Brrrring…Brrrring…. The alarm clock has been going off and we, as Americans, have been hitting the snooze button. Wasn’t the historic inauguration of our president exciting? Oh, and shortly after that the American Idol season began. I know that was a distraction because every time the president wanted to be heard by the American people he interrupted the show. Brrrring….Brrrring… the alarm sounded as the government passed the single largest stimulus/spending package in US history putting a yoke around the necks of your children and mine and followed that up with the omnibus spending package loaded with even more pork and goodies. Brrrring….Brrrring it sounded again as the administration stepped in to take over, oops I mean rescue, GM and Chrysler. Now the president, who has never run a business, is firing CEO’s and setting advertising budgets for the car companies. I feel certain that isn’t one of the powers in the Constitution. Then there was the AIG problem, the government stepping in to run the banking industry, the administration allowing ACORN to help with the census, and the list goes on and on. Brrrring…Brrrring… It is time to stop pressing the snooze button America and time to face this nightmare!
The latest assault on the American family is the American Clean Energy Security Act of 2009, aka ACES, aka, HR2454, aka Waxman-Markey, aka “Cap and Trade Tax.” This bill of many names passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee with a bipartisan vote of 33-25. It is always about semantics and marketing with this administration and the hopes that you are still snoozing. Clean Energy Security sounds like a bill everyone should support. A Cap and Trade Tax that is estimated to cost every family an additional $3,100 in our depressed economy is something that no legislator should support.
This bill will create new “green” jobs, but a study by the National Black Chamber of Commerce says that the bill will reduce employment by 2.3 million jobs by 2015. For every new green job that is created, two jobs will be lost.
For those of you that have been under the sheets until now, the idea behind the bill is that each carbon producing company will be allotted a certain amount of emissions. If a company does not use the allotted amount, those credits can go into an auction system to be purchased by other companies that have gone over their given amount. The theory is that it will force industry to produce less pollution as businesses strive to have credits rather than overages. Who determines the how much a business can emit, runs the auction, and profits from the transactions? The federal government, of course. That is why this is a hidden tax and a money grab by Uncle Sam; but like so many of these well thought out schemes, nobody seems to have thought about the consequences of such actions.
When asked, the supporters of this bill will tell you that the consumers won’t notice a price increase in energy because energy companies will be allotted generous emission credits. Another sales point is that any dividends collected from the auction process will help the poor. What supporters won’t tell you is that the creation of this cap and trade system results in creating an artificial scarcity in the right to use fossil fuels. This in turn will drive up the cost in oil, natural gas, and coal thus raising the consumer’s cost at the gas pump, when heating and cooling the home, and when buying products produced with petrochemicals. Our goods and services are moved from manufacturers to retailers using fossil fuels. That too will be factored in to the cost of everyday living. President Obama knows this because he said during the campaign that moving away from coal fired power plants will “necessarily increase” the cost to the consumer but it was a step we needed to take to save the planet from global warming (or is that climate change or climate in chaos now—all about semantics.) To know this will “necessarily increase” rates on the American people during this economy is nothing shy of cruel Mr. President. So much for hope and change! The report from the National Black Chamber of Commerce also states, “Since energy is used to produce everything from autos to food to houses to bytes of electronic information, ACESA’s impacts would cascade through the economy.” Another report that I saw estimated that electric bills could rise 300%
This bill received bipartisan support in the committee so don’t assume that your Republican members of Congress and the Senate will vote against it. If you don’t know who your elected Representative and Senators are, you can find out at www.votesmart.org Brrrrring….Brrrring…. Is that the sound of the alarm clock again or the sound of your Representative’s telephone in Washington? It is time to wake up America and take our country back!
