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Press Release

For Immediate Release
Contact: Sean C. Bonyun
September 18, 2009
(202) 225-8678 (cell)

Uncensored Treasury Docs Reveal Crippling Costs to Families Under Cap & Trade
Bombshell document predicts cap-and-trade "will raise energy prices and impose annual costs on the order of tens (and potentially hundreds) of billions of dollars."

Upton had urged Secretary Geithner to come clean and release the documents

Washington, DC – Congressman Fred Upton (R-MI), ranking Republican of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, made the following comments upon the release of Administration documents confirming what Upton has been saying all along, that cap-and-trade is a national energy tax that will devastate American families. Upton yesterday urged Treasury Secretary Geithner in a letter to come clean and fully release the documents. The uncensored Department of Treasury cap-and-trade document prepared by Judson Jaffe states, “It will raise energy prices and impose annual costs on the order of tens (and potentially hundreds) of billions of dollars.”

“These bombshell documents reveal that the Administration has been misleading the American public since day one on cap-and-trade,” said Upton. “The audacity of this Administration to repeatedly look working families in the eye and assure them cap-and-tax will only cost them a ‘postage stamp a day’ when their own data predicts otherwise is shameful and wrong. Now there is no doubt that cap-and-trade is nothing more than a national energy tax that puts an enormous bullseye on the backs of working families to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars each year.”

On the eve of the House energy vote on June 25th, shortly after 2:00pm EDT, President Obama ignored the findings of his own Treasury Department during remarks made in the Rose Garden on cap-and-trade, declaring, “And above all, it will protect consumers from the costs of this transition so that in a decade, the price to the average American will be about the same as a postage stamp per day.”

Upton strongly supports the “all of the above” American Energy Act, H.R. 2846, which calls for the construction of 100 new nuclear reactors over the next 20 years. The expansion of nuclear power would create hundreds of thousands of good-paying, high-skilled and permanent jobs. According to data from Oxford Economics, building 100 new nuclear reactors and an appropriate number of enrichment and reprocessing plants over the next 20 years would create 356,000 manufacturing and construction jobs, 242,000 permanent jobs, and an additional 404,000 jobs from induced economic activity. In total, this amounts to over 1 million new jobs.

View a pdf of the uncensored documents.

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