Cap-and-Trade for Congress

posted at 5:20 am on July 2, 2009 by directorblue
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You know the Cap-and-Trade bill that Democrats narrowly passed late last week? The bill — the ill-named “American Clean Energy And Security Act of 2009, H.R. 2454“) — consists of well over a thousand pages of government intrusions into every aspect of our lives.

Among other things, the bill regulates farming; fertilizers; animal husbandry and animal diets; feedstock; soil; light bulbs; home mortgages; banking; power generation and transmission; water and sewer systems; manufacturing; building codes; land use (forested, cleared, wetlands, etc); “manure management”; and creates gigantic new government bureaucracies (unionized, of course) to regulate, control, monitor and audit American citizens. It even reaches into your neighborhood and overrides Home Owners Assocation agreements.

Most importantly for companies, it specifies “emission allowances” for carbon dioxide. You know, the stuff that plants breathe and we exhale. Somehow, the environmental, flat-Earth, no-growth Marxists were able to have it categorized as a pollutant. Worked out well for California, didn’t it? But I digress. The bill assigns companies the right to emit carbon dioxide. Industry can trade those rights, but each year the amount of CO2 they emit is ratcheted down. Thirty years from now, the amount of CO2 is supposed to be roughly one-fifth of what it is today. The goal would appear to be to transform the U.S. into Somalia (their CO2 emissions are very low).

The emission allowance schedule looks like this (Sec. 721):

2012      4,627
2013      4,544
2014      5,099
2015      5,003
2016      5,482
2017      5,375
2018      5,269
2019      5,162
2020      5,056
2021      4,903
2022      4,751
2023      4,599
2024      4,446 

2025      4,294
2026      4,142
2027      3,990
2028      3,837
2029      3,685
2030      3,533
2031      3,408
2032      3,283
2033      3,158
2034      3,033
2035      2,908
2036      2,784
2037      2,659 

2038      2,534
2039      2,409
2040      2,284
2041      2,159
2042      2,034
2043      1,910
2044      1,785
2045      1,660
2046      1,535
2047      1,410
2048      1,285
2049      1,160 

Let’s take the defense and intelligence communities out of the mix. They seem to be good stewards of our money and, hell, they’re protecting our country from harm, which is more than we can say for Congress.

No, the truly outrageous offenders are the government bureaucracies that endlessly grow, never improving taxpayers’ lives while formulating new regulations and rules to further empower themselves.

So here’s how my Cap-and-Trade plan works.

We start with the most useless government agencies we can find. The Department of Education, the Department of Agriculture, The Department of Health and Human Services, The Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FCC and Amtrak. For the sake of argument, let’s say that together, they consume $250 billion a year.

Congress’ job? They would be required to cut spending for these ridiculous bureaucracies according to the following schedule (which I had a lot of fun creating — all numbers in billions).

2012      250
2013      210
2014      190
2015      160
2016      140
2017      120
2018      110
2019      100
2020       90
2021       75
2022       60
2023       50 

How do you like Cap-and-trade now, Democrats?

Cross-posted at: Doug Ross @ Journal.

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