Meanwhile, Another $3.6 Trillion Tax

The Democrats’ assault on our economy is proceeding at such a frenetic pace that what would normally be front-page news can easily be lost in the shuffle. On the back burner, for now, is Waxman-Markey, the Dems’ carbon tax bill. At the Washington Times, Senators Kit Bond and Kay Hutchison remind us what a disaster the carbon tax would be:

The controversial climate-change legislation winding its way through Congress will impose a massive new national gas tax on the American people. We discovered this by analyzing what the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill would do to gas prices and what Americans spend on gasoline, diesel and jet fuels. We found that cap-and-trade legislation will levy a $3.6 trillion gas-tax increase that will impact every American and important segments of our economy.

Only in the Age of Obama, a fiscal Armageddon of unprecedented proportion, could a $3.6 trillion tax increase be an afterthought.

Americans travel more than 200 million vehicle miles each month, and annually we spend nearly $1.2 trillion on gasoline and oil. The average household spends 5 percent of its annual budget on fuel. For many, gasoline is a mandatory expense. And this legislation disproportionately hits middle and lower income households that tend to have longer commutes to work and must drive in order to work. These families will be hit especially hard by the projected $1 per gallon increase for the additional gas tax the cap-and-trade legislation will bring.

The whole point of Waxman-Markey is to make energy too expensive for us to be able to afford, so we’ll use less of it. It is, in other words, it is a policy of deliberate impoverishment. As with health care “reform,” the Democrats are hoping to slip the carbon tax past you before you figure out what the legislation means.

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