Dave Roberts thinks Obama's decision to connect cap and trade to the Making Work Pay tax credit is a brilliant move:
Political reality being what it is, I can't help but think this is a stroke of genius. What you've got now is a tax cut for 95% of American workers, paid for by wealthy industries and individuals. It's flipped the "war on the poor" attack on cap-and-trade completely. Now blocking carbon legislation is a war on the poor. "Mr. Inhofe, why do you oppose a tax cut that will help so many hard-hit Oklahoma families? Whose interests are you defending?"
Maybe. It will depend on whether the poor trust the administration's tax credit more than they trust grim warnings of a world in which Al Gore decides the price of your gas. For that reason, I'm still with the folks who think that any carbon pricing effort should have a near 1:1 rebate. My concern with the Making Work Pay tax credit is that it's not obviously tied to the carbon tax: It's a whole other policy initiative that's politically independent from carbon, but is, in theory, going to be funded by cap and trade. But maybe David's right. He's smart about these things.
