Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Obama in Trouble

Apparently the new president is running into some heavy weather on his big tax plan. Seems to me he's turning into the American equivalent of Backpack Boy, with his own Green Shaft plan.

The sticking point is coal. As he said to a San Francisco audience last year during the campaign:

"Let me sort of describe my overall policy.

"What I've said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else's out there.

"I was the first to call for a 100% auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter. That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.

"So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted."

You can listen to him also on YouTube.

Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) says he has "spoken to enough colleagues about several different provisions in the budget to make him think Congress won’t pass it. Conrad urged White House budget director Peter Orszag not to “draw lines in the sand” with lawmakers, most notably on Obama’s plan for a cap-and-trade system to curb carbon emissions. ”Anybody who thinks it will be easy to get the votes on the budget in the conditions that we face is smoking something.”