July 5, 2009  Everyone knows cap and trade is a carbon tax in disguise, But there's a lot of confusion about how costly the tax is. Conservative say $100 billion or more a year. This is completely wrong, but it actually does cost something like $30 billion a year, and no one knows how much because it's too confusing for even the Congressional Budget Office to figure it out.

Why is this so great? (1) Everyone can see it's cheap. (2) It still works perfectly, provided everyone gets the same size check in the mail every three months or so. (3) It really is a lot cheaper than a cap because it cuts out all the waste on subsidies and paying for foreign offsets.

You can read Carbonomics—the one book that explains it—free on Google.