Cap and Tax

The Senate takes up the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill today, and Robert Samuelson nicely lays out the primary problems with its approach to regulating carbon emissions:

The chief political virtue of cap-and-trade — a complex scheme to reduce greenhouse gases — is its complexity. This allows its environmental supporters to shape public perceptions in essentially deceptive ways. Cap-and-trade would act as a tax, but it’s not described as a tax. It would regulate economic activity, but it’s promoted as a “free market” mechanism. Finally, it would trigger a tidal wave of influence-peddling, as lobbyists scrambled to exploit the system for different industries and localities.

And not that this will come as much of a surprise, but the bill’s terribly expensive as well. CBO estimates the bill’s cost to the private sector will be about $90 billion a year through 2016.