Cap and Trade: Spreading Wealth from Where to Where?

Yesterday, President Barack Obama met with House Democrats to set them straight about his high-priority proposal to create huge amounts of new revenue for the government by rationing energy here in the U.S. via the carbon cap and trade bill, now sitting in a nervous House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Many Democrats understandably don't want tell the people back home that they will vote for this bill, which is intended to kill two annoyingly non-PC birds with a single stone: a) "non-green" energy industries and b) the problem of how to squeeze enough taxes out of hurting Americans to keep the Good Ship Obama afloat.

The Press Secretary for the House Office of the Whip keeps track of such things, and it published some comments by some of the 31 Democrats who have opposed the bill [find link here]:

Senators:

Evan Bayh (IN): “You run the risk of sending jobs from our country . . . to other countries that have lower emission standards. So the irony would be we’d lose jobs and not help with global warming."

Jeff Bingaman (NM): "Too costly for industry."

Sherrod Brown (OH): “It really does say to manufacturing, ‘Go To China...'"

Mark Pryor (AR): “There are too many unknowns....”

Representatives:

Jason Altmire (PA): "Any way you do it, it hurts Pennsylvania, especially western Pennsylvania."

John Boccieri (OH): “In its present form, cap and trade would be devastating to Ohio.”

G. K. Butterfield (NC): “For a low-income family, it’s absolutely impossible for them to absorb the costs."

John Dingell (MI): “Nobody, nobody in this country realizes that cap-and-trade is a tax and it’s a great big one."

Gene Green (TX): “I don’t want to have to vote on a bill that would actually backfire for us.”

Mike Ross (AR): “If you don’t like $4-a-gallon gasoline, you’re really not going to like your electric bill sometime between now and 2030."

Representative Allen Boyd (FL) posed a deeply troubling question: Will the bill result in "a transfer of wealth from one part of the country to another?"

Considering Obama's stated desire to "spread the wealth around" and to "bankrupt" the coal industry, which supplies 57% of the nation's electricity, combined with his expressed disdain for (and suspicions of) Americans with conservative political views, this is a very good question indeed.