Cap and Trade WILL Destroy The Economy

By Liberty - Last updated: Tuesday, July 6, 2010 - Save & Share - Leave a Comment

What’s left of it that is.

Last year, the House passed the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. But now that 1400+ page bill is stalled in the Senate in large part because of its massive costs to Americans. To jump start the debate, Senators Kerry and Lieberman recently announced a new strategy to impose a cap-and-trade system on Americans — the inaptly named “American Power Act.” Senator Kerry no longer calls his various proposals “cap-and-trade,” but changing a bill’s name to disguise its intentions is a time-honored ruse in Washington.

To examine the economic impact of this plan, we performed an economic and distributional analysis of the cap-and-trade portion of the proposal. The following are some of the study’s key findings:

The American Power Act would reduce U.S. employment by roughly 522,000 jobs in 2015, a number that rises to over 5.1 million jobs lost by 2050.

Households would face a gross annual burden of $125.9 billion per year, or $1,042 per household, with costs disproportionately borne by low-income households.

On a net basis, the top income quintile will benefit financially, redistributing to these households roughly $12.3 billion per year from the bottom 80 percent of earners.

Households over age 75 bear the largest burden at 2.3 percent of income, followed by households aged 65-74 and under age 25 at 2.1 percent. By contrast, the nation’s highest-earning households between age 45 and 54 years would bear the smallest percentage burden of just 1.5 percent.

Contrary to the legislation’s stated goal of reducing price volatility by excluding petroleum refiners from quarterly auctions, the Kerry-Lieberman bill is likely to significantly increase allowance price volatility from quarter to quarter, compared to an ordinary auction in which all covered industries bid for allowances.