President Barrack Obama?s alliance with Republicans in Congress on the �forthcoming tax package is a good example of bipartisanship that sullies both parties and benefits none.
The package will provide tax cuts and estate tax relief for the richest two percent Americans, while on the other hand allowing two programs to lapse that have so far generated thousands of direct and indirect jobs in the clean energy sector.
We're talking solar, wind and geothermal energy technologies, which have miraculously weathered the recessionary storm thanks to tax packages under the Stimulus (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA, 2009). 
One of these is the Treasury Grant Program, or TGP, which provides direct cash relief in the same proportion (30 percent) as tax credits, but also as actual payments for small renewable energy startups that haven?t been in business long enough, or done enough work, to develop a tax burden.
The second program is the Advanced Energy Manufacturing Credit, which helps industry retrofit for clean energy manufacture, and both are scheduled to lapse Dec. 31 unless Congress acts to reinstate them. And both, according to the Center for American Progress, have helped build a larger, sturdier, more pervasive clean technology industry.
President Obama, having acknowledged that his party-crossing efforts are a compromise, apparently forgot the most important element of any compromise: you give something away to get something back. This package does nothing for the lowest tier of Americans, and even less for America?s clean energy future ? which was, ironically, part of the intent of the Stimulus (which Obama passed almost as soon as he took office).
It's been shown time and again that the failure to create green jobs here, on American soil, makes it impossible to compete with overseas solar giants, like China, which currently dominates the clean tech industries on a global scale.
As Daniel Weiss notes, in his superb article for the Center for American Progress (a Washington, D.C. think tank dedicated to pioneering efforts in energy, national security and social welfare), adding these extensions to a deeply divisive tax bill would at least improve the economy and help cut pollution.
That is something we can all, Democrat or Republican, get behind. However, as of Thursday afternoon, Dec. 9, the likelihood of the deal reaching cloture appeared blocked by a snarky Democratic House whose mood was best expressed by Peter DeFazio, who called Obama?s compromise an example of Republicans ?winning a game of chicken? (that is, Obama conceded too quickly).
Photo Credit: oporder & James O'Malley via Flickr CC
Source: http://solar.calfinder.com/blog/solar-funding/obama-tax-deal-no-solar/
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen