I have a thought problem for you. I want to take off your blinders, and sit down next to me, and think about how laws are passed, and what it means when a politician says a program is paid for.
Exhibit One is SCHIP, an idea originally written into a law by a Republican Congress, and then demagogued by Democrats as not doing enough when it was up for renewal last year. Bush vetoed the bill because $20 billion was added that shouldn't have been added, and at the time, $20 billion was a lot of money.
One of the first things Obama signed was the new SCHIP act, put in front of him by the Democratic Congress with a payment plan based on the raising of taxes on tobacco. In a very strange turn of events, smokers were going to pay for poor children (and adults) to have free healthcare. Now, there's just one problem with that.
Smoking, as we all know, is evil, and smokers should stop. But if they did stop, there wouldn't be any money for Timmy's crutches. The government spends millions on smoking cessation programs, but if people actually quit smoking, we couldn't fund the program smoking taxes pay for.
Hmmm. One would expect that the Democrats either don't really want you to stop smoking, or their plan was simply put a program in place, and if smoking doesn't pay for it, raise taxes somewhere else to cover the "gap." Tricky, aren't they. What starts out as a tax on bad, evil smokers, ends up as a tax on everyone.
What does this have to do with clean energy? Everything.
Cap and Trade is designed to raise prices on carbon based energy production. The goal is to cause enough pain to consumers that they alter their spending, and consumption habits to lower our carbon emissions. That money, projected in the trillions of dollars, is going to be used for healthcare, deficit reduction, and wealth redistribution to the poorest among us. Imagine the program starts up, begins pumping money to the federal government, sucks the trillions out of our wallets and uses it for their purposes, and then....
Someone gets cold fusion right. Someone develops a way to power a city for a year using a glass of water. Carbon emissions are a thing of the past, and the world has clean, abundant energy. But what about our tax revenues? What about the trillions that were supposed to be spent on social engineering? What happens when we actually go off carbon?
When the government decides to tax polluters (all human beings), they first make them evil, and then use that money to fund new programs. And just like SCHIP, the money that is spent trying to stop the evil, is working at cross purposes with the need to generate new revenue.
It's almost as if these bureaucrats look for something that is addictive, and harmful, and not easily quit, and decide to tax it, knowing full well that people won't stop using the substance. Could they be that devious?
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