Best. Idea. Ever. Cap-and-Trade for Congress.

You know the Cap-and-Trade bill that Democrats narrowly passed late last week? The bill -- the ill-named "American Clean Energy And Security Act of 2009, H.R. 2454") -- consists of well over a thousand pages of government intrusions into every aspect of our lives.

Among other things, the bill regulates farming; fertilizers; animal husbandry and animal diets; feedstock; soil; light bulbs; home mortgages; banking; power generation and transmission; water and sewer systems; manufacturing; building codes; land use (forested, cleared, wetlands, etc); "manure management"; and creates gigantic new government bureaucracies (unionized, of course) to regulate, control, monitor and audit American citizens. It even reaches into your neighborhood and overrides Home Owners Assocation agreements.

Most importantly for companies, it specifies "emission allowances" for carbon dioxide. You know, the stuff that plants breathe and we exhale. Somehow, the environmental, flat-Earth, no-growth Marxists were able to have it categorized as a pollutant. Worked out well for California, didn't it? But I digress. The bill assigns companies the right to emit carbon dioxide. Industry can trade those rights, but each year the amount of CO2 they emit is ratcheted down. Thirty years from now, the amount of CO2 is supposed to be roughly one-fifth of what it is today. The goal would appear to be to transform the U.S. into Somalia (their CO2 emissions are very low).

The emission allowance schedule looks like this (Sec. 721):

2012 4,627 2013 4,544 2014 5,099 2015 5,003 2016 5,482 2017 5,375 2018 5,269 2019 5,162 2020 5,056 2021 4,903 2022 4,751 2023 4,599 2024 4,446

2025 4,294 2026 4,142 2027 3,990 2028 3,837 2029 3,685 2030 3,533 2031 3,408 2032 3,283 2033 3,158 2034 3,033 2035 2,908 2036 2,784 2037 2,659

2038 2,534 2039 2,409 2040 2,284 2041 2,159 2042 2,034 2043 1,910 2044 1,785 2045 1,660 2046 1,535 2047 1,410 2048 1,285 2049 1,160

An epiphany struck me after seeing this schedule: what if we slapped a similar cap-and-trade on Congress, only it would be their spending they'd have to reduce?

Let's take the defense and intelligence communities out of the mix. They seem to be good stewards of our money and, hell, they're protecting our country from harm, which is more than we can say for Congress.

No, the truly outrageous offenders are the government bureaucracies that endlessly grow, never improving taxpayers' lives while formulating new regulations and rules to further empower themselves.

So here's how my Cap-and-Trade plan works.

We start with the most useless government agencies we can find. The Department of Education, the Department of Agriculture, The Department of Health and Human Services, The Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FCC and Amtrak. For the sake of argument, let's say that together, they consume $250 billion a year.

Congress' job? They would be required to cut spending for these ridiculous bureaucracies according to the following schedule (which I had a lot of fun creating -- all numbers in billions).

2012 250 2013 210 2014 190 2015 160 2016 140 2017 120 2018 110 2019 100 2020 90 2021 75 2022 60 2023 50

Pay-cuts? Layoffs? Closing unnecessary facilities? Who gives a crap? That's for them to figure out.

How do you like Cap-and-trade now, Democrats?



Linked by: Boker Tov, Boulder, Cheat Seeking Missiles and Wolf Howling. Thanks!