Crimes Against Liberty by David Limbaugh Read Free Book Online

completely and others outsourced to China and India, two nations that have made it quite clear they will not sabotage their own economic growth as we’re proposing to do to ourselves with this bill. Projecting the bill would cause a loss in GDP of $9.4 trillion by 2035, Lieberman predicted it would increase each family of four’s share of the national debt by 26 percent, or $115,000, and this is irrespective of the other bankrupting programs of bailouts, stimulus, and ObamaCare. 37 Even the liberal Brookings Institution projects the bill would reduce GDP by 1.8 percent by 2035 and 2.5 percent by 2050.
    The recklessness of the bill is truly staggering. As Heritage’s Foundry blog said, “Economists from liberal think tanks and industry associations agree that Waxman-Markey will reduce income by hundreds of billions of dollars per year.” Yet Obama liberals nevertheless tout their coveted transition to a green economy as if it were actually going to be a boon to economic growth. Lieberman said, “If truth-in-advertising laws applied to politics . . . you’d have to replace the word ‘clean’ with ‘costlier’” in the phrase “clean energy economy,” and that is why “this agenda is actually very bad news for jobs and the economy.” 38
    If all this weren’t bad enough, the American Issues Project notes that Section 204 of the bill, called the “Building Energy Performance Labeling Program,” gives the federal government unprecedented authority over our homes. It would mandate that new homes be 30 percent more energy-efficient than under current building codes—starting the very day the bill is signed into law—and the requirement jumps to 50 percent by 2014 and continues to rise until 2030. The bill would also cover existing properties by requiring states to assess their efficiency ratings and make the results public. The ratings could lead to a number of circumstances that would allow the state to inspect a property, such as with planned renovations. Another enormously wasteful provision in the bill sets up a fund that would reward homeowners for making their properties more environmentally friendly—up to $12,200.
    Also tucked into Waxman-Markey is another Obama standby: a major redistributionist scheme. The Foundry blog reported Obama is counting on $650 billion in revenues for selling carbon permits (an energy tax by another name) and only $150 billion of that will be assigned to alternate energy production. The rest will be transferred to people “who don’t pay income taxes.” 39 This isn’t as much about the environment as it is about socialism.
    And all this for what? As Lieberman contends, “Virtually everything one hears about global warming that sounds terrifying is not true, and what is true is not particularly terrifying. The risks of global warming are outweighed by the risks of ill-advised global warming policy like Waxman-Markey. . . . The bill would have a trivial impact on future concentrations of greenhouse gases (and) . . . it only binds the U.S., and trends in the rest of the world clearly show that emissions are rising.” It is “free markets,” argues Lieberman, “that provide us with the best way forward.” 40
    Just as with ObamaCare, Waxman-Markey was so problematic, even for some Democrats, that some holdouts had to be bribed with taxpayer goodies to support it—for example, Ohio Democratic congresswoman Marcy Kaptur was offered a new federal power authority, according to the Washington Times , “stocked with up to $3.5 billion in taxpayer money available for lending to renewable energy and economic development projects in Ohio and other Midwestern states.” Apparently unable to conjure enough of these bribes, however, the administration watched Waxman-Markey bog down in Congress.
    But liberals won’t give up easily on such a transformative program. In May 2010, senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman proposed a new version of cap and tax, The American Power Act (APA).