall Street Jour­nal were pre­dict­ing. He argued that it would cost around $.48 per day and that we would have bet­ter nation­al secu­ri­ty, more nuclear, coal and refin­ing capa­bil­i­ties, and a clean­er envi­ron­ment with the bill. He argued that the con­ser­v­a­tive argu­ments against were mis­tak­en, and that Wash­ing­ton specif­i­cal­ly would be bet­ter off even though the bill was imperfect.

   And, he caught the Green Riv­er Killer.

   Yeah, it took him a cou­ple of decades, but bet­ter late than never.
   I hear Fox was think­ing about mak­ing the Series 24 about Reichert. But instead of show­ing 24 hours in a day they would have to make each episode a year.

   Error hap­pened.

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3. 

   Senior

   July 2, 2009

   I have not read the bill, so I can­not speak to the specifics that Ben­jamin lists. I would note that nei­ther he nor the web site he links to make any effort to doc­u­ment the claims.

   I did see that Jam­mie Wear­ing Fool links to Michelle Malkin who tries to claim that there is a “place­hold­er” in the bill. I encour­age every­one to take a look:

   http://michellemalkin.com/2009/07/01/here-is-the-cap-and-tax-placeholder-wheres-the-fine-print/

   Now, if it isn’t too much trou­ble, you might want to go to the actu­al bill on line

   http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.2454.EH:

   and scroll down to the appro­pri­ate part of the table of con­tents, you will see that no such entry exists. (It is past halfway down. If you do a find for “sub­ti­tle B” it will be the third occur­ance, I believe).

   So, lots of unsub­stan­ti­at­ed claims and an out­right, lets be gen­er­ous, mistake.

   Very con­vinc­ing.

   Make no mis­take, if the bill requires I upgrade the win­dows before sell­ing the house or that I pay a con­sul­tant for a study before I replace a win­dow, etc., I will agree the bill should not pass. But I need evi­dence, not just claims.

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   1. 

      Senior

      July 2, 2009

      I see my link to the bill is bad.

      If you go here: http://thomas.loc.gov/home/c111query.html

      and search for:

      Amer­i­can Clean Ener­gy and Secu­ri­ty Act of 2009 (Engrossed as Agreed to or Passed by House)

      You should be able to find your way to the bill.

      Error hap­pened.

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4. 

   Senior

   July 2, 2009

   I now see that the “place­hold­er” that Michelle Malkin ref­er­enced was in the bill “report­ed in the House”, but it is not in the bill passed by the house. So Michelle is cit­ing the wrong ver­sion. Since the bill passed on June 26 and Michelle post­ed July 1 I think that’s a pret­ty big mis­take, if it is one.

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5. 

   Claude

   July 2, 2009

   In this, the new era of respon­si­bil­i­ty, weren’t we sup­posed to be able to find these bills on one of the admin­is­tra­tion’s many sites for review? As far as I know, this bill was amend­ed at 3AM the day of the vote, and those changes were not merged into the final bill before it was passed…? Did­n’t the same thing hap­pened with the so-called stim­u­lus bill?

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   1. 

      Rick Beckman

      July 2, 2009

      I think you’re con­fused, Claude… Nobody real­ly expects any­one to keep cam­paign promis­es. They’re like movie trail­ers — they can make any movie look funny/action packed/emotional/awesome, no mat­ter how lame/dull/boring/fail it is. Noth­in’ but adver­tis­ing, all of it, and we all know how hon­est ads are.

      But by God, we’re Amer­i­cans, and we have the right to be swin­dled by any man­u­fac­tur­er, pro­duc­er, or politi­cian that we want.

      Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go dry the Great Lakes with my ShamWow.

      Error hap­pened.

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