If we didn't already have enough fun talking about the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in the House, we now got the Boxer-Kerry bill in the Senate to poke holes in. While the legislation leaves several things unanswered, there is one thing certain, according to a Heritage Foundation analysis: it is still bad news.
Like Waxman-Markey, the focus is a cap and trade system, but takes the House bill’s 17 percent reduction of 2005 emissions by 2020 to a more stringent 20 percent cut. Unlike the House version, which gives away emission allowances to special interests groups that lobbied hard to protect their bottom line, the Senate draft does not include how the emission allowances – hundreds of billions of dollars - will be given away.
Co-sponsor Senator Kerry tells us, “This is not a cap-and-trade bill, it’s a pollution reduction bill.” But the simple reality is it’s an energy tax bill. As OMB director Peter Orszag says, “Under a cap-and-trade program, firms would not ultimately bear most of the costs of the allowances but instead would pass them along to their customers in the form of higher prices.” And the bill’s incompleteness goes to show how impatiently Kerry and Boxer are trying to move a historic energy tax into law.
The bills are structured very similarly, so the impacts of both are seen as comparable. The Boston Herald wrote, in an editorial out Sunday, "The effects of Boxer-Kerry, if passed, cannot be far different from Waxman-Markey: A reduction in average global temperature in 2050 of 0.09 degree Fahrenheit at an annual cost that could reach $1,791 per household." That $1,761 annual cost per household is the Obama Administration's own number. Heritage notes that "low-income families spend a larger portion of their income on energy," which means it doesn't take an economist to understand that any cap-and-trade bill (or variation of it) that low-income families are going to be disproportionately hurt by it. That's a hard sell to make, especially given its minimal impact on the environment.
Of course, we probably shouldn't call Boxer-Kerry a "cap and trade" bill, since John Kerry doesn't even know what "cap and trade" means. He recently told the media "I don't know what 'cap and trade' means. I don't think the average American does." Perhaps the average American doesn't know, but when his own legislation, regardless of whether he will admit it, is a cap-and-trade bill, and he should not only know what it means, but understand how it will hurt American families and how it won't help the environment.
Those of us at the American Issues Project have done our research... it be nice if John Kerry did, too.