The measure appears to try to punish the oil and gas industry by taking away basic business expense deductions, said Republican Senator Jim DeMint and Republican Representative Mike Pompeo.tada
"It should be the same regardless of what business you're in," DeMint said.
Pompeo and DeMint want to end expiring tax incentives for wind and solar energy production, tax credits that are supported by Obama.
The American Petroleum Institute, an oil industry group, denies the industry receives any subsidies or makes current use of any special tax credits or deductions. The industry pays more of its profits in taxes than other manufacturing companies, the API said.
Let's start with agricultural subsidies. The oil will still be in the ground where we can drill for it. But I hate the idea that we're paying money to people to not grow corn.I'm not really sure that's the case anymore, rather at least with corn they actually pay you more based on how much you grow.
Oil yes, agriculture... not so sure. Those subsidies result in HFCS in all the food, but my feeling is that their real purpose is to ensure that farmland stays in productive use regardless of whether the market supports it, thus when disaster strikes (here or elsewhere in the world) causing disruption to markets or transport or crops, there is a reserve of food production on hand. Kind of like the national strategic oil reserve.Right, the government obviously has an interest in keeping the food system working well. It also has an interest in supplying energy, but at this point funding more oil discovery is counterproductive. We should be putting that money into solar/biofuel/advanced grids and so on. We are, but not to the same extent, which is ridiculous.
Devil's Advocacy Warning: the subsidies are coming from (progressive) income taxes, and the elimination of them will cause the energy companies to raise prices to maintain profitability. Since the poor presumably spend a higher proportion of their income on energy than the rich, won't elimination of these subsidies will hurt the poor more that the rich?It will hurt rich oil executives more the anyone. Rich people who are invested in clean energy will benefit greatly, which is exactly what we want.
In the U.S., there are only about 960,000 persons claiming farming as their principal occupation.Somehow I doubt that figure counts all the migrant farm workers. Also, 100,000 people pulling weeds wouldn't do much of anything Assuming one person can weed 1 square foot in 10 seconds (fairly optimistic), and working 2080 a year, one person could weed 17.1 acres a year. The U.S has 445 million acres of farmland. Those bureaucrats could cover 1.7 million in total, or about 0.38%.
There are more than 100,000 employees of the Department of Agriculture. There are thousands more employees of various state agriculture commissions (e.g. California, the biggest state, has 2,300 employees).
And I'm posting too much, so I'll shut up now, but I can't emphasize enough how important the size difference is. you might look at jedicus' OECD chart and think" yeah but Germany is a big country and gas is very expensive there." Yes it's a large economy but population density-wise it's a different universe. Germany is roughly half the size of Texas. It has 1/4 the US population living in an area 1/26 the size of the US.This absolute physical size of the US is completely irrelevant. It's actually amazing to me that people would bring it up at all. First of all, people drive all over Europe, not just in their own countries. Secondly, people don't generally commute from NY to LA, and if they do they fly. The physical distance between metro areas makes no difference at all how much gas is used in those metro areas. And if it did NY to LA is no different then Berlin to Paris, not Berlin to Hambug
This should be a cross party issue. No more subsidies for oil (or agriculture.)One of the more welcome -- and long-overdue, IMHO -- items in the new Farm Bill would replace virtually all price support programs with crop insurance. That makes a lot more sense, while still providing farmers with needed income protection in the case of catastrophic weather, etc.
posted by lstanley at 12:02 on May 11 [4 favorites +] [!]
So, for every 9 farmers out there, there's a bureaucrat.Cool Papa Bell, a few thousand of us USDA employees are scientists. We help ensure that there is an affordable supply of safe foodstuffs.
We'd be better off if they left their desks and went out pulling weeds.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 13:19 on May 11 [2 favorites +] [!]
America’s system of rail freight is the world’s best...posted by nickrussell at 5:01 PM on May 11, 2012 [1 favorite]
America’s railways are the mirror image of Europe’s. Europe has an impressive and growing network of high-speed passenger links, many of them international, like the Thalys service between Paris and Brussels or the Eurostar connecting London to the French and Belgian capitals. These are successful—although once the (off-balance-sheet) costs of building the tracks are counted, they need subsidies of billions of dollars a year. But, outside Germany and Switzerland, Europe’s freight rail services are a fragmented, lossmaking mess.
Amtrak’s passenger services are sparse compared with Europe’s. But America’s freight railways are one of the unsung transport successes of the past 30 years. They are universally recognised in the industry as the best in the world.
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posted by jeffamaphone at 11:59 AM on May 11, 2012 [3 favorites]