Study confirms Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade redistributes wealth from lower, middle-class income earners to wealthiest, most politically-connected

Main Street Under Cap-and-Trade Attack

By Institute for Energy Research
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

WASHINGTON—As Senators Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) are expected to release their version of a cap-and-trade global warming bill this week, the Institute for Energy Research (IER), a non-profit free market energy think tank, today released a new study http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/p ... 8-2009.pdf that demonstrates the ways that cap-and-trade, as outlined in the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill, would benefit the nation’s wealthy and politically favored industries while placing a harmful burden on America’s struggling middle and lower income families.

Highlights of the study are below: http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/p ... 8-2009.pdf

The nation’s highest-earning households would profit by $604 per year on a net basis from the legislation, which amounts to the redistribution of approximately $14 billion per year from the lowest-earning 80 percent of households to the highest-earning 20 percent of families in the nation. Households in the lowest-earning quintile—those earning less than $18,370 per year—would pay $451 per year or a substantial 4.5 percent of their income. This additional tax upon these households would be larger than every other tax they currently pay, except the federal payroll tax, which costs an average of $656 per year. For America’s “middle classâ€