The House of Representatives passed the Cap and Trade Bill (more accurately referred to as the Cap and Tax Bill) last Friday. The Wall Street Journal said “it is likely to be the biggest tax in American history.” Steve Driehaus voted for it. This legislation, if it gets through the Senate and becomes law, will be a disaster for this nation.
It imposes a national energy tax on every single American. If you drive a car, heat or cool your home, buy food for your family, in fact if you buy anything in America, you will pay more for it. And when we are in a recession and people are already hurting, this is the worst time to put an additional significant burden on the American people.
This bill will cost American jobs, and ship them overseas. And when the unemployment rate in the U.S. is at 9.4%, and approaching 11% in Ohio, does this make any sense at all?
Even though Speaker Pelosi touts this legislation as being necessary to improve the environment, many experts acknowledge that it will have little or no impact on improving the environment, because the world’s biggest emitters of carbon, India and China (who are also economic rivals of the United States) refuse to even consider similar legislation restricting their carbon output.
Now with legislation that’s as far-reaching as Cap and Trade (Cap and Tax), it would be logical to assume that Congress and the public would have sufficient time to fully scrutinize and go over the bill with a fine-tooth comb. Well, that didn’t happen. This was a 1500 page bill and 300 additional pages were added at 3 A.M. the morning of the vote. Not one member of Congress had sufficient time to read the bill. Speaker Pelosi, realizing that the more public scrutiny given the bill, the more reservations Members of Congress were likely to have, muscled the bill to a vote the same day that the unread 300 pages were added.
If this huge new energy tax becomes law, it will be a job-killer and punish American families with crushing new taxes that will suffocate an already struggling economy. It is truly a shame that the Pelosi-led Congress continues to pass legislation that will tax more, spend more, and run up more debt on the American people, our children, and our grandchildren.