nissan looking at 150 mile epa range, implies battery costs continuing down

Since you seem to have taken the bait from People like Mike Kelly and Pat Micheals who are funded by the Koch brothers in tortured language, I'll give you a counterpoint from cato, which these two pretend to subscibe, but unlike the Micheals shill editorial piece, deals with some of the libertarian economics of oil politics, instead of the oil politics that gives the biggest subsidies to those that give the biggest campaign contributers.
Eliminating Oil Subsidies: Two Cheers for President Obama | Cato Institute

So what do we have here? The government has given oil companies some extra deductions so they can pay lower taxes. One of the biggest of these also pertains to other manufacturers, again deductions that are special. The botom line is at $90+/bbl oil these special tax breaks for oil don't really produce 1 extra drop of american oil or create 1 more american job, unless you count that pool cleaner that an oil executive could hire with the extra money given to him/her. Don't want to call it a subsidy? Fine. Call it a corrupt system that funnels money to certain people. Who gains? The management at said companies, and their stock holders, which seems a strange place to funnel money.

Now instead of getting rid of these special tax breaks, some want to claim that removing them would be an unfair raising of taxes. The pac that is most loud about removing these special breaks is Americans for Prosperity, you guessed it, it is heavily controlled by the koch brothers, that greatly profit from special tax breaks. Don't get me wrong, Mitt Romney also put in a carried intrest line on tax forms that mainly helped billionaires like himself pay lower taxes in investment companies. Its all a really corrupt system, and these breaks benefit very few people. Yep, I'm with you if you say its unfair to hit the oil companies but not the financial companies or venture capitalists. But don't try to tell me these "purple roses" help the free market. That is what the guy writing the bill that is trying to remove the battery subsidy.

On the other hand, the plug-in tax credit is a much smaller program and limited in scope. Those buying plug-ins get to pay less tax on their tax form, but this really is a special tax break to manufacturers of plug-in cars. It isn't really heavily weighted to a small number of the very rich, it goes to the car manufacturers. GM, Nissan, Toyota, Tesla, and ford are the biggest beneficiares of the program. The american people if it works get a way to substitute away from oil, and reduce the damages that Opec and the oil sands may cause the economic security and the environment. Compared to the other programs it is quite small. I would have designed it differently, probably capping it at 300,000 cars, 80,000 per manufacturer, $400/kwh starting with 4kwh capped at 20kwh ($8000), and given the tax credit to manufacturers once the car was sold, not to the cosumer. That would have cost much less but gotten most of the benefit. Now that the manufacturers have spent most of the R&D money it seems counter productive to kill the incentive they were promised, but you could cut it back from 1 million cars and 200,000 per manufacturer.

If you wanted to do that. Kill all the subsidies, but in a way that doesn't punnish those that actually are using the subsidies to help our country in the short term. I'm with you. If on the otherhand you want to pretend that Mike Kelly is right, oil companies need the subsidies to be profitable and help america, but car companies should be punnished for trying to build cars that consumed less oil, then I have to disagree.

 

Absolutely, but this is simply a matter of size and rate. Say you are in the 25% marginal bracket (for easy math, most plug-in are probably 28%), you need the deduction to be 4 times higher to equal a credit. But that richer guy at a 39.6% marginal rate if it was a deduction would get to keep more money from the goverment to subsidise. Definitely don't want these things to be deductions and benefit the higher income people more. 20/20 hindsight it would have been more effective if it had gone to the manufacturers the quarter after sales (delay for returns, and to stop dealer to dealer book cooking). I really don't think the government should subsidize more children with an extra tax deduction, but you know these subsidies have been there a long time.

Hey I'm an equal oportunity corruption basher. I named the two guys that are the most corrupt here, wanting to subsidize oil, but want to go on 24 cable news to bash plug-ins, hmm. I don't think most republicans really want to subsidize oil, but it is a sickness in the congress. Throw Pelosi and Reid in there too, as they seemed to craft a truely horrible ACA, that didn't do much to make things affordable, but funneled benefits to the pacs contributing to their campaigns. To do good health reform you would have to take on the trial laywers, and hospitals, and insurance companies, but the bill seemed to take on small business and younger non-pre existing condition individuals.

+1

Excellent, just remember that plug-in credits will run out soon, and did most of their work (created incentives to manufacturers to drive down battery costs). 10 years from now we won't be paying and its likely the country got a benefit. Most corporate welfare programs, never go away. If you want to fix the system, you need to go after the big money, not these tiny things on the fringes.