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A Secret Cap and Trade Tax of $1,761 Per Family?

ABC News' Jake Tapper and Matt Jaffe report:

At the Values Voter Summit Saturday, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said of cap and trade legislation that "the Obama team had secretly calculated that his plan would cost the average American family $1,761 a year, the equivalent to a 15 percent income tax hike."

I'd estimate it at least 50% higher for those families that pay taxes, because many American families don't anymore.

$1,761??

The Congressional Budget Office has concluded that the cap and trade legislation in the House would only cost the average taxpayer $160 dollars a year.

So for a family of four that'd be... carry the 17... plus 3... $640 total. Do let's compare apples to fruit at least, if you please. Not a trivial amount to that average family, even if those secretly calculating wouldn't notice that much in the rounding errors.

Yet those opposed to the Democrats' cap and trade legislation -- including the American Petroleum Institute and Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. -- are using this new, larger figure.

So where did it come from?

Earlier this week, the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute posted excerpts from transition memo from the U.S. Treasury Department that CEI obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The Treasury document memo said that "given the administration's proposal to auction all emission allowances, a cap and trade program could generate federal receipts on the order of $100 to $200 billion annually."

Declan McCullagh, a libertarian blogger at CBS News, wrote about this memo this way: He assumed that the costs of these fees paid by polluters to the government would be entirely passed on to consumers, and divided the number $200 billion by the number of households in the United States -- approximately 113.5 million according to the census.

That came out to $1,761 per family per year.

Or, as he put it, the "Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent."

Politifact looked at the $1,761 figure this week and concluded that it was false "based on a blogger's incorrect assumptions and overly simple math. The estimate does not account for revenue that will be returned to consumers in the form of rebates and other efficiency measures."

A Treasury official told ABC News that the $100 billion-$200 billion figure "was an estimate of auction revenue, not costs to households."

The official said the "statement in question was not a reference to a 'price tag' of climate legislation, but rather an order of magnitude estimate of auction revenue if all allowances were auctioned. That is, we were communicating that auction revenue would not be on the order of millions, $1 billion, or $1 trillion, but rather on the order of $100 [billion] to $200 billion."

Posted by: Fred 2009-09-22

http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=279432