Thursday, May 7, 2009

Support the Cap-and-Trade Tax Disclosure Act

image by Rees

article from Michelle Malkin.com
written by Michelle Malkin
May 7, 2009

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, one of the bright lights of the GOP in the House, has a terrific idea to let the sun shine in on the Democrats’ massive national energy tax proposal.

He’s looking for co-sponsors of a measure that would require full disclosure of the impact of “cap-and-trade” on ratepayers.

The details via the Republican Study Committee:


Rep. Jason Chaffetz is seeking original cosponsors for the Cap-and-Trade Tax Disclosure Act which will require utility companies to disclose and separately itemize the impact of cap-and-trade taxes on each customer’s utility bill. Sound tax policy requires that taxes should be visible to taxpayers and not buried in the cost of items we purchase. With this legislation, every utility customer – residential and business — will be able to identify the cost of cap-and-trade emissions that the utility is passing on to the customer. As regulated entities, utilities pass taxes on to customers, unlike unregulated companies that can also pass taxes on to shareholders and employees. The cap-and-trade tax is potentially the largest tax increase ever imposed. According to the Administration’s own budget document, the cost will be at least $646 billion over an eight-year period. No matter where you stand on the issue of cap and trade, both sides can agree that full disclosure and transparency are good public policy.


Call your rep and ask them to sign on (and make a special effort to contact the Democrats who have publicly criticized the national eco-tax): 202-224-3121.

Pssst, President Obama: This is what transparency looks like.

***
And this is what transparency looks like, thanks to Sen. Jim DeMint:


The US Senate has finally reversed its longstanding policy of restricting public access to raw data about how Senators vote, and is now posting XML of votes on Senate.gov.

This move follows a recent initiative, led by Senator DeMint, to request the Senate Rules Committee post the votes data.

While this issue may seem to be arising out of the blue, with recent coverage in the Politico, Senate votes XML have been brooched as a perennial roadblock. It would seem, however, that the number of people affected by the restriction grew to the point where they could no longer be ignored, and common sense prevailed.

Just as the recent rewriting of Web use restrictions has led to creative Internet use among Members of Congress, the new votes data should help fuel a renaissance of vote analysis and visualization. XML encourages advanced processing and analysis, making votes legible to both humans and computers, and giving us a new view on how Senators vote.

Click to read the rest of the article and the comments

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