energy tax

An Election-Night Win For Domestic Energy Jobs

by Ben Lieberman on November 4, 2010

in Energy

Draw up a map of the U.S. and shade in the regions that rely on energy jobs — places like Appalachia, the Rockies, western Gulf states, Alaska — and that’s where we saw some of the strongest anti-Obama sentiment succeeding on election day.

With few exceptions, the only Democratic congressional candidates who won in these areas were those able to distance themselves from President Obama’s energy policies — or to be more accurate, his anti-energy policies. In its first two years, the Obama administration has tried to slam the door shut on domestic production of coal, oil, and natural gas.
But now, many of the administration’s congressional allies in this effort have gotten a pink slip from their constituents. Obama will soon have to contend with a Congress that sees increased supplies of affordable domestic energy — and the increased jobs that go with it — as things worth fighting for rather than against.

Most notably, costly global warming legislation proved to be political poison. Many Senate incumbents can only be grateful that the administration-endorsed cap-and-trade bill never came to a vote in the upper chamber, as the House-passed version was a major factor in defeating more than two dozen of its supporters. This includes longtime Democratic incumbent Rick Boucher whose rural Virginia district has a number of coal mines.

Voters throughout Appalachia correctly saw cap-and-trade as an energy tax designed to raise the cost of coal and other fossil fuels in order to drive them out of the marketplace. They didn’t like the implications for their electric bills, and they certainly didn’t like the implications for coal mining jobs. In addition to cap-and-trade, attempts by the Environmental Protection Agency to deny new coal mine permits added to the voter outrage throughout coal country. And on top of concerns about coal mining jobs, voters in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan that need affordable coal to maintain manufacturing jobs sent home incumbents who voted for cap and trade.

Cap-and-trade was every bit as unpopular in other energy producing regions, including the West where Rep. Harry Teague of New Mexico suffered the same fate as Boucher. The administration’s efforts to reduce oil and natural gas production on federal lands were also a factor. Obama’s Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar quickly earned a reputation as Secretary No on oil and gas drilling throughout the Rocky Mountain region, blocking many already-approved leases and issuing a record-low number of new ones. The region has the highest unemployment in the nation, and killing high-paying oil and gas industry jobs there was not well received on election day. Another November 2nd victim was Obama supporter John Salazar, incumbent congressman from an energy-rich but job poor Colorado district — and Ken Salazar’s brother.

It is also worth noting that the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, hyped by President Obama in a nationwide address as “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced,” had little impact on the elections. If anything, it was the administration’s attempt to parlay the spill into a deepwater drilling moratorium that sparked anger amongst voters in the Gulf region. Obama’s overreach has already killed jobs in Louisiana and neighboring states. The only reason the moratorium did not play a bigger role in the elections there was that it was denounced by candidates of both parties.

The same is true in Alaska. Nowhere is the energy industry more important to a state economy than in Alaska. And there, the Obama administration has reached a dubious milestone –for the first time in decades, virtually all energy exploration activities in the state have come to a halt. As with Louisiana, the only reason energy wasn’t a bigger issue was that every major candidate had strongly disagreed with the administration and vowed to fight it on issues like opening portions of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and National Petroleum Reserve and allowing exploration in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas.

In sum, just about every place in America where there is energy below the ground there were angry voters above it on November 2. The mandate is clear and now it is up to the incoming Congress to bring to Washington something that has been missing for the past two years – a policy that favors American energy production and jobs.

The Spin Zone

by Ryan Lynch on April 20, 2010 · 2 comments

in Video, Zeitgeist

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4BBKEyEiZc 285 234]

Kerry-Graham-Lieberman: The Tax Formerly Known As Cap-and-Trade

by Marlo Lewis on March 11, 2010 · 1 comment

in Global Warming

My colleague Julie Walsh flags a funny statement by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), quoted earlier this week (Mar. 9) in Greenwire (subscription required). Although Lieberman, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) want to include cap-and-trade in their draft climate and energy legislation, they are reluctant to use the term.

Greenwire reports:

Lieberman also downplayed the use of the term “cap and trade” when it comes to limiting emissions, even though that is generally the plan with their bill. “We don’t use that term anymore,” he said. “We’ll have pollution reduction targets. Remember the Artist Previously Known as Prince?”

According to earlier reports, Graham et al. may propose to combine an electric utility sector cap-and-trade program with carbon taxes on transportation fuels. If so, then Kyotoism is truly dead. Electric utilities are gung-ho for cap-and-trade only if it’s economy-wide, so they can sell the free emission permits they would get under a bill like Waxman-Markey to other sectors receiving fewer or zero freebies.

Also, Waxman-Markey is a non-starter in the Senate because millions of Americans now understand that cap-and-trade is a stealth tax on energy. Combining carbon taxes with cap-and-trade is hardly the bold alternative and fresh start Graham, Kerry, and Lieberman are promising. Indeed, if this is what’s on offer, it’s even more obviously a tax, and should be even easier to shoot down!

The Artist Formerly Known As Prince was still Prince even before he changed his name back to Prince! And an energy tax by any other name is just as foul.

Obama One Year Later — A Legacy of Lies and Broken Promises

by Hans Bader on November 3, 2009

in Agriculture, Economy, Energy, Environment, Ethanol, Global Warming, Healthcare, Insurance, International, Legal, Natural Resources, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere, Trade

It’s been a year since the president was elected, and he’s already piled up an impressive list of lies and broken promises.

The broken promises include his pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” his promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year, and his promise not to sign bills without first giving the public five days of notice.

The Congressional Budget Office says that Obama’s proposed budgets will explode the national debt through massive spending increases, increasing the already large deficits left behind by the Bush administration from $4.4 trillion to $9.3 trillion. His record-setting budgets flagrantly violate his promise to propose a “net spending cut.”

Obama broke his campaign promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year by signing into law a regressive excise tax increase to expand the SCHIP program, and by proposing a cap-and-trade energy tax that could charge up to $2 trillion, a massive cost that Obama himself has said will be passed “on to consumers,” as well as homeowners and motorists. (In 2008, Obama privately admitted to the San Francisco Chronicle that if he was elected, electricity bills would “skyrocket” under his administration, but it didn’t report that.)

He also broke his promise not to raise taxes by backing health-care bills that would impose a laundry list of new taxes on the middle class, including a tax on uninsured people.  Americans for Tax Reform earlier summarized the tax increases in ObamaCare: an individual mandate tax of $900 per individual or $3800 per family (if you don’t have health insurance); an employer mandate tax of $400 per employee if health coverage is not offered; an “excise tax on high-cost health plans”; a “medicine cabinet tax”; capping Flexible-Spending Accounts (FSA’s); abolishing most HSAs; and increasing tax penalties for HSAs.

The costly cap-and-trade energy bill supported by Obama would lead to big tax increases, administration officials privately have conceded, even though they publicly claim otherwise.  “Officials at the Treasury Department think cap-and-trade legislation would cost taxpayers hundreds of billion in taxes, according to internal documents circulated within the agency and provided to The Washington Times” by CEI.  It could raise household taxes by $1761 per year, equivalent to a 15 percent tax increase.   It would also result in “loss of steel, paper, aluminum, chemical, and cement manufacturing jobs.”  (Obama earlier admitted that “under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”)

Although cap-and-trade backers claim it will cut greenhouse gas emissions, it may perversely increase them and also result in dirtier air, as well as harming forests and water supplies.   It would enrich politically-connected corporations, and result in massive destruction of the world’s forests.   By expanding ethanol subsidies and mandates, it would cause enormous “damage to water supplies, soil health and air quality.” Ethanol subsidies have already resulted in forests being destroyed in the Third World, and by diverting cropland to fuel production away from food production, they have already caused famines that have killed countless people in the world’s poorest countries.

Over and over again, Obama has broken his campaign promise to give the public five days of notice before signing bills into law, including his very first law, the trial-lawyer backed Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Obama also repeatedly made false claims about the Supreme Court decision that the Ledbetter law overruled, misstating the facts of that case and how long it gives employees to sue over pay discrimination (the Court did NOT say that employees have to sue even before discovering discrimination).

Obama broke seven campaign promises dealing with transparency and clean government in signing the $800 billion stimulus package, much of whose contents were secret until shortly before Congress voted on it, and whose 1400 pages went unread by most Congressmen who voted on it.  (It repealed welfare reform and contained loads of welfare, pork, and waste, while wiping out jobs in the export sector.)

Obama’s broken promises are part of a larger pattern of dishonesty. Obama claimed his $800 billion stimulus package was needed to avert “irreversible decline.” But the Congressional Budget Office concluded before and after its passage that the stimulus package will actually cut the size of the economy in the long run. Obama’s budgets don’t add up, either, piling up $9.3 trillion in red ink, according to the Congressional Budget Office, a staggering $2.3 trillion more than Obama claimed.

The Energy Tax Budget

by Iain Murray on February 26, 2009 · 8 comments

in Economy, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Stimulus to Nowhere

“Not one dime,” said President Obama in his address to Congress, referring to how much extra tax people earning under $250,000 a year will have to pay in his budget. Unfortunately, even if you don’t have to pay extra tax, you will have to pay extra fees for your energy, which are passed on to the government via energy companies. That’s the effect of the President’s cap-and-trade scheme for carbon emissions, an important part of his new budget. Energy companies will have to pay the government for permits for each ton of carbon dioxide or equivalent they emit in the generation of power. They will pass on these costs to the consumer, as has happened everywhere a cap-and-trade scheme has been tried. The Administration will split the revenues between $15bn for alternative energy pork and about $52 billion per year to help pay for the Making Work Pay tax cut/welfare check of $800 for “95 percent of all American workers.” By raising the price of fossil fuel energy and thereby making expensive alternative energy more competitive, the program is also aimed at reducing the amount of greenhouse gases emitted.

How much will cap and trade cost households in increased energy costs? Well, we know from a CBO study last year that a 15 percent reduction in emissions from 1998 levels would cost each household at least $660. That target is about 25 percent more stringent than the budget target, which is simply a return to 1990 emission levels by 2020 (far less than environmentalists demand). So we can apply simple arithmetic to estimate that the current budget cap and trade program will cost each income quintile $510, $660, $870, $1125 and $1635 (in 2006 dollars, slightly more in nominal values) respectively. This is a significant offset to the $800 “tax cut” per worker.

To those who might object that most households have two income earners these days, that’s not true. While the “traditional” family model of a husband supporting his family only accounts for 7 percent of householders now, dual-income families actually account for just 29 percent of households. Moreover, it is the bottom three quintiles that have on average just one earner, meaning that they suffer proportionally more from this energy tax increase.

Finally, for the highest quintile, the lower income limit is just $88,000. If you earn that amount, even if you have two income earners in the household, you will likely lose money from these stealth energy taxes. So will the average household earning between $35,000 and $55,000. So much for “not one dime.”