Today AFP blasted the White House for quietly removing the estimated cap-and-trade “climate revenues” that it showed in its 2010 budget from the new 2011 blueprint, while remaining committed to enacting an expensive cap-and-trade energy tax.

President Obama today released his FY 2011 budget proposal, which featured a blank line labeled “Allowance for climate policy.” There is no disclosure in the new budget of the revenue expected, but as recently as August 25, 2009 (in Obama’s 2010  Mid-Session Review) the administration counted on $627 billion in “climate revenues” between 2012 and 2019.

“The 2011 budget tries to explain away the costs of cap-and-trade in a footnote that says all of the revenue will be spent – claiming climate policy is therefore deficit neutral. But a promise to spend every penny of a huge new tax hike should not be reassuring to the American people who will pay the price for this tax,” said Americans for Prosperity Vice President for Policy Phil Kerpen. “This hidden slush fund flies in the face of every promise this administration has made about transparency and accountability.”
 
“For years President Obama and White House Budget Director Peter Orszag have made clear that the cost of any cap-and-trade program must be written into the budget as revenues, whether emissions permits are auctioned or given away. But now we have a budget with literally a blank line for climate policy. They are creating a potentially multi-trillion-dollar black box for higher taxes and spending hidden inside an already $3.8 trillion a year budget.”

In testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, Orszag insisted that the cost of cap-and-trade allowances must be shown as budgetary revenues:

"[T]he federal budget should record the value of allowances that are given away by the government if the recipients of the allowances could readily convert them into cash. In particular, the budget should record the value of those allowances, when they are distributed, as both revenues and outlays. That procedure, which CBO has already applied in its estimates for S. 2191, underscores that giving away allowances is economically equivalent to auctioning the allowances and then dedicating the proceeds to the recipients."

“The White House has now thrown transparency out the window and created a black box for taxes and spending on climate hidden inside its 2011 budget,” Kerpen concluded. “The bottom line is a huge new tax hike should not be hidden in a climate bill, especially one not honestly accounted for in the federal budget.  We urge President Obama and all elected officials to commit to that basic premise by signing our NoClimateTax.com pledge, as hundreds of officials have already done.”