Dow Jones Newswire, in a story “DJ Sources: White House Official Boosts Cap, Trade Rev[enue] Estimate,” is reporting that:

“A top White House economic adviser told Senate staff a proposed cap and trade system could raise “two-to-three times” the administration’s existing $646 billion revenue estimate, according to five people at the meeting.
This could mean the cap and trade system could actually generate between roughly $1.3 trillion and $1.9 trillion between fiscal years 2012 and 2019.”

Yes, ladies and gentleman, the White House is apparently fully aware that they are proposing the largest ta- . . . er, “revenue measure” . . . in the history of the Republic — likely, it seems, to be at least twice as large as the largest to date, the $107 billion (adjusted to 2007 dollars) per year (expiring) tax to pay off WWII.

Since the president already indicated to the Business Roundtable on Thursday that he’s facing reality, and backing off his call for selling all of the ration coupons and instead handing them out to industry (no doubt with some fig-leaf percentage sold and with a promise to sell them all, sometime over the horizon — you know, like closing Gitmo), this tax is to pay off GE, Duke Energy, and the rest of Enron’s carcass-pickers and Ken Lay proteges who took Lay’s very specific business model with them.

And it’s in the name of . . . wait for it . . . global warming. Not our finest hour. But the good news is that even though much of industry is selling their support for this BTU-tax redux — at your expense — we have a better model of disseminating information now than we did in 1993 (after all, Al Gore’s invention was relatively new at that point), and you are therefore now better equipped to defeat this beast.

Biggest. Tax. Evar.