The Homa Files

Excerpted from WSJ, “The Carbon Cap Dilemma”, March 28, 2009 

Ken’s Take: The Bushers were clever rebranding the estate tax as the more pejorative sounding “death tax”.  Team Obama is similarly clever calling their energy tax “cap and trade”.  Doesn’t change the essence — it’s a tax.

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On pure economic grounds, a straight carbon tax, would be simpler and more efficient than cap and trade.

But “the political will to go the tax route . . . is just not there. Nonexistent” — namely because the use of the word “tax.”

The cap & trade approach is to design a  program that will “simulate the same thing a tax would do.”

That is, to achieve the increased energy prices essential to the success of cap and trade.

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Full article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123819777143661833.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

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This entry was posted on April 3, 2009 at 9:19 am and is filed under Cap & Trade, Energy, Environment - Green, Oil & Energy, Taxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.