Help Stop Massive Tax Increase
Many are fooled into thinking taxes and fees on companies are paid by the companies. This is a politically contrived illusion.
When a company’s expenses go up (be those expenses from wholesale costs, supply costs, taxes, or whatever) there are three primary ways they pass the costs on so they can stay profitable and in business.
1) They pass the cost to consumers.
2) They cut payroll related costs (lower pay, fewer employees, etc.)
3) They reduce dividends (this means your 401k either directly or indirectly)
It gets more complex but the bottom line is that taxes are ultimately paid by individuals, not companies.
Cap-and-trade schemes are no exception. As companies are forced to pay fees to stay in business, these fees will be passed on as described above.
The two links below provide information and (one) a way to take action. Before I refer you to the links, though, I want to clarify one more point. Both links refer to the following quote by our President (from before he was our President).
“Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket,” he said. “You know, regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad, because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal-powered plants, you know, natural gas, you name it, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money onto consumers.”
I find his use of the word money in the last sentence to be rather interesting. The more accurate word would have been “cost.” Putting it all together, he is saying that these companies will pass skyrocketing costs on to consumers. Now, keeping in mind that these costs are essentially taxes paid to the government, and since consumers of all economic levels will be paying higher prices to cover these costs, it begs the question: “What ever happened to the notion of no new taxes for people under $250,000?”
Please, see the links below and take action as recommended by our friends at Americans For Prosperity.
http://capwiz.com/americansforprosperity/issues/alert/?alertid=13201806&type=ML
(And, as long as you’re thinking about fixing taxes, I always recommend a visit to www.fairtax.org)
(Additional sources of information linked in 3rd associated comment)
April 24th, 2009 at 10:41 am
So, you are arguing against a system that attempts to force the cost of pollution management and cleanup to be at the source of the cause: the consumer demand would be responsible for paying for the costs of pollution.
Instead, you advocate the current system which is to ignore the problem in our generation so that it balloons ten-fold in the future to become an immediate problem for that generation, who now have to pay for managing their waste as well as our waste.
As I thought, your movement is one of hypocritical “me me me!” ideology, and in no way is actually interested in promoting personal responsibility. You simply use that as a facade to sell yourselves.
Laughable.
April 24th, 2009 at 10:43 am
By the way, your “friends” are the responsible party behind the 2004 “swiftboat” smear campaign against John Kerry, which was later revealed to have zero credible merit.
This is who you get your “facts” from?
April 25th, 2009 at 1:40 am
Taxing pollution or taxing air we exhale?
Problem? A problem that can’t hold up to a fair and balanced hearing?
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/429/Report-Democrats-Refuse-to-Allow-Skeptic-to-Testify-Alongside-Gore-At-Congressional-Hearing
AFP is/was not a primary source of my info. They simply provided a place to take easy action for people. Here are some more sources but still just a tip of the iceberg.
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=10fe77b0-802a-23ad-4df1-fc38ed4f85e3
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=5AC1C0D6-802A-23AD-4A8C-EE5A888DFE7E
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=2158072e-802a-23ad-45f0-274616db87e6
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6622
Are we really trying to fix a climate problem or are we really jumping on a bandwagon as an excuse for more taxes, government control, and redistribution of wealth?
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,510937,00.html
Are we going to keep attacking sources or facts?
And, just for fun, let’s not forget…
http://www.denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm
For the record, I want my children, and their’s, etc.. to have a clean and healthy earth and atmosphere to live in. But, I also don’t want them to be manipulated into oppression by charlatans like Gore over false alarms.
April 27th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
I think we’re making it a penalty to pollute more, or pollute excessively. Currently, in many industries in many states, if you can be more profitable by increasing emissions or waste product, then you have a motivator to enact said waste production or emissions.
This approach is one solution to close that “loophole”, and make the profit margin disappear as waste product increases. It basically forces companies to clean up after themselves, something that sadly many of them haven’t. Try canoeing down the Mill Creek for an example. Polluting is bad, climate-changing or not.
The silly thing is that almost all of the conservative climate-change doubters have been the ones making the false argument elsewhere that same-sex marriage might be “bad for society” because of some pre-conceived notion about “god’s view” of the “proper” family unit. Because of the lack of evidence supporting same-sex marriage as “safe to raise kids under” they would like us to keep it illegal “just to be safe”. This includes your buddies at the AFP.
It also includes that conservative buffoon, Tim Coburn, who decided to take a short break from “informing us” on the excesses of “the gay agenda” in this country to collect 700 signatures for this global-warming critics report. Seriously, this guy is a publicized homophobe and you expect me to take his word and reporting on climate change? Ooooohhh 700 signatures from “scientists around the world”. You know, 700 sounds like a big number, but considering the global population, it is not a very significant feat. Maybe, if he gets 10,000 scientists onto it, I might care.
These are just a handful of the many reasons I don’t trust most of the sources you listed above.
So, I’m saying to you (and them), why not institute enforced pollution fees and sell the “privilege” to pollute (where we can use the proceeds to clean up said pollution), rather than protecting the “right to pollute” air, land, and water which will have broad impact on us (the people of this country).
Or to use your line of logic, why should we “subsidize” all these rich companies’ clean up costs, by refusing to charge them for dirtying our country?
Additionally, please explain how they are “manipulating you into oppression”. If you don’t believe it, don’t buy it, and don’t vote for it. If you “don’t win”, than that means that “your side” was not persuasive enough. With role models like AFP and Coburn, I can see why it isn’t. The unfortunate thing for your point of view is that all of the credible experts fall on the side of climate change.
April 28th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Coleman,
Your posts are usually pretty good, but this one isn’t. You’ve setup a straw man and knocked it down pretty good.
Our discussion is specifically about carbon cap and trade and hence about CO2 output. Nobody on this blog is arguing in favor of dumping sludge into rivers, or noxious chemicals into the atmosphere.
I want to be clear – I do not consider carbon dioxide to be a pollutant and I don’t understand how any objective observer can. Those that claim that CO2 triggers runaway warming are flat out wrong. It is well established through the historical record that their is a correlation between temperature and CO2. As you know, correlation does not imply causation and the fact of the matter is that a rise in temperature PRECEDES a rise in CO2. It is a lagging indicator.
Quite frankly, your first two paragraphs are not relevant. I’ll stipulate that pollution is bad. Happy?
Now regarding the gay marriage stuff. Being right or wrong on this doesn’t change the rightness of their arguments on global warming. I don’t see the connection between what is primarily a moral issue and what is a scientific issue. That being said, I don’t listen much to Tom (sic) Coburn either about global warming unless he actually discusses the underlying science. I’m not interested in doing opinion polls of scientists to see who believes what.
So in paragraph 6 and 7, you’re back to the straw man about pollution. I just don’t know how to respond to this since carbon dioxide is not pollution.
In paragraph 8, I’ve addressed this somewhat indirectly in my more recent blog post. In order to support cap and trade, you have to answer yes to a series of questions:
1. Is climate warming?
2. Are humans responsible for warming via CO2 output?
3. Is warming a net bad thing (why this fetish for current climate)?
4. If yes to 1, 2, and 3, is reducing CO2 output worth the costs to the economy?
The answer to question 1 is currently an unequivocal NO! Some scientists are now claiming this is just a “pause,” but this wasn’t predicted by their vaunted models.
The answer to question 2 is a probable no. The evidence is that a rise in CO2 lags temperature, not precedes.
The answer to question 3 is difficult, but I think it’s no as well. The main problem cited is sea level rise, but who’s to say this isn’t outweighed by an increase in habitable area and increased food production due to longer growing seasons? I can tell you for sure that global cooling is much scarier than warming.
As for question 4, unless you can answer yes to 1, 2, and 3, it doesn’t matter. Even if you answer yes, I haven’t seen many arguments that place this into a cost/benefit analysis.
Coleman – you are pretty clearly a smart guy. If I didn’t think you were worth salvaging, I wouldn’t bother to respond to you.
When you stick to facts, you are enjoyable to debate, but you have a tendancy to fall off into logical fallacies, innuendo, and invective. Unfortunately, most of your comments on this post have very little to do with what Brian or I have said on this blog and seem to have more to do with your impression of what you think a generic “conservative” believes.