Tax Increases to Fund Bigger Government and Corporate Welfare?

Think we have high energy prices now?  Just wait 'till liberal cap and trade programs are enacted.  NRO reports:

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has determined that the leading cap-and-trade scheme, the Lieberman-Warner Secure Climate Act, would include a huge tax hike, raising federal revenues an astonishing $1.2 trillion over the next ten years. (It’s really only seven years because the bill’s cap doesn’t take effect until 2012.) It also would increase spending by about the same amount, partly in the form of valuable allowances given to the very same companies whose emissions are targeted for reduction. The bill includes no tax cuts.

Many in the energy industry support the bill because the costs, according to the CBO, are passed on almost entirely to energy consumers, while the benefits, in the form of free allowances, accrue largely to energy companies and their shareholders, as well as a wide variety of politically favored special interests.

The politically convenient fiction that this kind of cap-and-trade is anything but a tax hike must be laid to rest. Meanwhile, a new conservative consensus should agree that any climate-change policy should be revenue neutral. Revenue neutrality requires auctioning all of the permits, not giving them away as subsidies, and using the revenue, dollar for dollar, to cut taxes.

Sen. Judd Gregg, ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee (and a co-sponsor of a different cap-and-trade bill) stated it well on the Senate floor: “If you are going to shift what amounts to a $1.2 trillion increase in consumption taxes, you ought to use the revenues to reduce income taxes to working Americans by pretty much an equal amount.”