Financial impacts of ‘cap and trade’
So-called “cap and trade” legislation has often been portrayed as a regressive policy — one that would hit poor people the hardest. A new MIT study concluded that this is not the case.The U.S. House of Representatives passed a cap-and-trade bill last year, and different versions of that bill had been working their way through the Senate until being yanked from consideration last month. The study, co-authored by researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and at Tufts University, found that under all three versions of the bill submitted so far, the costs would fall hardest on wealthier households, and that lower-income households would see no change or a net benefit.The basic concept of cap and trade is that greenhouse-gas emissions would be capped at some level (usually about the present level, or the level from a past year), and companies that produce...