President Obama’s new budget includes revenue from an all-but-dead cap and trade bill, as discovered by Mark Tapscott in this post, but is that a function of wishful thinking on the part of OMB director Peter Orszag? From the Wall Street Journal:
In a 2004 paper with Brookings economist William Gale, Mr. Orszag suggested tackling the deficit through a tax on carbon emissions and a value-added tax—a sales tax levied on all retail and wholesale transactions.
So in other words, to Orszag, cap and trade has always been a way to shore up tax revenue to pay off the debt. And here we thought this was all about being good for the environment.
