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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (81137)	8/18/2010 11:40:21 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 149317

RAND PAUL'S TAX CUTS CAN CURE A DRUG EPIDEMIC.... That's the best argument in favor of higher taxes I've ever read. API chief economist admits taxes on oil industry can create millions of jobs August 18, 2010 This is a Wonk Room cross-post. The American Petroleum Institute (API) — the lobbying giant of the oil and gas industry that also writes its own rules — is continuing its work to keep oil industry profits high as the American worker suffers. API demonizes any effort to cut the industry’s billion-dollar subsidies as “energy taxes” that “destroy jobs.” In fact, API chief economist John Felmy has claimed a report commissioned by the Center for American Progress finds that “$1 billion increase in oil and natural gas industry taxes destroys 5,000 jobs,” quoted in an API blog post: Citing a study conducted by the Center for American Progress (CAP), API Chief Economist Dr. John Felmy said every $1 billion increase in oil and natural gas industry taxes destroys 5,000 jobs. The administration’s 2011 proposed budget includes tax hikes of $80 billion on the industry, which translates into a loss of 400,000 jobs throughout the U.S. economy. Noting this unusual claim, the Wonk Room reached Dr. Felmy for a telephone interview. Contrary to API’s portrayal, “Green Recovery,” the 2008 report prepared by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, did not actually model taxes, but compared levels of investment into the oil and gas industry versus clean industry (renewables and efficiency). The analysis found that a ten-year $100 billion shift in capital from polluting energy to clean energy would create two million new jobs with a loss of only 500,000 jobs in the oil and gas sector. Using Felmy’s logic, the Center for American Progress report found that a $1 billion increase in oil and natural gas taxes creates 15,000 jobs. The administration’s 2011 proposed budget includes tax hikes of $80 billion on the industry, which translates into an increase of 1,200,000 jobs throughout the U.S. economy. In his interview with the Wonk Room, Felmy recognized that the report concluded that you would get four times as many clean energy jobs as oil jobs from the same investment, because “green technology is more labor-intensive and less capital-intensive.” He admitted that if you invest money in clean energy instead of oil and gas: “I have no doubts you can get a lot more jobs.” In other words, tax hikes improve the economy. Felmy dismissed this potential engine of massive economic recovery by arguing that the green jobs that would be created are “low-paying, low-wage jobs,” citing the report’s finding the green jobs would have a 20% lower average wage. However, Felmy evidently failed to read the report’s very next sentence: “But this number is deceptive because a green investment program will create roughly triple the number of good jobs — paying at least $16 dollars an hour — as the same level of spending within the oil industry.” Clean energy investment can revitalize every sector of the economy, from entry-level positions to advanced manufacturing. When the Wonk Room attempted to raise the question of global warming pollution, he said emphatically and repeatedly that it is API policy to not discuss the science of global warming: “We do not talk about the science.” “It’s almost impossible,” he said, to reduce global warming emissions. “Focus on coal and support us,” he argued. When the Wonk Room noted that the Department of Energy found that the Waxman-Markey legislation would have had a marginal effect on petroleum prices in the short term because investors would focus on high-polluting coal first, he responded: “That’s just silly.” Unfortunately, the oil and gas industry’s deliberate, decades-long campaign to distort climate science and make society pay for its pollution-based profits is not “silly” at all. Even as its public documents elliptically recognize that “the potential climate impacts of energy use” are “an important environmental challenge,” the American Petroleum Institute has funded global warming denial for decades, with the goal of “victory” by making “uncertainties in climate science” into “conventional wisdom.” Ironically, American oil companies would likely benefit dramatically from President Obama’s clean energy agenda. They have the capital, the manufacturing capacity, and the engineering wherewithal to dominate the clean energy economy, especially in areas like deep geothermal power, offshore wind and tidal power, and carbon sequestration. They even have the bridge fuel of comparatively low-carbon natural gas to bridge the transition from traditional coal-fired electricity to fully renewable energy. But mastering the green economy of the future would require new business models for a stagnant industry frightened of change. Instead the American Petroleum Institute continues to demonize the path to green economic recovery as job-killing taxes, as the United States falls into disrepair and the world burns. –Brad Johnson climateprogress.org

To: tejek who wrote (81137)	8/18/2010 11:46:19 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 149317

Do you expect me to be your go to source to defend anything Ron Paul says? If so I expect you'll be disappointed. Tax cuts aren't very well connected to drug abuse. Sure lower taxes could cause more economic growth over time, and there is a correlation (and causation) between economic growth and reducing poverty, and there is a correlation between poverty and drug abuse, but that's just too weak to support any argument that the answer to drug abuse is tax cuts. I agree that to the extent he is promoting tax cuts as the answer to drug abuse than the response doesn't make a lot of sense. One answer might be treatment for the abuse (which may often not work so well, but it works better than doing nothing). Another possible answer might be legalizing the drug (which probably would not reduce abuse, in fact it may slightly increase it, but it will make the cases of abuse less problematic, and will reduce or eliminate the expense of enforcement (freeing up resources for treatment), while eliminating most of the violence associated with the trade (which is one of the larger sources of violence in the US).