Predictions

The House passed the Obama energy and climate bill this week.

“There’s a growing awareness that we need to move on energy,” David Axelrod said on NBC’s Meet the Press today. “We’ve been waiting for decades. And this bill will create millions of clean-energy jobs. It will deal with … our dependence on foreign oil, and we have to deal with that. And it deals this deadly pollution and global warming that we have to move on.” He also admitted that “We have not broken the back of the recession” despite the January rush to pass the $787 billion emergency stimulus package.

The bill includes crap and trade as well as extensive taxes on energy use. Investor Warren Buffett called the bill “a huge tax, and there’s no sense calling it anything else … it’s a fairly regressive tax.”

There is every reason to expect the Senate to pass the Obama energy and climate bill this fall.

I predict that gas prices will exceed $6/gallon
immediately after the midterm (2010) elections.

I predict that the prime rate will exceed 12%
immediately after the 2012 elections.