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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (314600)	7/14/2009 6:25:13 AM
From: Bearcatbob	2 Recommendations Respond to of 793957

Anyone wonder how much book cooking is going on by Team Obama? I wonder who delivers the offers people "cannot refuse"? CBO Lowballs Waxman-Markey Cost Posted 07/13/2009 06:26 PM ET investors.com Climate Change: Supporters of economy-killing cap-and-trade legislation not only misquote the Congressional Budget Office's report lowballing the costs. They ignore how CBO cooked the books to get its numbers. We have often cited the CBO in our editorials. It's a nonpartisan entity whose staffers normally do a decent job analyzing data and crunching numbers. But as regards the true cost of climate change legislation, they have fallen victim to the computer-age trap: garbage in, garbage out. In recent weeks, ABC's "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos twice misquoted a CBO analysis of the Waxman-Markey bill that claims that we can save the planet for the price of a postage stamp per day. How this squared with the Obama administration's admission, even promise, that energy costs would "necessarily skyrocket" he did not explain. The former Clinton adviser twice made the assertion that the cost of Waxman-Markey was only "about $150 a year." His first error was not reading the actual report, which puts the figure at $175. And that's not every year. The unread report says that's the cost in 2020 after allowing for eight years of transition — not every year in between, for which the true costs are staggering. The CBO's own numbers do not compute. An earlier June 19 revenue estimate projected that the allowance price — the price to emit carbon dioxide — will be $28 per ton of CO2 in 2020. There are 5.056 billion tons of CO2 in the cap that year. So, doing third-grade math gives a $141 billion gross cost. The CBO, however, lists the 2020 gross cost at $91.4 billion. Where did that extra $50 billion disappear? This is how Timothy Geithner does his income tax. The CBO projected allowance revenues from this carbon tax to be $119.7 billion, $129.7 billion, $136.0 billion, $145.6 billion and $152.0 billion for the years 2015-2019. Why the big drop to $91.4 billion in 2020? It's not explained. And what about the preceding years of escalating costs? The CBO makes other mistakes, such as assuming the extra costs on energy will be rebated to some degree to consumers to lessen the economic impact. It also considers only the gross costs of taxing carbon emissions, not the impact on GDP or human and economic behavior. GDP costs are totally ignored by the CBO, which it admits in footnote No. 4 on page 3 of the report: "The resource cost does not include the potential decrease in gross domestic product (GDP) that could result from the cap." Note the use of the words "potential" and "could." This is not analysis. This is guesswork and wishful thinking.