The new administration is making a big push to support green energy and lower carbon emissions. But are they doing it the right way?
Debating the issue are Christy Goldfuss, senior vice president for energy and environment at the Center for American Progress, and Alex Brill, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
President Biden’s tax-and-spend infrastructure plan will reduce the competitiveness of U.S. corporations, burden working-class Americans, and discourage the type of private investment in America that fuels economic growth.
President Biden has announced two ambitious, entwined economic policy agendas: raising the corporate tax rate and other taxes on large businesses to pay for a significant increase in spending on a broadly defined set of infrastructure objectives. While the case for at least some increase in infrastructure spending is sound, the case for unwinding the corporate tax reforms enacted in 2017 is not.
In his Forbes article, Personal Finance Contributor Ted Knutson discussed Tuesday’s Senate Committee on Finance hearing that focused on climate change tax reform. During the hearing, leaders on both sides of the aisle asserted that new clean energy laws should be technology neutral, so that no one industry “wins.”
On Tuesday, American Enterprise Institute resident fellow and MGA founder and CEO Alex Brill testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance. The topic of the hearing was the tax treatment of energy. Brill spoke of the criticality of a “broad, efficient, technology-neutral tax policy geared toward encouraging less energy consumption and more renewable energy production” to working toward a reduction in U.S. reliance on fossil fuels—and ensuring a reduction in CO2 emissions.
Much of the public debate over climate change policy focuses on the cost of reducing emissions, deploying green energy, or building adaptations. A point often lost is that whatever we do, we pay for climate change, even if we do nothing. For officials to arrive at effective solutions, they must know both the cost of the policy options and the cost of inaction.
“I advocate and support a carbon tax, but not just blindly, not just any carbon tax. It is critically important that the carbon tax be revenue neutral. That at the time at which this policy is put in place its done in a matter in which the revenues expected to be generated from the carbon tax are used to reduce other taxes that are more distortionary. This is what we would call the principles of basic tax reform.”