Key Vote No: H.R. 2454 American Clean Energy and Security Act

On behalf of hundreds of thousands of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to vote “No” on H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markey “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.”  H.R. 2454 calls for a “cap and trade” system for the regulation of greenhouse gases, and is in essence, a tax that will drive up energy costs across the board. 

The best projections estimate that the climate bill would result in a barely measurable 0.05 degree Celsius temperature “savings” over the next fifty years.  In the meantime, over those fifty years, the economic effect would be far more tangible and disastrous.

Independent experts estimate that in the next eight years the legislation will take $2 trillion dollars from our economy, redistributing it to powerful, favored institutions through a complex regulatory scheme with standards that are impossible to meet, as has been found in other countries with similar systems in place.  Actually doing so would set our economy back over 130 years to 1875, the last recorded time our carbon-emissions met the legislation’s goals.

At a cost of any where from $750 to over $3,000 a year per family, the price is far too high for so little in return. High energy prices affect everything from heating, electricity, and fuel prices to agriculture, manufacturers, and shipping costs.  These are the unavoidable costs of living and the burden of this legislation will fall most heavily on the poor who spend a higher percentage of their income on these essentials making cap and trade a regressive tax that forces impossible decisions between food and the drive to work.

The astronomical costs of this bill and the unachievable caps that cripple many industries such as farmers and miners will mean the loss of many jobs as manufacturers, shippers, and others are forced to scale back, close, or send jobs overseas.  While the prospect of numerous new “green” jobs has been widely touted, a recent study by economist Gabriel Calzada has found that for every one green job, 2.2 other jobs are lost or not created.  Each of those jobs comes at an enormous subsidy that pours money from the private sector into an overpriced, inefficient industry. 

An economy suffering from massive losses of jobs and wealth, and strapped with a staggering deficit cannot afford a plan that would exacerbate these problems. Promised cleaner alternatives to our current fossil-fuel based technology are still years out of reach.  Rolling back regulations that stifle alternatives like nuclear would be a less costly option.

On behalf of our FreedomWorks activists, I again urge you to vote “No” on H.R. 2454 and will count your vote as a KEY VOTE when calculating the FreedomWorks Economic Freedom Scorecard for 2009.  The FreedomWorks Economic Freedom Scorecard is used to determine eligibility for the Jefferson Award, which recognizes members of Congress with voting records that support economic freedom.

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