Author Archives: HarralGeidl697

Republicans Should Choose a Different Hostage

by HarralGeidl697 Posted on January 7, 2013

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Suzy Khimm writes about a way for Republicans to shut down the government that doesn’t involve refusing to raise the debt ceiling:

Congress will have to pass another short-term budget before late March because it’s been unable to pass a full budget through the regular process. In fact, the continuing resolution was the very first budget fight that Republicans used to extract spending cuts in the last Congress, threatening to shut down the government until a last-minute deal was struck in April 2011….Congressional Republicans now say that the year-to-year, discretionary budget must be part of the next fiscal deal’s spending cuts, not just entitlements. “The pinch points will be the sequester, debt ceiling and the CR—all three coming up in the next three months,” Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) told me. “The CR—it’s one of the areas where there is indeed an absolute deadline. Washington and Congress respond to crises and deadlines, and we need to address the spending side of the equation.”

If Republicans really want to shut things down, this is the way to do it. Don’t get me wrong: I still think they’d be crazy to do it. Cutting spending while the economy is still weak is a recipe for disaster. But that’s a difference of opinion, and a perfectly legitimate one to solve via the political process. Refusing to pay bills you’ve already run up isn’t. Neither is risking the country’s credit rating and its historic position as the world’s most reliable lender.

There’s another reason to do this via the normal budget process too: it’s entirely feasible. When John Boehner says that he wants a 1:1 ratio of spending cuts to debt ceiling increases, he’s using a ten-year baseline. In other words, a $1 trillion increase in the debt ceiling requires a $100 billion cut in annual spending. This is an amount that Obama and congressional Democrats have already agreed to in the past, and finding cuts of that magnitude can probably be done via the ordinary give and take of the legislative process.

Maybe not, of course. Maybe Republicans will end up shutting down the government. That would be terrible public policy, but it wouldn’t be a complete breakdown of America’s commitment to pay its bills. It’s the right road for Republicans to take if they insist on holding hostages yet again.

View article: 

Republicans Should Choose a Different Hostage

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , | Comments Off on Republicans Should Choose a Different Hostage

A Hidden Climate Win in the Fiscal Deal

by HarralGeidl697 Posted on January 4, 2013

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In the midst of this week’s fiscal cliff hullabaloo, with tax hikes for many Americans, tax breaks for Big Oil, and a superstorm of righteous outrage over withheld storm aid, you’d be forgiven for not noticing the climate win that slipped in at the eleventh hour: a long-awaited extension of the wind energy Production Tax Credit, a federal incentive that has for many years been the bread and butter of the wind industry, providing $1 billion each year to keep wind competitive against heavily-subsidized fossil fuels.

Despite being a record-setting year for wind installations, 2012 was a nail-biter for many in the industry, who feared Congress would axe the credit and send the industry from boom to bust, as has happened several times in the past when the credit has not been extended. The industry’s trade group was a clearinghouse for grim prognostications: Some 35,000 jobs lost and up to a ninety-percent drop in wind projects, should the credit not be passed. Even with the extension, the industry’s financial backers were so spooked by last year’s uncertainty that investments are almost sure to fall in 2013.

“We’ve effectively killed 2013 by waiting this long to extend the PTC,” Jacob Susman, CEO of wind installer OwnEnergy, told me a few months ago.

And while the extension was an excuse for wind folks from Colorado to Iowa to Boston to pop an extra bottle of champagne, the industry ain’t out of the woods yet: The recent extension is only for one year, which means the battle to wring money from Congress will need to be fought all over again in just a few months. Indeed, the complaint one hears most often from industry leaders is that the constant political kowtowing necessary to secure this essential tax credit makes it nearly impossible for the industry to secure long-term growth. That’s very different from fossil fuels, whose benefits, as my colleague Andy Kroll points out, are “baked into the tax code.”

But this extension comes with at least one big improvement: In the past, to secure the credit, wind projects had to be delivering power to the grid before the credit’s expiration date at year’s end. That led to a huge push to get projects up and running in the final months of 2012, but also threw up a barrier to any projects that got started too late. This version sets a lower bar: The credit is now available to any projects that break ground in 2013, giving everyone from turbine manufactorers to installers to investors much more breathing room on a realistic timescale, which David Roberts at Grist says is equivalent to extending the old version for two or three years.

The challenge for Big Wind this year will be to work with Congress to find ways to keep the industry competitive in the long term, while unleashing it from year-to-year political turmoil.

“The extension is a very important piece of legislation,” industry researcher Matt Kaplan told the Financial Times. “The big question, though, is what comes next.”

From: 

A Hidden Climate Win in the Fiscal Deal

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on A Hidden Climate Win in the Fiscal Deal