Lance Wallace writes in Tips and Notes:
The Congressional Budget Office has released an analysis of the effects of a carbon tax.
At $20 a ton. they estimate about $1.2 trillion in revenues over a 10-year period. A money quote for me is:
“Without accounting for how the revenues from a carbon
tax would be used, such a tax would have a negative effect
on the economy. The higher prices it caused would
diminish the purchasing power of people’s earnings,
effectively reducing their real (inflation-adjusted) wages.
Lower real wages would have the net effect of reducing
the amount that people worked, thus decreasing the overall
supply of labor. Investment would also decline, further
reducing the economy’s total output.”
The CBO goes on to soften this by saying that certain ways of spending the revenue (e.g., reducing deficits or marginal tax rates) might result in a net benefit. But just returning the revenues to the low-income homes most affected by the rise in cost of electricity (16%; range 7% (California) to 27% (Illinois, West VA, etc.)) would not decrease the total cost of the carbon tax.
Report here http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/44223_Carbon_0.pdf
Follow the money. This CBO estimate provides the potential energy underlying the debate posturing. It is irresistible. Single party rule in 2014 could get it done.
@Tadchem “Many project engineers realize that projections of costs are always low-balled by 50% or more versus real-world costs as calculated at the end of the project lifetime, and projections of benefits are always inflated by 100% or more.”
Maybe in the public sector. At least in my industry, crap like that is a firing offense.
This is precisely the kind of idea many in Congress would like to see adopted.
They can raise $1.2 Trillion in new taxes, cause $3-$5 Trillion in damage to the economy, while getting addicted and dependent upon the new $1.2 Trillion and producing no benefit at all.
What’s not to like?
The klecptocrats will continue to steal until punished.
Why voluntarily change from a system that has served 3 generations of parasites so well?
Ever emboldened by our forbearance, the lying and stealing keeps ramping up.
Now we are out of productive people willing to be robbed.
We have the example and evidence thanks to Europe.
Nice of them to destroy their economies and societies for our edification.
Tax on tax on tax spiral into no govt income and no private property.
The proof is in, the political bureaucracy will not restrain their greed.
100% plus, tax sounds good to ideologues for whom maths is hard.
It is the irony of allowing the voluntarily nonproductive, any say at all in the creation of wealth by the productive.
As smart as the ticks on a bull, legislating that bulls shall eat meat.
Herman Cane was far too generous with his , 999 plan.
All governments are in breach of contract.
Promises made.Money taken. Can not keep promises.
Starve the beasts, useless self serving parasite is my polite version.
Pay only 10% locally, local govt becomes relevant again.
Local body pay only 10% to State, who pays only 10% to Fed.
After all here in Canada we have the proof, 60 years of nanny state. The state is fine, the citizens are broke and welcome to wait in queue for illusionary healthcare, police protection,competent governance and equal justice.
Standard govt line, “Its not our fault, that we can not provide, we have no money.”
Sorry for rant.
Sick of the can’t do’s,no clue’s, insisting they have the wisdom to overrule those who can and do.
So taking 1,2 trillion from real economy and putting it in politicians hands is a good thing.
Sylvan Smyth May 30, 2013 at 11:36 pm
Generate, or confiscate?
Both. You generate; we confiscate.
Liberals like to lambaste and laugh at Laffer.
But he was right.
(Sorry, could not resist a bit of alliteration. )
Generate $1.2 trillion? Taxes don’t generate money, they take money from the private sector.
By contrast, if a business generates $1.2 trillion dollars, they created it. (Big assumption here — assuming they generated $1.2 trillion by selling something, not be lobbying the government for subsidies or requiring people to by it.) The private sector generates wealth, taxes take wealth.
i will echo most of the other comments above. Where exactly do they figure the $1.2 Trillion will come from? The money tree outside or the printing press in the basement? No, it will be sucked out of the economy. Why are these people allowed to come up with this stuff?
“Generate”. No, move.
“Shock News – Public sector finds new source of expansion capital”
As several commenter’s have pointed out … You are thinking of using Europe as a template?
What’s next? Adopting the North Korean constitution as your own?
Here is how the fun and games of a Carbon Tax devolves…
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/05/banks-and-trading-houses-bought-two-thirds-of-carbon-permits/
And, as with Kyoto, here is the graph of CO2 demonstrating, quite clearly, just how much difference handing your hard earned cash to these parasites makes to “The AtmosFear”
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo_full
Case Closed.
1.2 trillion per 10 years will cost some jobs. Those jobs will trickle down to others losing jobs. 120 billion at an average of $43K per year per worker, that equates to 2.8 million jobs, if one calculates the new theft strictly be paid for by job loss. Of course, the 43K per year average only includes those who work, therefore it has increased over that last years as the low income part timers get laid off completely and full time is reduced to part time. Now throw NObama Care into the equation…glad I retired…And….Good luck to the youth who put the crooks into power. 🙂
I do like the asteroid approach. It is decisively going to clean house.
Apparently these people have never heard of Bastiat’s Broken Window Fallacy.
We the People can stop the EPA, the IRS the DOE and the rest of the alphabet agencies . . it is up to us folks make this go viral – email to all you know . . http://articlevprojecttorestoreliberty.com/article-v—group-overview-and-proposal.html
policycritic says:
May 31, 2013 at 3:36 am
Jim Turner says:
May 31, 2013 at 3:20 am
Your headline says: “…US carbon tax will generate $1.2 trillion…” No it won’t, tax doesn’t generate anything, it just takes it from someone else. Politicians use such terminology because they can’t discriminate between creating and stealing.
Correct. Taxes REMOVE income from the private sector. Deprives it. Robs it, if you will. And the job of citizens isn’t to make the government into a successful business. The US federal government should always be in deficit. That assures that the private sector (business, households, and state/local governments) are in surplus. [Well, this isn’t actually sector analysis where the state/local would be part of the government, but it’s still the truth.] The US monetary system is a CLOSED SYSTEM. Because the US federal government creates its own currency, it should never be in surplus, otherwise, the private sector will be in deficit as it was under Clinton where everyone was blinded by the “surplus” and borrowing from the banks because the private sector’s wages weren’t sufficient to meet expenses.
Not the US government, but the private banking cartel which set up and owns the Federal Reserve, your IRS taxes go to pay the interest on money your government could issue, but has chosen instead to allow control of it by the banking cartel, who set it up to create money out of nothing, organised primarily by the Rothschild’s of London (the City of London is a different country, it is not part of the UK).
“Who actually owns the Federal Reserve Central Banks? The ownership of the 12 Central banks, a very well kept secret, has been revealed:
“Rothschild Bank of London Warburg Bank of Hamburg Rothschild Bank of Berlin Lehman Brothers of New York Lazard Brothers of Paris Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York Israel Moses Seif Banks of Italy Goldman, Sachs of New York Warburg Bank of Amsterdam Chase Manhattan Bank of New York (Reference 14, P. 13, Reference 12, P. 152)
“These bankers are connected to London Banking Houses which ultimately control the FED. When England lost the Revolutionary War with America (our forefathers were fighting their own government), they planned to control us by controlling our banking system, the printing of our money, and our debt (Reference 4, 22).
“The individuals listed below owned banks which in turn owned shares in the FED. The banks listed below have significant control over the New York FED District, which controls the other 11 FED Districts. These banks also are partly foreign owned and control the New York FED District Bank. (Reference 22) ”
continued on:
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/fed_reserve.htm
Here’s part of how the fraud works by the crime syndicate which is the banking cartel together with the governments it controls part and party:
“Here is the trick. Take, for example, a year like this year in which the government runs a $400 billion dollar deficit. The Treasury Department has to sell $400 billion in US Treasury bills, bonds and notes (government IOUs) to buyers at a rate of interest sufficient to attract their money (and beat the interest competition of other banks’ CDs and other governments’ bills, bonds and notes). To avoid a credit squeeze, the Federal Reserve System Open Market Committee in Washington directs the NY Federal Reserve Bank to purchase roughly 10% of that total (or $40 billion in our example) in existing US bills, bonds, and notes from the current holders. To pay for them it creates the $40 billion out of nothing, merely with keystrokes on a computer. Through more keystrokes, this new $40 billion is deposited into the banks of the various bill, bond, and note sellers, thereby increasing the reserves of those banks by $40 billion.
“Pursuant to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 those banks must keep only 10% of those new deposits on “reserve.” (Because these banks do not have to keep 100% on reserve, this banking system is called a “fractional reserve” system.). So of the $40 billion deposited, the banks must keep 10% on reserve ($4 billion) and may loan out $36 billion (90%), for business loans, mortgages, credit card loans, to purchase government bonds – for whatever borrowers want. Those loans (and payments) are in turn deposited in banks (very few folks put their money in mattresses). So of the $36 billion loaned out and then re-deposited, the banks receiving the new deposits can then loan out 90% or $32.4 billion, retaining 10% or $3.6 billion as reserves.
“Banks repeat this redeposit-reloan process, reduced 10% each time, until the 10% reserves retained have reduced the funds available for loan to zero. This cunning process allows the banks to create out of nothing nine times the original $40 billion in new deposits received from the Federal Reserve (the “Fed”), or $360 billion dollars. This total is concealed from the public by the only partial expansion of the loan total at each repetitive step.”
continued on:
http://antimisandry.com/business-career/united-states-federal-reserve-private-banking-cartel-explained-26521.html
If we could all put our money in bank accounts and times it by ten and so have created 90% extra out of thin air and lend that out at interest we’d all be rich. It might even go to our heads and we’d think we could control the world and everyone in it..
More on the subject: http://www.converge.org.nz/pirm/fr_paul.htm
None of our governments have debts..
The debt created was a fraud, so there is nothing to pay back. The banks have to reinburse us.
I came across The Use of Money
By Major C. H. DOUGLAS
in the last couple of weeks, but haven’t had a chance to read more about his proposed solution: http://www.alor.org/Library/TheUseofMoney.htm#1a
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/fed_reserve.htm
dbstealey
Congressional Budget Office says US carbon tax will generate $1.2 trillion
Apparently these people have never heard of Bastiat’s Broken Window Fallacy.
Yes they have. The modern version would include a fine for the shopkeeper for having endangered the public by placing a window in a position where the window, if broken, could potentially endanger passing townsfolk having not providing a warning to that effect in 27 different languages.
The boy would be in juvenile detention with team of crack Psychiatrists eyeing papers at the next conferenced based upon his strange need to break windows.
The assembled crowd would be fined for assembling in a public place without a licence.
All this assuming we can get the 5000 Sociologists attending the “Broken Window – what does it say about child rights in the 21st Century” Conference” (Hawaii – where else) to eventually agree upon definitions of the words … ‘community’, ‘public’, ‘crowd’, ‘child’, ‘victim’, ‘broken’ and, of course, ‘window’ without another meeting next year on Bali.
Lo, the broken window is now ‘generating’ $1.2 Trillion’ for the community. The window, to this day, remains broken. The kid is still in juvenile detention. Fines have been paid by the crowd. Theoreticians are still ’employed’ and enjoying the conference on Bali.
The crowd will now struggle to pay their ‘bills’ next year. But… “They had to count them all … now we know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall”.
The higher prices it caused would
diminish the purchasing power of people’s earnings,
effectively reducing their real (inflation-adjusted) wages.
Lower real wages would have the net effect of reducing
the amount that people worked, thus decreasing the overall
supply of labor. Investment would also decline, further
reducing the economy’s total output.”
I believe this is what they want to do (among a number of things) because it’ll result in us using less natural resources meaning the rest of the developing world would have a larger (and hence cheaper) supply of natural resources to develop with.
I read on here from time to time that dana1981 is a leftist. I thought it was referring to his position on AGW. Well it turns out IMO he’s a leftist all the way round. He believes tax increases are incentives. I ask him (before being banned) if the government increases the payroll tax does that give him the incentive to work harder? He said thats different, he has to work. I guess that means folks have a choice rather they use carbon based energy. Technically the answer to both (to work & to use carbon based energy) is NO! See what kind of life style you have if you choose no.
He was only considering the increase in electricity costs per household from a carbon tax. If electricity cost go up, they effect every thing not just households.
… And at that exact point in the sentence the politicians, especially those IQ challenged members of the US Senate, stopped reading.
They will come back at this over and over and over again like the child in the back seat saying: Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
Hide your wallets. And vote them all out.
A tax is supposed to FOR some reason. Gasoline tax to maintain roads. BUt, taxing carbon just to raise revenue is evil. Spending is out of control and the cure is not to find more revenue but to CUT SPENDING. A carbon tax would be taxing something that is good for the environment and releasing CO2 is a benefit to the world. It would be a travesty to tax carbon just because you can and need money. Why not have a breath tax? Give everybody a chest sensor and then they have to pay per breath. It’s no different as we have to breath and we have to use carbon energy to live.
http://articlevprojecttorestoreliberty.com/history-of-taxation-in-the-united-states.html
Not at all. It has always been so, as these two charts will show you:
Sectoral Financial Balances as a % of GDP, 1952q1 to 2010q4. The green is the foreign sector, but noted here as the capital account. All three sectors cannot be in surplus at the same time. If two sectors are in surplus, however, then one must be in deficit. This isn’t me making this up, these are accounting rules, something most economists never study BTW.
http://i41.tinypic.com/30l1awm.png
Public vs. Private Balance. The automatic stabilizers (unemployment insurance, etc.) that kicked in during the financial crisis are visible in 2008. They are direct mirrors of each other to the penny, otherwise someone in the government has to stay late to find the accounting mistake.
http://i39.tinypic.com/ac8isp.png
Taxes don’t “generate” money, they take money from people that generated it.
How much will the carbon tax generate if all our factories and jobs move to China, or India, etc?
It’s like raising the taxes on smoking. Do you want to bring in more tax revenues or do you want to make people smoke less? Raise the rate high enough and you get less tax money and less smoking. Not to mention a black-market for cigarettes along with the organized crime syndicates that go with it.
But unlike the taxes on cigarettes, we have no public health issue to drive the need for a carbon tax. We certainly have no shortage of carbon fuels and there is zero evidence of any health hazards from carbon emissions themselves.
The statist will tell you that the carbon tax really won’t cost the average American anything, that only the rich will pay it but the poor and middle class will get the benefits of all the great new wonderful social programs the tax will pay for. In other words, it’s a neo-Marxist redistribution scheme hidden behind the vacuous “it’s for the children.”
You have a number of things wrong. Eustace Mullins, Gary Kah, and Thomas Schauf (the 1992 info you linked to) have misled the American people on this. It’s sort of understandable because the Federal Reserve in its infinite arrogance preferred to remain opaque—especially since August 15, 1971 when we became completely sovereign monetarily. Had Americans discovered what that meant for its prosperity, we would have a far better world today. If you think Americans (and the world) are being bamboozled by global warming scientists, it is nothing compared to how they have been bamboozled by descriptions of how federal accounting works since 1971.
About who owns the Federal Reserve (Shauf’s information is 100 years old and describes a universe that existed before we went off the gold standard in 1934):
The Fed is divided into 12 regional banks. There is no national bank, only regional ones. Each bank is owned by the banks in its region, which buy shares in the regional Fed bank. No matter the size or number of branches of the bank, each bank in each regional bank has one vote.
It wouldn’t make any difference whether the Rothschilds were the largest shareholders in the Federal Reserve or not (the only one making this claim is Gary Kah and he doesn’t substantiate it). The ownership rights of Federal Reserve Bank stock are completely different than the common stock of typical corporations. Usually, the number of votes a shareholder has is proportional to the number of shares he owns. However, ownership of Federal Reserve Bank stock entitles the shareholder to one vote when voting for its regional Federal Reserve Bank officials regardless of how many total shares the member bank may own. The vast majority of member banks (about 1,000) are US federal and state banks.
Each shareholder bank–individuals and non-bank firms are not allowed to participate–is paid a dividend equal to 6% of the price of the original shares, not of the value of its shares to date. In 2010, for example, the Federal Reserve paid 1.56% of its earnings over all 12 regional banks to its shareholders. You can read this in the 2010 Annual Report here: http://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/annual-report/2010-federal-reserve-banks.htm#8
After expenses, the remaining profits of the Federal Reserve are 100% returned to the US Treasury, and have done so since required by law in 1947. In 2010, the Fed Reserve earned $81 billion. It returned $79.xx billion to the US Treasury. Look at the Annual Report I linked to.
Independent accounting firms conduct full financial audits of the Federal Reserve banks and the Board of Governors every year. The Fed is also subject to certain types of audits from the Government Accounting Office. Congress conducts oversight twice a year, by law.
Most of the 12 regional banks list their member banks on their websites. (I say most because I haven’t checked all 12, only a few.) Here is a 54-page list of the large commercial banks and the percentage foreign-owned:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/lbr/current/default.htm
There is no national Federal Reserve bank that operates apart from the 12 regional banks that does all these nefarious things claimed by Eustace Mullins, Gary Kah, and Thomas Schauf.
You wrote:
Not so fast.
Congress wrote the law that forbids the Federal Reserve from providing direct overdrafts to the Treasury back in the days of the gold standard because it had to protect the government from printing too many dollars if there wasn’t enough gold in the vault. It was a way of putting a set of suspenders and a belt on the gold supply.
Let’s make this personal so you understand. When you are overdrawn at your bank today, when you have no money in your bank account, your bank could–if it wanted to and thought you were a good credit risk– cover you with an overdraft if your rent check was about to bounce. Congress, back when horse and buggies were still on the road, said that the Federal Reserve could not do that for the US Treasury because of gold concerns. Instead, it forced the US Treasury to issue, or sell, Treasury securites so that Treasury’s bank account wasn’t in the red. Treasury bills (mature in 1 years or less), Treasury notes (mature in 10 years or less), and Treasury bonds (mature in 30 years or less) are all real money inserted into the economy. That gold standard-era law was never changed, which it should be.
But here’s the big difference between you and the US Treasury. The Treasury creates the money in this country. You don’t, neither do I, nor any business or foreign country. So Congress forcing the US Treasury to issue (sell) Treasury securities to cover an overdraft in its bank account is just an accounting doodad. The US Treasury is the monopoly creator of its own money. No one else on the planet can make it, unless they’re counterfeiting. All this BS that the “government has to borrow money to survive” is just that: BS. There is no factory in downtown Beijing making dollars that we borrow, for example.
Lastly,
Absolutely 100% wrong. The fractional reserve system disappeared decades ago; it is an artifact of the gold standard days. Absolutely does not exist today. Loans create deposits. Let me repeat that: loans create deposits, not the other way around.
A bank makes that loan based on its perceived credit-worthiness of the client. If the bank does not have enough money to cover the loan, it gets reserves from the Fed at the going interest rate (it has about two weeks to settle up) or from other banks through interbank transactions that are too complicated to get into here.
Understanding how this system really works is what is going to cause ‘the people’ to demand that it gets changed. Hanging onto the Eustace Mullins, Gary Kah, and Thomas Schauf version of it undercuts everyone, and keeps the populace as ignorant of the truth as Hansen is trying to make us ignorant about the climate.