How Lisa Jackson Stole $11,000 from Every American Household
Conn Carroll /
As we reported this morning, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson was forced to admit she had not even read the Waxman-Markey carbon taxing bill before her agency released a report claiming the economic impact of cap and trade legislation would be “modest.” Asked how the EPA could produce a report on a bill they hadn’t even read yet, Jacson said: “We had to make assumptions.”
What were some of those assumptions? For starters, as University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke notes, the Obama EPA used GDP growth estimates far below those used by the Obama Office of Management and Budget. To make his unprecedented deficit spending look as innocuous as possible, Obama’s OMB used a 3.3% projected GDP growth rate. But Obama’s EPA used a 2.5% GDP growth rate. That may .8 difference may seem small, but applied to the entire economy the smaller EPA estimate means a $1.22 trillion smaller U.S. economy. (more…)