Clean energy tax credits mostly go to the affluent

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gwb-trading

Clean energy tax credits mostly go to the affluent
http://www.vox.com/2015/11/24/9792474/energy-tax-credits-inequitable

One of the main ways US policy encourages the uptake of new clean energy and energy efficiency technologies is through the use of tax credits. There are tax credits for qualified windows, boilers, air conditioners, insulation, and more.

The US is something of an outlier in this. In the KPMG Green Tax Index — a ranking of countries according how much they use tax penalties and incentives to achieve sustainability goals — the US ranks number one. Notably, the US is 14th in the use of tax penalties. It is America's profligate use of tax incentives, mainly tax credits, that vaults it to number one overall.

Some new research brings troubling news about those tax credits. To put it bluntly: They are highly inequitable. Most of the money goes to relatively affluent consumers.

(More at above url)
 
The policy is to save energy, not redistribute income. Could the policy be better? It would save more energy to replace a hundred year old window in an inner city row house occupied by poor people than in a ten year old mini-mansion in the burbs, but you can only do the former with direct grants, not tax subsidies.
 
gwb-trading said:
Some new research brings troubling news about those tax credits. To put it bluntly: They are highly inequitable. Most of the money goes to relatively affluent consumers.
More...

Of course they are. To have a tax credit benefit you, you have to be paying taxes. You must be making/have money. The lower incomes can't benefit much with a tax credit as they're not paying taxes in the first place. DUH!

In the false utopian ideology of the Lefties, everything of value is "unfairly not equal" until everybody is the same... broke and miserable... except for the ruling elites, that is. (But of course, "inequality" is a great tag line for Lefties to garner votes from ignorant hoi polloi and illegal alien voters.)
 
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same with mortgage exemption and charitable donation exemption. Most of those deductions go to the aflluent.
 
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