edatoakrun
Well-known member
Another paper showing just how badly America has implemented "clean" energy incentives.
Someone explain to me why American taxpayers should be paying wealthy buyers of resource-inefficient BEVs (like a Tesla S or X) in those areas that produces electricity largely through coal generation (much of the region ~between the Rocky mountains and Appalachia) $7,500?
Paper available here:
http://ei.haas.berkeley.edu/research/papers/WP262.pdf
Someone explain to me why American taxpayers should be paying wealthy buyers of resource-inefficient BEVs (like a Tesla S or X) in those areas that produces electricity largely through coal generation (much of the region ~between the Rocky mountains and Appalachia) $7,500?
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2015/08/20150830-haas.html60% of $18B in US clean energy tax credits 2006-2012 went to top 20% by income; 90% in the plug-in program
30 August 2015
A working paper by a team at the Energy Institute at Haas, University of California, Berkeley, has found that 60% of the $18 billion in US federal income clean energy tax credits issued between 2006 and 2012—e.g., for weatherizing homes, installing solar panels, and buying hybrid and electric vehicles—went to the top income quintile in the US (above $200,000 per year). The bottom three quintiles (up to $75,000 per year) received about 10%.
The most extreme case, Severin Borenstein and Lucas Davis found through their examination of tax return data from the IRS, is the program aimed at electric vehicles—the top income quintile received about 90% of all these credits. As a result of the work, Borenstein and Davis conclude that tax credits are likely to be much less attractive on distributional grounds than market mechanisms to reduce GHGs...
...It can often be easier politically to introduce subsidies than taxes, but the two are not equivalent. Probably the single biggest limitation of technology-based subsidies is that they don’t achieve the efficient level of usage, but economists have pointed out other limitations as well. For example, Holland et al. (2015) shows that the external benefits from electric cars vary widely (and can even be negative) depending on how electricity is generated...
Paper available here:
http://ei.haas.berkeley.edu/research/papers/WP262.pdf