The Drudge Report (9/16/09) is featuring this headline (in scary red type):

Obama Admin: Cap And Trade Could Cost Families $1,761 A Year...

The link goes to a CBSNews.com post, which declares:

A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. At the upper end of the administration's estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year.

Well, there's one problem: $1,700 is the upper estimate. The second, far more important problem: This was an analysis based on a plan that called for auctioning all of the carbon-burning permits; the bill that passed the House auctions just 15 percent of the permits, meaning that this document (FOIAed by the corporate-friendly Competitive Enterprise Institute) bears almost no relationship to reality.

The CBS report has an "update" at the bottom of the piece, from the kind of people CBS didn't bother to quote (preferring the likes of the Heritage Foundation and CEI, staunch critics of cap-and-trade):

Update 9/16/2009: The Environmental Defense Fund has responded to the documents' release with a statement saying, in part:

"Even if a 100 percent auction was a live legislative proposal, which it's not, that math ignores the redistribution of revenue back to consumers. It only looks at one side of the balance sheet. It would only be true if you think the Administration was going to pile all the cash on the White House lawn and set it on fire.

"The bill passed by the House sends the value of pollution permits to consumers, and it contains robust cost-containment provisions. Every credible and independent economic analysis of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (such as those done by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the Energy Information Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency) says the costs will be small and affordable -- and that the U.S. economy will grow with a cap on carbon."

That is kind of like saying "IGNORE THE PRECEDING REPORT."

The Politico had a brief story on this as well by Ben Smith--not nearly as bad as CBS's-- that also included a late correction:

CORRECTION: The League of Conservation Voters' Navin Nayak points out to me that the documents are a bit less than meets the eye: They refer to a version of the legislation profoundly different than the one that passed. Specifically, the original White House plan had 100 percent of emissions permits being distributed by auction; the plan that passed has just 15 percent.  "Can you say 'irrelevant analysis'? It would be like pricing the healthcare bills currently in front of Congress based on a single-payer system," he writes.

He also notes that the revenue comes directly from polluters, not taxpayers, and continues (and I'm quoting him at length because my original post was sloppy):

"Why not use the CBO analysis of the house bill? Republicans seem more than happy to use CBO when it helps their case (i.e. Against some of the health care bills). But CBO said that ACES would only cost a postage stamp a day per household...in 2020."

So the scary-sounding statistic is nonsense. Nonetheless, one can expect to hear this "It will cost you $1,700!" factoid all the time.

Tying the urgent present-day topic of economic reporting in with the most pressing global emergency of climate change, Dean Baker has posted at his Beat the Press blog (6/29/09) on "What Does 'Free Trade' Have to Do With Taxing Greenhouse Gas Emissions?":

That is the question that the New York Times should have been asking in an article that reported President Obama's opposition to taxing imported items from countries that have not taken steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The point of his cap-and-trade program is to make items that require large amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions more expensive, thereby discouraging their consumption.

If goods can just be imported from countries that have no tax on GHG, then the point of cap-and-trade is undermined, as goods that require large amounts of fossil fuels will just be produced abroad. It is understandable that importers and other special interest would be opposed to measures that prohibit this sort of evasion, but that has absolutely nothing to do with "free trade."

Baker notes that "the NYT completely misrepresents the issue by implying that this is somehow a debate over principles of free trade," when really "it is a debate of whether special interests will be allowed to import goods to undermine the limits set by a cap-and-trade bill for GHG emissions." For more on press distortions of Obama's cap-and-trade policies, listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Mike Lillis on Climate Bill" (5/22/09).