Deal likens cap-and-trade to ‘Ponzi scheme’

U.S. Rep. Nathan Deal likens the Obama administration’s “cap-and-trade” climate change legislation to a “Ponzi scheme” where investors unknowingly are the source of returns to people who have previously invested in the fraudulent operation.

“If you don’t have the technology to achieve the goals that the legislation says you are to achieve, it becomes a virtual impossibility (to implement),” said Deal, a Republican from Gainesville who is running for governor, during a Kiwanis Club meeting on Monday in Dalton.

“This is not the way policy is usually established,” Deal said. “Usually you have technology, you have facts, you have things that are already in place that are the premise on which you legislate. Here, we have legislation that has far outpaced the capability of fulfilling the requirements of that legislation.”

Deal said the legislation was founded on the premise that CO2 emissions are harmful to the environment and must therefore be “curbed.”

“Quite frankly, that is still a scientifically disputed point,” he said. “But that was not the basis on which the battle was fought ... (it) was fought on the assumption that that’s true, and what are you going to do about it? The answer (is that) you capture that carbon, and that you reduce that carbon output. And that is where the so-called ‘cap’ — capping the emissions (comes from) — and the trade part comes in that if you exceed your cap you’ve got to buy some credits from somebody else.

“Now you talk about the possibility of magnitude of fraud like we have never seen in programs before, I think this one invites it.”

Deal said Europe has seen that fraud.

“You are basically trading something you can’t see,” he said. “Sounds like a Ponzi scheme, doesn’t it, when you really think about it ... at least the snake oil salesman had to have something in a bottle.”

Deal said Spain has been the country to most fully embrace “green” legislation like cap-and-trade, with negative results.

“Spain became the poster child for green energy,” he said. “They were going to be the country that showed the rest of the world how you could go green. Now you would think we would want to know what happened in Spain. The (Obama) administration referenced it during the campaign and used them for an example, but when the truth started coming out ... they didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”

Deal said a study by a professor in Spain revealed that for every green job created, 2.2 jobs were lost, because the “green jobs” involved installation of equipment that eventually replaced workers.

He said the “strategy” behind cap-and-trade, as well as attempts to push through health care legislation — both bills are more than 1,000 pages — is to “spring them on people at the last minute, and don’t give them the opportunity to have this matter digested in terms of the implications of it.”

He said the premise of the health care bill is to “eliminate the uninsureds” in the country.

“The truth of the matter is, the number of people who are totally uninsured for an entire year is a relatively small number compared with that 47 million or 50 million they are currently throwing out,” Deal said. “People come and go, change jobs, have insurance here, maybe lose it if they move around. A significant number of the uninsured, of course, are illegally in our country and therefore (are) not entitled to the public options that are available.”

Deal said others are entitled to enroll in Medicaid or the children’s health care plan called PeachCare in Georgia. But the problem in addressing those uninsured, he said, is the Obama administration’s plan to create a government-controlled health care program that would be in competition with private insurance companies.

“The truth of the matter, though, is it’s very difficult to imagine how a private insurance company can stay in business if they’re in competition with a public option plan,” he said. “A public plan doesn’t pay taxes, a public plan doesn’t have to show a profit, it doesn’t even have to live by its own laws. We have a hard time getting Congress to live by the laws we set for ourselves ... I just don’t think many private insurance companies can stay in business very long because the competition is such that the public option plan is cheaper and people will migrate to that plan.”

Deal said he expects to vote against the health care legislation.

“I don’t think that there’s going to be any way they can fix all the problems I see in this legislation,” he said.

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