Cap and trade bill puts million of jobs at risk

The president talks about how the new cap and trade bill is going to create a couple of hundred thousand jobs. What he doesn't talk about is that the bill will kill 3 million jobs. That's an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.

In addition, lawmakers are on camera telling the people that there will be rebates for the poor to help defray the costs of this new bill. They do acknowledge that this bill will hurt the lowest income people the most. Again from the CBO, they are planning on reimbursing $161 per year for a single person household earning under $23,000 and up to $359 for a household with at least two children whose household income is less than $42,000.

Analysts from all business sectors estimate that the costs per household for this Cap and Trade Bill will average $2,000 to $4,000 per year. The American Petroleum Institute has stated that the bill will raise the price of gasoline above $4 per gallon. So if you receive the maximum rebate from the government for this bill, it will buy you 90 gallons of gasoline. If you get 30 miles per gallon, that's less than 3,000 miles you can drive in a year on the rebate. That is 8.2 miles per day. Then there would still be higher electricity costs to pay, higher costs for food, and higher heat bills.

This bill is touted as necessary to help heal global warming, however the best case estimates for this additional burden on the American public is a net lowering of the global temperature by one hundredth of one degree in the next 20 to 50 years. That is if everything the politicians have envisioned works as planned.

Farming is expected to be particularly hard hit by this bill since farming is energy intensive. The Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade Bill will put American farmers at a global disadvantage as other food-exporting nations would have no comparable energy price raising measures in place.

Enough is enough.

Corlana J. McCartney

Calcium