Ready to be capped?

While everyone's been talking about health care and arguing over what President Obama should or shouldn't say about Iran, cap & trade is sneaking up on us. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants it introduced tomorrow and passed before the Fourth of July recess. This is a bill that has grown from 900 pages to nearly 1,200 just in the last few days, and they're still making changes. It's doubtful many legislators will have even read the thing before they vote on it. But the broad intent of the bill is clear, and those who take comfort in recent studies, indluding ones by the CBO, about how minimal the cost will be for Americans, should take a closer look, as The Wall Street Journal did:

The hit to GDP is the real threat in this bill. The whole point of cap and trade is to hike the price of electricity and gas so that Americans will use less. These higher prices will show up not just in electricity bills or at the gas station but in every manufactured good, from food to cars. Consumers will cut back on spending, which in turn will cut back on production, which results in fewer jobs created or higher unemployment. Some companies will instead move their operations overseas, with the same result.

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Note also that the CBO analysis is an average for the country as a whole. It doesn't take into account the fact that certain regions and populations will be more severely hit than others -- manufacturing states more than service states; coal producing states more than states that rely on hydro or natural gas. Low-income Americans, who devote more of their disposable income to energy, have more to lose than high-income families.

"Certain regions" that are manufacturing states and rely on coal. That would be Indiana.