Oil independence can be achieved. Your "experts" take no account of the newfound willingness to do it. With the right incentives, the private sector's investment in going green as well as the drive for renewable energy technologies this time coupled with what might be the public and government support, ask, as John McCain does, why not see what the ambitious effort brings?
Republicans Debate in Des Moines
Email To A Friend
Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.
SPONSORED BY
Taxing the Truth
Rep. Duncan Hunter of California overstated the compliance burden of the federal tax system:
Hunter: The tax that we're all paying that doesn't help anything ... is the $250 billion-plus that we pay each year not to the federal government, to the Treasury, but to prepare our taxes, defend our taxes, and for the massive cost of the IRS. That's all overhead – 250 billion-plus dollars.
We're not sure where Hunter gets that figure. The President's Advisory Panel on Tax Reform puts total compliance costs at around $140 billion per year, a figure that includes the value of individual taxpayer's time spent filling out forms, which strictly speaking is not money "that we pay." Add to that the "more than $10 billion" that the government spends to administer the tax system, and the figure comes to $150 billion, not $250 billion. The advisory panel report says other estimates of compliance costs fall between $100 billion and $200 billion.
Sources
"U.S. Can Eliminate Oil Use in a Few Decades." Rocky Mountain Institute. Press release, 20 Sept. 2004.
United States, Energy Information Administration. "Basic Petroleum Statistics." Updated July 2007.
Sadler, Aaron. "Arkansas Text Scores Catch Up With Nation." Arkansas News Bureau. 20 Oct. 2007.
Discuss