Obama admin: Cap-and-trade will cost families $1761 per year

(By Ed Morrissey, Hot Air) - Supporters of the administration’s plans for cap-and-trade have argued that the costs would be minimal for American households, as low as $175 per household per year, as the White House proclaimed an incomplete analysis from the CBO. A new study shows that the actual costs per household are ten times that number, almost $150 per month, once cap-and-trade gets implemented. What right-wing organization created that analysis?

The Treasury Department:

The Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent.

A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. At the upper end of the administration’s estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year.

A second memorandum, which was prepared for Obama’s transition team after the November election, says this about climate change policies: “Economic costs will likely be on the order of 1 percent of GDP, making them equal in scale to all existing environmental regulation.”

The documents (PDF) were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute and released on Tuesday.