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Warren Buffett: Obama carbon-tax idea 'regressive'

by Frank James

During his three-hour appearance on CNBC today, Warren Buffett, the world's most famous investor, described the cap-and-trade plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions which President Barack Obama included in its recent budget proposal as a "pretty regressive" tax.

Buffett, an Obama ally, is clearly not synched up with the White House message. He has given opponents of the proposal a powerful bit of ammunition to work with.

And by describing the taxes that would be imposed as eventually regressive since they would be passed along to consumers, Buffett has said, not in so many words, that Obama would hurt the low and middle income Americans the president sees himself championing since a larger share of their incomes would go towards paying higher utility bills than would be true for the more affluent.

But Buffett has long been outspoken, which is one of the reasons the Obama people liked him when he sided with them during the presidential campaign.

The relevant excerpt from the CNBC transcript:

BUFFETT: Well, yeah. As you know, that hasn't been enacted yet or anything. But it is part of the budget that was put out the other day that--giving effect to it. Anything you put in that effectively taxes carbon emissions is--somebody's going to bear the brunt of it. In the case of a regulated utility, the utility customers are going to pay for it. I mean, it's going to become, in effect, a tax which we have decided is needed because the market system doesn't really appropriately penalize something that hurts the future but doesn't really hurt us tomorrow morning. But that tax is probably going to be pretty regressive. It'll be determined by individual public utility commissions state by state what customers it gets passed through to. But if you put a cost of issuing--putting carbon into the atmosphere, it--in the utility business it's going to be born by customers. And it's a tax like anything else. If--in terms of ConocoPhillips, it would be less direct, anything of that sort. Or in terms of industry generally.
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