Word: fueled
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...money involved, numbers of people affected (just about everybody) and vehemence of opposition. Though Administration officials were insisting late last week that the type and amount were still unresolved, the choices had apparently narrowed to either an ad valorem levy, essentially a sales tax on the wholesale price of fuel, or a BTU (British thermal unit) tax based on the heat content of fuel. Either would apply to every kind of energy -- coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear and hydroelectric power -- and for every use -- running cars and trains, heating homes, firing factory boilers, generating electricity. A 5% ad valorem...
Opposition will be bitter. Truckers and other big fuel users are claiming that energy taxes depress the economy and wipe out jobs. They have been joined by the very liberal Citizens for Tax Justice, which complains that energy taxes would hurt the poor and middle class. The Administration would probably try to give back some of the money to the poor in the form of a higher earned- income tax credit or some similar device. The Administration's essential argument is that it needs the money, and this is one way to raise it that also promotes energy conservation...
...looks like Clinton's No. 2 choice. A 5% sales tax on energy would raise $18 billion a year and cost the average family about $100 a year in higher gasoline and electric bills. But oil and gas producers object that the levy would favor coal companies because their fuel is cheaper and they would therefore pay fewer taxes. Environmentalists complain that a sales tax would fail to sock it to coal and thus do little to help stop global warming. "It misses a tremendous opportunity to do good for the environment at the same time you're meeting deficit...
...would achieve more pollution control because of its greater impact on coal, which has a high BTU content in relation to its price. Even so, a BTU levy would be far less punitive than a carbon tax. "The BTU tax doesn't cause ^ any big shift in fuel choices," says an official of the United Mine Workers union. "We prefer it to the carbon tax, which could destroy our industry." But the levy would still run afoul of powerful interests that reject the very idea of new energy taxes. Says Charles DiBona, president of the American Petroleum Institute: "The deficit...
Such resistance should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the passions unleashed in Washington by the thought of economic sacrifice. "If any of these fuel-tax options were politically easy, we would have done them already," says Rafe Pomerance, a senior associate at the World Resources Institute. Some of the impact could be softened by measures like a cut in the stiff Social Security payroll tax. Even so, if Clinton hopes to pare down the deficit, he will have to persuade voters to share the pain and then stick to his guns against all the opponents that...