Another New Tax Appears, ‘To Fund Infrastructure’

March 29 , 2021 (EIRNS)—The American Petroleum Institute has called on the Biden Administration to create a carbon tax by pricing carbon emissions—something Biden has, in fact, already implicitly done by executive order. Now, however, the API, joining the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, has called for putting this in the form of a tax on CO2 emissions rather than just an implied “social cost.” And it would not just be levied on businesses, but on households as well. For example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s proposed vehicle mileage tax, on top of the existing Federal gasoline tax, will be effectively one carbon tax largely falling on households.

These groups want $40/ton, knowing it’s likely to be $45/ton or higher—precisely the “Shultz-Baker Tax” pushed for years in the name of those permanent Wall Street establishment figures, George Shultz and James Baker III. If enacted, it will rise by $5/ton plus inflation every year, making any further coal production useless, and drastically raising prices for oil and oil distillates like gasoline. API is essentially giving up under the pressure of regulators and executive orders shutting down projects, and BlackRock, Inc. etc. shutting down companies; “We’ll pay a tax,” they say, hoping it will only shut down coal.

A celebratory editorial in the March 28 Washington Post says a tax like this must pay for infrastructure investments—because infrastructure, for those not sufficiently up on central bank Newspeak to realize it, is not “emergency” spending like the $6 trillion the Treasury has pumped into stock and bond prices and consumer demand. All that non-productive money printing was “emergency,” so no need to back it up. Infrastructure is “long-term” and so it must be paid for.

Make sense? Not to anyone following Lyndon LaRouche’s American System economics, who knows what productivity is and how it’s created and raised. But it’s “to fight climate change,” so no rhyme or reason is expected.