Friday’s bill should be renamed to cap and steal

Call your congressman and let them know that the bill they are voting on Friday shouldn’t be called cap and trade, it should be cap and steal. The Waxman-Markey Bill (HR 2454) is not a bill to clean the air or to clean water or to remove CO2 from the air, it is simply another route for government control and taxation. A study from MIT suggests that the direct costs to the average family (2.56 people) will be about $800 per year. What they leave out of their calculations are the $3,128 per year that will be taxes charged through companies that you buy stuff from. MIT says they left those out because they are assuming that those monies will be refunded to taxpayers either during the year or at the end of the year. If you think you will get that money back every year, Bernie Madoff has some investment vehicles he would like to speak to you about.
The CBO estimates that cap and trade will cost the average family about $175 per year in 2020. They completely leave out the cost of changing the infrastructure of the country to fuel cars and trucks, the cost for you to buy a Prius, and the cost associated with changing the way we produce electricity. To give you some idea of what they are leaving out, they estimate a $22 billion overall cost to the economy in 2020. The MIT guys estimate first-year costs alone to be $826 billion for infrastructure, etc. So the CBO underestimated the cost again; see their other misses on health care, bailouts and the positive effects of the stimulus plans. 
The really bad part is that this bill reduces no pollution. All it does is tax you for driving your car or turning on your lights. It’s not about pollution control, it is about government control and revenue from us to them. Call Congress and tell them to vote no to cap and trade.

Bryan Newell
Shawnee