President Obama and Budget Direct Peter Orszag have thrown transparency out the window and created a black box for taxes and spending on climate change hidden inside their 2011 budget.
February 02, 2010
By Phil Kerpen – FOXNews.com
The big news in last years budget release was the revelation that the Obama administration planned to use cap-and-trade to raise $646 billion dollars over ten years to finance its big spending programs. At the time I wrote here in the Fox Forum that estimate was a lowball of what actually constituted the biggest tax increase in U.S. history, something White House economist Jason Furman later admitted when he revealed the real revenue would likely be triple the official estimate. So the first thing I checked in this years budget was how much revenue was expected from the cap-and-trade energy tax, to which the president reiterated his commitment in his State of the Union address last week. The surprising answer is the budget actually has, literally, a blank line for the cap-and-trade tax. A black box. A slush fund. A secret budget-within-the-budget. Talk about a lack of transparency.
Read the rest at FOX Forum.
Listen to a related 2-minute KerpenCast here.