Why have the CBO if Congress doesn't heed it's warnings?

The CBO is the Congressional Budget Office. CBO assists the House and Senate Budget Committees, and the Congress more generally, by preparing reports and analyses. In accordance with the CBO's mandate to provide objective and impartial analysis, CBO's reports contain no policy recommendations. (That's direct from the CBO website cbo.gov)

While the 'stimulus' bill, now called the Reinvestment Act of 2009, was still being debated, the CBO released it's analysis that showed that the short term effect (ie next couple of years) the Act would help the economy. BUT in the long term the effects would be worse on the economy than if nothing had been done. Around the year 2016 the Reinvestment and Recovery Act would cause the GDP (gross Domestic Product) to drop. That's never a really good thing. Hum...

Now fast forward to the current debate over Cap and Trade. The idea is admirable and has worked in the past for helping to curb sulphur emmissions that lead to acid rain back in the early 90s. The current proposed use of the idea of setting a "cap" on the amount of carbon emmissions that are allowed into the enviornment. Companies can "trade" their allowances so that large emitors can buy emmission allowances from smaller emitors. Good in theory. However guess who emits carbon? YOU DO!! Everytime you drive your car, use your lawn mower, use your water heater or washer and dryer, basically anytime you use energy. Here is what the Wall Street Journal had to say.

Here is what the CBO had to say: (you can read their whole report here)

"The rise in prices would impose a larger burden, relative to income, on low-income households than on high-income households for two reasons. First, low-income housedholds spend a much lager fraction of their income than do high-income households.
In addition, energy-intensive items compose a greater share of low-income households' total expenditures. Data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistic
indicates that, measured as a share of income, spending on energy-intensive items by households in the lowest income quintile averages more than five times that by households in the highest income quintile (see Table 1).
Although the price of energy-intensive items such as electricity, natural gas, homes heating fuels, and gasoline would increase the most, the price of most items would rise in response to the imposition of a cap-and-trade program (because energy is an input for almost all goods and services). The price increases (as a percentage of income for items that were not energy-intensive would account for approximately 40 percent of the total price increases for households.
The price increases caused by a ca-and-trade program would impose additional costs on households. For example, without incorporating any benefirs to households from lessening climate chane, CBO estimates that the price increases resulting from a 15 percent cut in CO2 emissions could cost the average househols roughly $1,00 (in 2006 dollars), ranging from nearly $700 in additional cost for the average household in the lowest one-fifth (quintile) off all households arrayed by income, to about $2,200for the average household in the highest quintile.
The higher prices that woud result from a cap on CO2 emissions would reduce demand for energy and energy-intensive goods and services and thus create losses for some current investors and worskers in the sectors of the economy that supply such products. Investors might see the value of their stocks decline, and workers could face higher risk of unemployment as jobs in those secotrs were cut. Stock losses would tend to be widely dispersed amount investors because sherholders typically diversigy their porrfolios. In contrast, the costs of unemployment would probably be concentrated amount relativesly few households and, by extension, their communtities.
The magnitude of those transitional costs would depend on the pace of emission reductions, with more rapid reductions leading to larger transitional costs."
How much are you going to have to pay?
Didn't Obama say no taxes on 95% of American working families? This looks like a tax to me.