Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader hasn’t read the Cap & Trade bill passed by the House of Representatives earlier this year. He’s heard plenty of bad things about it from the usual suspects. (And to be fair, he’s heard opposite arguments from the other set of usual suspects.) On the balance the Cap & Trade system just doesn’t seem to be workable in its current form. Ideally the system would use “market forces” to “reduce carbon emissions.” There seem to be many problems directly relating to how insulated from real “market forces” the system would actually be.

Then of course there is always the issue of cost. On the CBS news blog site:

The Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent.

A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. At the upper end of the administration’s estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year.

A second memorandum, which was prepared for Obama’s transition team after the November election, says this about climate change policies: “Economic costs will likely be on the order of 1 percent of GDP, making them equal in scale to all existing environmental regulation.”

The documents (PDF) were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute and released on Tuesday.

Wow. An upper end estimate of $1761.00 per household. Fun! Just what we need to combat falling consumer prices! Your Maximum Leader can hardly wait!

Thanks to Asian Badger for the link.

Carry on.