WASHINGTON, DC – House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) today went to the House floor to urge passage of his resolution, H. Con. Res. 89, expressing the sense of Congress that a carbon tax would be detrimental to the United States economy. Scalise’s resolution passed the House with a bipartisan vote of 237–163.
Remarks:
“Thank you, Mr. Speaker. and I thank the gentlelady from Tennessee for yielding.
“I’m proud to bring forward this legislation, Mr. Speaker, that expresses the strong sense of Congress that a carbon tax would be detrimental to the United States economy. If you look at what this administration has done through radical rules and regulations, through all of its agencies starting with the EPA, with the IRS, with the NLRB, the whole alphabet soup of federal agencies that every morning wake up trying to figure out how to make it harder for our economy to get moving again, how to make it harder for people to create jobs in America and, frankly, these — the results of these radical regulations are shifting and running jobs away out of our country to foreign countries like China, like India, and they want to keep it going.
“This is not a new concept, Mr. Speaker. They tried this years ago when they brought through the cap and trade bill passed out of the House. It couldn’t even pass in the Senate when they had a supermajority in the Senate, with 60 votes, because it was such a detrimental idea that would devastate our economy. Yet, even with that defeat, President Obama still tries to come back with a carbon tax through other means.
“Whether it’s regulation or whether it’s superimposed carbon taxes through the EPA and some of the other things they’re doing. But we had hearings on this, Mr. Speaker. There’s data all the around that confirms how devastating a carbon tax would be to the United States economy.
“You can just look at what some of the outside groups that look at this. The National Association of Manufacturers, the people that make things in America, have confirmed we lose more than a million jobs in America if a carbon tax was imposed. Where would those jobs go? They’d go to countries, ironically, that don’t have the good environmental standards we already have. So they would go to countries like China and India where if you’re concerned about carbon going into the atmosphere, the things that they do to produce the same things we produce here in America, it creates more than five times the amount of carbon in those countries. So you’re shifting jobs out of America to send it to countries where you’d actually create more carbon. They talk about somehow being able to create policy that would stop hurricanes and change the sea level rising, for goodness sake. As if some policy’s going to do that. And by the way, the result of their policies will increase carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere.
“Let’s talk about the track record of this administration that now wants to control the earth’s temperature. They spent over $500 million and couldn’t even create a website to take your health insurance request. Healthcare.gov you remember that? Well, this same group thinks they can control the earth’s temperature through radical policies. But again let’s look at the devastating impacts these policies would have. They wouldn’t work, first of all, but they would have a devastating impact on the middle class of this country. The Congressional Budget Office, our own Congressional Budget Office, that looked at this said a carbon tax would actually hit low-income people the hardest.
“Even harder than high-income people. It would have a devastating impact on those people that are least able to afford it because it would increase the cost of everything they do. It would increase your food at at the grocery store, it would increase, of course, when you pay at the pump, it would increase your electricity prices.
“The Heritage Foundation looked at this and said that this kind of carbon tax would actually increase the cost of everything that families buy by over $1,400 per family. Families are going to pay $1,400 more every year for the cost of a carbon tax that the other side wants to defend. And to yield what? To just yield an opportunity for countries like China and India to grow their economies at the expense of ours.
“So Mr. Speaker, if you look at what they’re trying to — and, again, if you want to do this, bring it forward as an idea in legislation, and they tried it with cap and trade and it got defeated when Democrats controlled everything. There’s bipartisanship on this issue, and the bipartisanship is in opposition to a carbon tax. And so why won’t we go on record and be very clear about it? Not just that it’s bad policy, but to reaffirm how devastating to would be for the United States economy. It shouldn’t move forward.
“The President needs to stop this radical agenda and instead focus on reversing the depressing economic activity that we’ve seen in this country since he’s been president because of these kind of policies. Let’s get real economic growth, let’s bring those jobs back to the United States. Let’s reject a carbon tax. I urge adoption of this resolution and I yield back the balance of my time.”