Cap and Trade.
Heard of it? Probably not, since EVERY news station including Fox News has chosen to do wall-to-wall nonstop coverage on Michael Jackson for four solid days rather than reporting on the largest and most stifling bill to ever pass through Congress: the Waxman-Markey bill. HR2454.

This bill took a mere five days to make it to the House floor for voting. Five days. There are bills that languish for years in the system, getting discarded at the end of each Congressional session and re-introduced in the next session in the hopes they might make it to the floor. Yet this bill took just five days before Nancy Pelosi forced it to the floor.

Pages were added to the bill all week long, culminating in a 1,200+ page bill on Friday with an additional 304 pages added to it at 3am Friday morning. Then the bill went to the House floor for debate and voting when the members of the House hadn’t even had time to read the 1,200 pages, much less the additional 304 pages tucked in at the last minute. Representatives such as Barton publicly called for the full bill to be present on the podium so that the Representatives could have the opportunity to read it - they were denied. Barton then asked for a 15-minute recess so that the full bill could be cobbled together with the 304 page amendment and placed on the podium - again, he was denied. In desperation, Representative Boehner from Ohio used his power as Minority Leader to take the time to skim through the 304 page addition and comment on things he found there. It took over an hour for him to give his remarks.

The bill was forced to a vote - and astonishingly, the Representatives participated in this farce and voted on it - without reading it.

The bill is being passed off as “good for the environment” and a cure for “global warming”. The truth of the matter is, this bill will reduce every state to the bankrupt equivalent of California, as well as reducing the common citizen (that’s you and me) to the level of paupers.

In this bill, there is a clause that states that before being permitted to put your home up for sale, you will be required to have a federal inspector come through your home and rate it for energy efficiency. Your insulation, your windows, your water usage (such as toilet tank capacity and shower head), your water heater, your electrical appliances - will all be graded according to current (at that time) energy restrictions. If they do not meet the current restrictions, you will be required to fix/replace anything that does not meet standards before you can put your house on the market. This might be as simple as buying a new $1,200 refrigerator that meets the current energy standards, or it might be as extreme as replacing your roof, replacing all of your insulation, putting in all new windows, replacing your water heater and all major appliances… each at skyrocketing costs.

The kicker? The “current” standards get more and more strict every year that the new law remains in place. Your house might pass energy standards this year, but next year they will barely scrape by. Three years from now you’ll be in direct violation of the energy standards.

The bill will also use tax dollars to subsidize (that means give money to) companies that manufacture products that meet the bill’s standards. Things such as the “shower nazi” - a shower head that severely cuts water flow to nearly nill after a set time. Take a look at the link. Would you seriously want to be covered in eye-stinging soap and shampoo and try to rinse off with that “reduced water flow”? That’s what the government will be paying companies to make and sell to us.

Common Sense Alert: What will happen to the companies that make products that do not adhere to these stringent standards?
Well, they won’t get extra federal money like the “shower nazi” company will. As the economy further tanks and taxes go up, these companies will find it increasingly harder and harder to stay in business. As consumers are forced to purchase these subsidized devices, the other companies will find their sales decreasing. Eventually, these companies will be forced out of business not by consumer choice, but by Governmental pressure, regulation, and paying off their “chosen” manufacturers.

This bill doesn’t just affect the consumer in this way (and sadly, this is just ONE issue present in the massive legislation) - it affects Government properties as well. Before a State can receive federal funding, it will have to make sure that all of its properties and all of the buildings on those properties are fully compliant with current restrictions. This is the same thing that California has done to itself - the state that is now officially bankrupt because it cannot come up with enough money to refit and replace all of its buildings to meet the “green standards” that it has set into place. Before your state will be given any federal money - such as funding for police, fire stations, schools - it will have to spend billions of dollars retrofitting all of the public properties, replacing toilets, installing water-restricting sinks in the bathrooms, replacing air/heating systems… money that the states do not have.

End result? State after state will fall into bankruptcy just as California has in their desperate attempts to meet the yearly-increasing green standards.

As I said, this is just ONE of the hundreds of mind-boggling changes that the Waxman-Markey bill enacts. Read it yourself. Keep in mind though, that you’ll need a good chunk of time to do so… this bill is longer than Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and not nearly as entertaining. The restrictions in this bill force energy restrictions that are equivalent to the year 1910 (1875 if you figure in population growth over the time span of the increasing restrictions). As the regulations get tougher year by year and more and more businesses are unable to meet them, these businesses will fail. Every business that fails is more jobs lost. Prior to the 304-page amendment being added at 3am, job loss predictions from this bill were at 2.5 million per year. Utility bills (your gas, electricity, etc) will rise 90% by 2035, says a study by the Heritage Foundation. If your summer electric bill is $200 now, it will be $380. Can you afford that? Will you be able to afford it once your employer is forced out of business by this increasingly harsh legislation? The average net income will be reduced by 57% over the bill’s span from 2010 to 2035 - can you afford that? Take into consideration the income reduction of more than half of what you have now, coupled with the near-doubling of utility bills. Just grab a pen and paper and work that out and you’ll see the kind of poverty this bill will force us all into… and that’s just scratching the surface.

It’s not just impartial entities such as the Heritage Foundation going through the bill and calculating these costs; even the Congressional Budget Office has stated that this bill will result in a tax increase of $827 billion just by 2019. That’s a direct $2,700 increase in your tax bill. That’s not even factoring in inflation! That’s not even considering that the CBO is not finished reading the bill and calculating everything!

This bill is the largest tax increase in history. The House of Representatives passed it without reading it. Will the Senate do so as well?

Call your Senator. Write your Senator. Tell them to vote NO on the cap and trade bill.
Because if it passes, god help us all.