Dan, let me get this straight: According to the WSJ report you linked to, Reid’s new energy bill primarily does three things:
1) It eliminates the cap on damage claims oil companies must pay for spills.
2) It offers new federal subsidies for natural gas and electric vehicles.
3) It covers its $15 billion price tag by raising the per-barrel surcharge that oil companies contribute to the federal Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund to 49 cents, up from eight cents now.
Now, presumably, the $15 billion is the cost of the new federal subsidies for electric cars. And presumably, money from the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund isn’t supposed to be spent on electric cars; it’s supposed to be spent on oil-spill clean-up. So how could the government use that $15 billion to pay for new federal subsidies for electric cars?
The Democrats have resorted to double-counting to evade their own PAYGO rules so many times that I’m starting to think Harry Reid’s calculator has a stutter.