[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 74 (Thursday, May 14, 2009)]
[House]
[Page H5637]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          THE CAP-AND-TAX BILL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Shimkus) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SHIMKUS. Madam Speaker, it looks like the Energy and Commerce 
Committee is moving forward in addressing and moving on the cap-and-tax 
bill. And I'm coming to the floor to just talk about the real-world 
implications of what this bill might do. The basic premise is this: 
carbon fuels are bad, whether that is coal or whether that is petroleum 
crude oil. And because it is bad, we are going to have to monetize it, 
which means put additional cost on that to decrease people's use of 
that fuel.
  There are problems with that premise. We went through the last Clean 
Air Act amendments in 1990 in the State of Illinois. In the Midwest 
particularly there were a great deal of problems. This is a picture of 
miners from the Peabody No. 10 mine in Kincaid, Illinois. They were 
part of the 14,000 United Mine Workers that lost their jobs in the last 
Clean Air Act amendments. At this one mine location, over 1,200 miners 
lost their jobs, and that has caused a devastating effect in southern 
Illinois.
  Now, Illinois wasn't the only State affected. I always like to 
highlight the State of Ohio. The State of Ohio lost 35,000 mine worker 
jobs in the last Clean Air Act amendments--35,000 people. And that is 
not just individuals. That means that affects their families, the small 
rural communities in which they reside, the tax base for the school 
districts, the spin-off effects of folks having good-paying jobs 
averaging from 50 to $70,000 a year with benefits, gone.

                              {time}  1700

  This is an editorial in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. They used 
this picture. Again, a picture paints a thousand words. We know that 
the economy is struggling today. So this identifies ``Ship USS 
Recovery'' with Uncle Sam. You would think that Uncle Sam would want to 
help lift this economy up by throwing a lifesaver to the people who 
need it and create jobs. Well, Uncle Sam is doing it, but he's showing 
an anvil which is listed as a big tax to the drowning citizens. Now, we 
all may chuckle with this, but that is exactly what the cap-and-tax, 
cap-and-trade bill will do.
  And you don't have to take my word for it. Take the word of someone 
highly respected, the dean of the House, Chairman Emeritus John 
Dingell, who said this in a committee hearing just 2 weeks ago, 
``Nobody in this country realizes that cap-and-trade is a tax, and it's 
a great big one.''
  If you don't want to take his word for it, take the word of now 
President Barack Obama, who was quoted as saying, ``Under my plan of 
the cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily 
skyrocket. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to 
consumers.''
  Now, that's real money to real citizens, citizens like these folks 
right now who are drowning in the inability to either make their own 
payments or for the manufacturing sector of our society to compete 
today.
  What we fear, if the Democrats are successful, is that we have a hard 
time competing in the manufacturing sector around the world. We usually 
are able to compete because of low-cost power and a very efficient 
manufacturing sector. We can't compete on wages. We can't compete on 
environmental restrictions of sovereign nations. So if we take another 
variable off the table of how we can compete, what will happen is this: 
We will drive more manufacturing companies offshore to countries that 
aren't going to comply with monetizing carbon. Who are these countries? 
China, India, who have stated over and over again they don't care what 
the United States is going to do, they are going to continue to build, 
in the case of China, one new coal-fired power plant every 10 days. 
What we could do is we could go all the way down to zero and the 
world's carbon dioxide emissions are going to increase.

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