President Obama and the Democrats are planning to jack up energy prices and pass the cost on to you and your family...[C]an you and your family afford an additional $3,100 in higher energy taxes a year...if Obama and his liberal Democrat cohorts get their way, you and your family will be paying an additional $260 a month in energy taxes thanks to the Democrats' outrageous Cap & Trade legislation. That's $260 a month that you and your family should be allowed to spend, save or invest anyway you see fit.
The root problem with this misleading email is that the dollar figure is around
The information that the GOP is manipulating comes from a study done by MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change in 2007.
The study estimated that a cap-and-trade market for 2015 would be worth $366 billion in revenue. Republicans, figuring that that amount would be passed from the energy companies to consumers, calculated the average cost per household by dividing $366 billion by 117 million households (a population of 300 million divided into households of 2.56 persons) to get $3,128, or roughly $3,100.
The GOP has always had issues with science, and their interpretation of scientific studies is just as shining of an example of their inherent ignorance.
On April 1st, John Reilly ( Associate Director for Research at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change ) sent a letter to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) stating that their findings had:
...been misrepresented in recent press releases distributed by the National Republican Congressional Committee.
The GOP email, as well as the current round of talking-points being diseminated, did not reflect Obama's proposed plan of a rebate to comsumers to cushion the effect of any increased prices.
[M]any of the proposals currently being considered by Congress and as proposed by the Administration have been designed to offset the energy cost impacts on middle and lower income households and so it is simplistic and misleading to only look at the impact on energy prices of these proposals as a measure of their impact on the average household.
In follow-up communication with Boehner, Associate Director Reilly showed that the actual, annual, increase in cost to consumers was estimated at around $800. This, however, did not stop the GOP from continuing with the thouroughly debunked line of "$3100 per year" in increased energy costs.
Boehner's website posted an "alert" that read in part:
An MIT professor has questions about the $3,100 figure but his letter makes assumptions that are factually inaccurate...[W]e all know that Democrats have no intention of using a cap-and-trade system to deliver rebates to consumers; they want the tax revenue to fund more government spending.
In this, anyone that read the "alert" was left with a choice - believe John Boehner or an Associate Director of Research @ MIT. The choice, to myself at least, is clear.
In stark contrast to Boehner's claims, one has but to read the proposed 2010 Budget to see where, in fact, the money from Cap-And-Trade is going to go.
[T]his program will fund vital investments in a clean energy future totaling $150 billion over 10 years, starting in Fy 2012. The balance of the auction revenues will be returned to the people, especially vulnerable families, communities, and businesses to help the transition to a clean energy economy.
However, the study done by MIT was 2 years ago and the Obama Adminstration's Budget Proposal for Fiscal 2010 was just this year.
We could not anticipate what he would propose, and frankly the details of any current proposal are not completely specified and will change as things go through the Congress.
Still, Director Reilly was able to respond to Boehner's outrageous claims and correct them. So, the fact that the study was done 2 years ago poses little to no inherent issues.
An alternate Cap-And-Trade program ( H.R.2454 ) introduced by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) has recently passed in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce by a vote of 33 to 25.
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