From ZeroHedge, this summary, in nine charts.
Right click on the image to enlarge it.
The Obama Recovery
Reply
Tag Archives: taxes
Tax Pollution
That’s what Richard Revesz thinks we should do, instead of subsidizing this or that energy company or industry. In his Wall Street Journal piece, Revesz thinks that “greenhouse gases, smog precursors and other pollutants” should be taxed and all those subsidies done away with.
He’s half right. Subsidies have no place in American economics. To the Democrats who say “green” energy companies need the subsidies in order to grow (quickly or at all), they’ve answered the claim themselves, although they’re loathe to admit it: if a company needs a government subsidy to exist or to grow in our competitive economy, it isn’t ready for our economy. To others who say the oil and gas companies need the subsidies (a relative pittance, anyway, compared to green’s subsidies), the answer also is no they don’t. They can compete.
Revesz would be fully right if we could arrive at an accurate definition of “pollution.” Consider the current en vogue “pollutant,” atmospheric carbon dioxide. Pseudo-climatologists and other “environmentalists” like to fear-monger over CO2 in our air. They carefully ignore the fact that increases in atmospheric CO2 come after planetary warming by some 800-1,300 years. Far from being a pollutant, it’s the ordinary output of respiring life and with those lagging increases it confirms the increasing health of the planet and its burgeoning life.
Until facts stop getting in the way of the money flow, there’s no possibility of accurately defining “pollutant,” and so there’s no reasonable way to tax it.
Energy Wealth Redistribution
Your tax dollars at work. Exposed by UC Berkeley, yet. This is the Abstract from their working paper The Distributional Effects of U.S. Clean Energy Tax Credits [emphasis added]:
Since 2006, US households have received more than $18 billion in federal income tax credits for weatherizing their homes, installing solar panels, buying hybrid and electric vehicles, and other “clean energy” investments. We use tax return data to examine the socioeconomic characteristics of program recipients. We find that these tax expenditures have gone predominantly to higher-income Americans. The bottom three income quintiles have received about 10% of all credits, while the top quintile has received about 60%. The most extreme is the program aimed at electric vehicles, where we find that the top income quintile has received about 90% of all credits. By comparing to previous work on the distributional consequences of pricing greenhouse gas emissions, we conclude that tax credits are likely to be much less attractive on distributional grounds than market mechanisms to reduce GHGs.
Of course, the top quintile aren’t only the cronies; they’re also the folks rich enough to install these things and/or buy the expensive battery-operated cars—which are horribly expensive, even after the “tax credits,” and in the case of those solar panels, have payback periods measured in generations rather than years.
From the body of the paper [citation omitted]:
If these tax credits are successful in inducing changes in behavior, then we should expect to see increased purchases during years in which the subsidies are particularly generous. Conversely, if credits do not induce additional sales, then the primary effect is just to transfer rents to participants in transactions that would have taken place anyway.
In other words, if there are no additional sales, then the sales that would have occurred anyway would see wealth redistribution from the lower income strata to the higher income strata in addition to the basic price paid for the goody bought.
How did that work out? Taking, for example, hybrid car sales,
There does not appear to be much of a decrease in hybrid sales when the AMVC [Alternative Motor Vehicle (Tax) Credit] was ended for all hybrids at the end of 2010. Moreover, since 2010, hybrid sales have increased significantly without the benefit of the AMVC.
Hmm….
From the paper’s conclusion:
Since 2006, these credits have provided more than $18 billion in subsidies for households who make clean energy investments. Using rich data from tax returns we show that over the last decade US clean energy tax credits have gone predominantly to higher-income Americans. Taxpayers with AGI in excess of $75,000 have received about 60% of all credit dollars aimed at energy-efficiency, residential solar, and hybrid vehicles, and about 90% of all credit dollars aimed at electric cars.
Again, hmm….
Free College
Hillary wants to rein in the rising cost of a college education.
States would have to increase their own spending on higher education, and universities would be required to control spending[.]
With those strings, Clinton would send an additional $350 billion of your tax money (including your higher taxes she’s proposing to pay for some of this) over the next 10 years to the states for their public universities and community colleges.
And
…new rules would ensure a certain portion of total spending is directed to instruction….
How like a Progressive to think the answer to stopping a rise in the cost of a thing is to spend more money on the thing. And then to add to the cost of the thing with compliance cost imposition.
Can our nation really afford another four or eight years of this lack of understanding about how a free economy works?
Medicare Funding
The fund Medicare uses to pay hospitals will run out in the next 15 years, and experts say there are no easy answers to solve it.
Certainly not politically easy answers, and that does matter. However, the practical answer is quite simple, if expensive in the transition.
Keep everyone 55 and older in the current Medicare system, with the individual option to leave that system in favor of the one I’ve proposed many times and summarize here. It’s important to note also that the “experts” are referring only to Medicare Part A, the hospitalization part. My reform is broader and applies to Medicare Parts B, payments to physicians, and D, drug coverage.
Rescind the payroll taxes from both the employer and younger-than-55 employee, while requiring the employee to put his payroll tax equivalent into what would be essentially a Health Savings Account. This New Model HSA would contain investment vehicles of the account owner’s choosing—including stocks, bonds, mutual funds for the same, bank savings accounts, etc—and be held for the benefit of the account holder. Unlike the Old Model HSA, with its shameful limits, the NMHSA would have no income limits on contributions, no annual limits on contributions, no requirement to have a High Deductible Health Coverage Policy, none of those government-mandated limits.
Of course, this can’t happen in a vacuum. In conjunction with this, the bankrupt* Social Security system needs to be similarly privatized, also, and the overly expensive Medicare system blocked granted, on a declining-to-zero schedule, to the States. These need to be done, too, with significant tax rate reductions and Federal spending cuts (and not just one-time gimmicks or reductions in spending growth).
Most, if not all of the cost of the transition can be covered by that spending and taxing reform.
*Bankrupt: not strictly so because in a few short years, while the Social Security Trust Fund will be emptied of money, current payroll taxes still will be available to make the payouts, requiring the payouts to drop to 75% of their presently scheduled values.
Update: Corrected an empty reference to Part C to the correct reference to Part D.