Obama's Cap-and-Trade Taxes Will Destroy the Rust Belt

An editorial in the Detroit News sums up the destruction that Obama's cap-and-trade energy plan will do to Michigan and other Rust Belt states:

President Barack Obama's proposed cap-and-trade system on greenhouse gas emissions is a giant economic dagger aimed at the nation's heartland -- particularly Michigan. It is a multibillion-dollar tax hike on everything that Michigan does, including making things, driving cars and burning coal.

The president is asking for a system of government limits on carbon emissions. The right to emit carbon would be auctioned off to generate revenue for more government spending programs.

The president's budget projects receipts totaling $646 billion through 2019 from the sale of these greenhouse gas permits.

The goal, according to the president's budget outline, is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide to 14 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

Doing so will drive up the cost of nearly everything and will amount to a major tax increase for American consumers.

Such a tax will hit the Midwest particularly hard, which is why House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, told the New York Times, "let's just be honest and call it a carbon tax that will increase taxes on all Americans who drive a car, who have a job, who turn on a light switch, pure and simple."

The carbon tax will be paid by energy companies, manufacturers and public utilities, who will pass the cost on to their consumers. Michigan will be especially targeted. It gets 60 percent of its electric power from coal plants, and the state's economy is still reliant on heavy manufacturing such as car and truck assembly and auto parts production.

Michigan will lose as carbon tax money is shifted to states with a greater presence of high-tech and service businesses.

The proposed tax would take effect in 2012 and has the very real potential to throw the nation back into recession, if indeed the expected recovery has arrived by then. It's impossible to raise costs for such basics as manufacturing and energy production by more than half a trillion dollars over a decade and not have the effects felt across the economy.

The really sad thing about this is this whole plan is being proposed to fix a problem that may not even exist - global warming caused by carbon emissions.

In fact, Al Gore and the like have been misrepresenting the effect of carbon on global temperatures for years. They've insisted the carbon dioxide has increased and then been followed by higher global temperatures. In fact, the opposite has been true. As temperatures have increased (during normal global fluxuations) carbon dioxide has increased thanks to a process known as "de-gassing" in which carbon dioxide is released from warmer sea water.

Of course, the cap-and-trade plan has nothing to do with stopping global warming and everything to do with raising funding for federal spending. It's all about the money.