James K. Boyce and Matthew Riddle have updated earlier anlysis that examines the household-level impacts of a cap-and-dividend plan, and how they differ between states. In this paper, the authors not only consider the specific parameters of the 2010 CLEAR Act, but also add an assessment of the state-by-state job creation that would have resulted from the bill.

Boyce & Riddle find that interstate differences in the bill’s impact on household incomes would have been small: much smaller than differences across the income spectrum, and vastly smaller than the differences in other federal programs, such as defense spending. As a result, the CLEAR Act would have delivered positive net benefits to the majority of households in every state. Where there are interstate differences, Boyce & Riddle suggest ways in which the CLEAR Act could have been modified to eliminate them altogether.