The Left Still Does Not Understand Where Wealth Comes From

Conn Carroll / April 24, 2009

The dispute over MIT professor John Reilly’s cap and trade cost study has exposed, again, how the left has no idea how wealth gets created.

The MIT study estimates that the government revenue from a carbon cap and trade policy would amount to $366 billion per year, or roughly $3,128 per American household. As Reilly readily admitted in a an email to the Weekly Standard, the government revenue raised through cap and trade (which any economist and even Tom Friedman will tell you is just a tax) will be ultimately be paid by American consumers in higher energy costs. Add $800 in dead weight loss and Reilly’s MIT study clearly shows cap and trade will cost the average American family $3,900 per year.

This is a very inconvenient truth for advocates of cap and trade like the Center for American Progress.  So this is how they attempt to spin it: (more…)