Finally... a little bit of honesty

With their guy in the White House and owning majorities in both the House and Senate, Democrats can afford piques of honesty when it comes to legislation they are pushing. Piques of honesty in the text of the legislation that betrays what they are saying publicly.

Case in point is cap and trade where “displaced workers” or what normal people call “folks who will lose their jobs as a result of cap and trade” will be eligible for some handsome compensation

Adversely affected employees in oil, coal and other fossil-fuel sector jobs would qualify for a weekly check worth 70 percent of their current salary for up to three years. In addition, they would get $1,500 for job-search assistance and $1,500 for moving expenses from the bill's "climate change worker adjustment assistance" program, which is expected to cost $4.2 billion from 2011 to 2019.

For a bill that’s all about jobs, that provision seems to be a pretty sizable hedge that it’s not. Because the bill only passed in the House by a 219-212 margin, you can bet that the bill would’ve gone down to defeat were it not for provisions like this to swing votes from states like West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. We wrote about another such multi-billion dollar sweetener, here.

But back to jobs…

While the analyses assume displaced workers will eventually find jobs, the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution predicts a net job loss of 0.5 percent over the first 10 years that carbon reduction legislation, called "cap-and-trade," is in effect. The conservative Heritage Foundation found that by 2030 net job losses would top 1.1 million, while the Coalition for Affordable American Energy, an industry group, estimates that more than 3 million jobs would be lost by 2030 as a result of the cap-and-trade system.

Throw out the last two for the sake of partisan argument and even the Brookings Institute is skeptical.

And then there this:

Job losses probably would not happen right away, even if Congress meets President Obama's deadline for a bill by the end of the year. Its main provisions do not take effect until 2012.

"I doubt there will be a bunch of people filing for assistance when the bill first launches because it won't have a huge economic effect for at lease five years," said James Heintz, associate director for the Political Economy Research Institute at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who co-authored a study on job creation under the bill.

Ya hear that West Virginia and Ohio? Everything is cool for at least another 2-3 years. What’s that? You’re out of work, anyway? Well then, this cap and trade thing looks better and better all the time.

Saving the best for last:

The billions of dollars that would finance the unemployment fund would come from polluters under the cap-and-trade system. The system requires companies and entities that pollute to pay for the right to emit carbon dioxide above government-established limits.

This is the equivalent of telling a company that has to lay off workers because of a down-turn in the business cycle that the company is also responsible for generous long-term unemployment compensation to those former workers.

It’s a double whammy. Not only does cap and trade try to legislate polluters out of business, they are on the hook for employees they have to lay off as a result of an increasingly hostile business climate as dictated by Congress.

Excrable.