Obama to Tax the Air You Exhale

RUSH: Now cap and trade. Obama is going to use cap and trade to redistribute wealth to poor people. A lot of people don’t know what cap and trade is. I have ‘splained it on this program on a couple of occasions, but basically here’s how it’s gonna work. Any company that spews carbon emissions in the process of doing what they do will be assigned an allowable level of emissions, and if they exceed it, they will have to pay for it. They might be able to trade with a company that is underusing what it’s allowed, but the objective here is the carbon tax. Just look at it as a carbon tax. They call it cap and trade because what they’re trying to make you think is we’re saving the environment. They’re just going to put ridiculously low emission level standards on every business so that everybody exceeds them, and they’re going to tax them, the business is going to have pay. Now, as you know, the way business operates they pass along the costs of doing business as much as possible to the end-user which is the retail customer. So prices are going to go up. Cost of doing business is going to go up.

Here’s how it’s described as MSNBC.com: ‘The federal government will soon begin tapping into a huge new source of revenue by requiring companies to pay for the permission to emit so-called greenhouse gasses linked to global warming.’ While many details of the program remain unclear, the government’s going to begin issuing permits by 2012. The basic outline is that ‘large sources of greenhouse gasses, such as electric utilities to purchase permits from the government for the gasses they emit, including carbon dioxide,’ which we exhale. We exhale it. It is part of us staying alive. It is going to be become a tax when it comes out of a smokestack. ‘A ‘cap-and-trade system’ would be created, under which the government would place a cap, or limit, on the total amount of greenhouse gasses that can be emitted. Companies that need to exceed their allotted level must buy offsetting permits from those that emit less.’ It’s not a new idea. Trading pollution credits has been around for a while. This, however, is massive and has an ulterior motive.

Peter Orszag, the Congressional Budget Office director, now the head of Office and Management and Budget under Obama, told the House Ways and Means committee in September that such a system would create a new commodity, the right to emit carbon dioxide. A new commodity government could tax, they charge you for, you exhale it. For those of you who voted for Obama, I mean you breathe it out. You inhale, you exhale, carbon dioxide all over my microphone here, I’ve just polluted. The day might come where I get taxed on the average amount of exhales over the course of a week, particularly if I do it in the presence of other human beings who could thus be poisoned, they will say. The CBO estimated that by 2020 the value of these allowances could total between 50 and $300 billion annually, an enormous revenue stream that at the high end would be equal in size to roughly half the benefits paid out in Social Security last year. All this is is a money grab disguised as helping the environment. How much money can they steal this way when businesses are out of business, though? How much can they tax people when they’re not working? If they limit salaries like they’re talking about on Wall Street to $500,000, how is New York City going to survive? Doesn’t matter. These are not concerns. He doesn’t care about paying for any of this. This is about control.

It’s like I told you yesterday, in 1975, the great economist, Dr. Friedrich Von Hayek was interviewed by George Will. Dr. Von Hayek, a brilliant free market economist, was asked, ‘Dr. Von Hayek, why is it that so many intellectuals and particularly economists look at capitalism, they won’t see the overwhelming prosperity and success that it has generated.’ He said he troubled over this for a long time trying to understand it, and the best that he could come up with was that, to intellectuals, it’s all about control. The fun is controlling things. That’s what we’re dealing with here, an administration, an individual, President Obama, who wants to control as much as they can. This is not about paying for things; it’s not even really about raising revenue. What it’s about is removing revenue. It’s about limiting the amount of money that people have access to. That’s a great attack on individual liberty and freedom. Bye-bye American dream. That’s what all this is about. To get caught up in policy debates and agendas that are set by Democrats is to miss what this is about. This requires a philosophical opposition and a detailed explanation to the American people about what they face. Because Obama is promising all this stuff within the realm of reviving an economy, saving people’s lives, making them more prosperous just like he’s against earmarks while there are 9,000 in his budget, or in an omnibus spending bill that he’s going to sign.