Obama’s Undemocratic Plan to Tax Everything You Do and Send the Money to Kuwaiti Millionaires

from The Foundry

Despite the 5,800 miles between them, events yesterday in Poznan, Poland, and Sacramento, Calif., shed a frightening light on the direction President-elect Barack Obama’s administration wants to take our country on energy policy. First in Poznan, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) promised delegates at an international climate conference that “Congress and the president-elect are committed to movement on mandatory goals as rapidly as possible.” According to Obama’s transition website, the preferred enforcement mechanism for these mandatory goals would be a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions, which any honest economist will tell you is really just a energy tax dressed up in drag. Meanwhile, in Sacramento, the unelected California Air Resources Board approved “the nation’s most sweeping plan to reduce global warming by curbing emissions.” Like Obama’s plan, California’s plan features “an elaborate cap-and-trade program” at its core.

What makes California’s cap-and-trade plan so scary is that voters never had, and never will have, an opportunity to debate and vote on its implementation. The plan is being implemented entirely through the administrative process. None of the members of California board have ever had to, or ever will, face the voters. They are appointed by the governor.

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