---

        Volume CCXXXIII, Number 40        December, 2003              Page 4

---

President Bush greets a group of working stiffs who will get absolutely nothing out of his energy bill

By Bobby Baker
Political Correspondent

After money [Surely, many? – Ed.] months of sedulous effort, the House and Senate Energy Committees have reached tentative agreement on a bicameral, if not bipartisan, fleecing of the Treasury and the citizenry for the benefit of energy and construction interests who bankroll the party and the Bush Administration.

By dropping over a thousand pages of unreadable legislation over a weekend, the Republican leadership obviously hopes to keep the public in the dark long enough to ram through the bloated, useless goodie bag over the whiny objections of a few spineless Democrats.

Energy conservation? Energy efficiency? It's enough to make Dick Cheney laugh, or at least chuckle knowingly. Put the energy bill under the bright lights and you'll see nothing but a series of giveaways to large energy producers and users, purveyors of possibly lethal chemicals and Iowa muckspreaders.

After careful consideration, Dick Cheney has decided that there is no need to promote energy conservation or mass transit as an alternative to commuting by automobile.

Let's turn the high beams on just one portion of the egregious bill: the special tax provisions. All 66 of them. How about Section 1310, providing a credit for new nuclear power plants? What new nuclear power plants? Met anyone lately who was willing to let a nuclear power plant go up with 200 miles of their front door (except Homer Simpson)? But if anyone wants to build one, they can knock up to $125 million off their tax bill each year.

Or just back up to Section 1309, allowing electric utilities to write off electric time-of-day meters in three years. By the way, how old is the electric meter at your house? When was the last time the utility replaced it? Tony Conigliaro's rookie year?

Down on the farm, farmers who turn corn oil into biodiesel can slide $1.00 a gallon from their taxes on the stuff (section 1314).

Or how about the subtitle mysteriously titled "Reliability?" We all agree that reliability is good thing: if Dick Cheney can't be relied on to falsely claim that Saddam Hussein was linked to September 11, then what can we not believe in?

Cornholing the taxpayer: the ethanol gang rides again By Samuel Insull Business Editor It will take years to ferret out all the special-interest shtupping in the Republican "energy" bill, but the bipartisan ethanol bribe to corn farmers and the Senators who "represent" them is impossible to miss. Who could object to subsidizing ethanol? Say hi to John McCain (R – John McCain) and he'll tell you: "It takes more energy to make ethanol from grain than the combustion ethanol produces. Seventy percent more energy is required to produce ethanol than the energy actually in ethanol. Every time you make 1 gallon of ethanol there is a net energy loss." Well, no one's perfect. Notwithstanding the dubious conservation benefits, section 1501 of the Republican conference biomass [Surely, bill? – Ed.] requires refineries to pump out 5,000,000,000 gallons of ethanol, the bill for which will be paid by any chucklehead who buys gasoline. That's twice as much as required under current law, itself a travesty of a free market, unless one considers the market in votes from prairie state Democrats. The tax title contains a Section 1313, a credit to small producers of ethanol. We don't know how small is small, but the section doubles the maximum amount of the juice that a "small" producer can churn out and still slurp up the dollar-for-dollar reduction in his tax bill. It's always moving to hear the nation's farmers, so free to criticize babies on food stamps and other free-loaders, speak out in favor of their God-given right to help themselves to the contents of our wallets. An especially effete Easterner might conclude that ethanol is welfare for hicks. Sen. Tom Daschle (D. – Corn) told the ethanol lobby with perhaps admirable candor that ethanol "will provide South Dakota corn and soybean producers with an additional market for their products. In fact, studies have shown that South Dakota’s seven operational ethanol plants provide an estimated $1.2 billion to our state’s economy each year. If the plants currently under construction are factored in, that figure jumps to nearly $2.7 billion annually." And who's paying that $2,700,000,000? Everyone pays their fair share: the good clodhoppers of South Dakota, and the 99.5% of Americans who happen to live elsewhere.

This appears to be a grab-bag of depreciation speed-ups for energy producers and those who help them, kind of like, oh, I don't know, Halliburton. Seven years to write off natural gas producing pipe (section 1321)? How long does natural gas pipe last? When was the last time the pipe under your street was replaced? We'll bet it was about the time George Bush was defending the skies of Alabama from the Viet Cong.

And if you are among the unfortunate few who still have to comply with EPA rules, you'll be pleased to know that the requisite capital improvements can be expensed, unlike all other improvements, at least if you're running high-sulfur crude through your refinery (section 1324). And you get a nickel-a-gallon on the low-sulfur diesel that comes out the other side (section 1325). Even better, any utility that cleans up its filthy coal plant gets a tax credit of 17.5% of the cost (section 1351). Do you get a tax credit for obeying the law? We don't.

Not that these conspirators [Surely, conferees? – Ed.] limited their attention to tax breaks for big oil and those that feed upon them. What is going on in Section 1361: pass-through treatment of distributions from publicly traded partnerships to regulated investment companies? Is it a good or a bad change? Who knows? All we know, it ain't got nothin' to do with energy.

We could go on, but of course the details of tax law changes don't really matter. What really matters is the 10-year cost. What is the 10-year cost of these tax breaks? No one knows, because the scoring hasn't been rigged [Surely, written? – Ed.] yet. The Democratic staff says $23,000,000,000. More or less.

Don't worry, it'll come out not five minutes after George Bush affixes his Presidential X to this mess. Right after he tells his glazed-over subjects that the bill will prevent electrical blackouts, keep America safe from terrorists and cook an eight-pound roast beef to perfection in just 90 minutes.