Biden Marks Earth Day by Announcing $7 Billion in Solar Power Grants - Slashdot

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  Just be sure to stop by your local polling place to pick up your mail-in ballots on the way! Show them to our helpful staff for an extra free gift!

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      Nobody's starving while there are Bidens [youtube.com] to eat!
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  Not free, paid for by large corporations. The Inflation Reduction Act raises $300 billion over a decade by requiring large corporations to pay a 15 percent minimum tax on their profits and by enacting a 1 percent excise tax on stock buybacks and redemptions.

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    What? Actually taxing corporations, and using the money to promote the common good by slowing global warming!?

    No wonder the corporate lackey trolls are attacking it

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      You seem to have a problem understand the word "over". It isn't a lump sum at the end of the decade, it is accumulated over the 10-year period -- like like the spend.

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    Please explain how it raises money with a tax rate that's below the existing corporate tax rate and based on behavior specific behavior that corporations aren't necessarily going to engage in? I think you've been hoodwinked.
    
    Meanwhile we're spending money now that will only be hypothetically raised in the future? I don't believe that will help to reduce inflation in the slightest.

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      > Please explain how it raises money with a tax rate that's below the existing corporate tax rate

      15% minimum. You're a fool if you think a large corporation pays anywhere near the corporate tax rate. 15% is much more money than these businesses are paying now.

      Some of them are so good at the game that they effectively "pay" a negative income tax [americanprogress.org]. To pull the first example from that link; AT&T earned $29.6 and the Feds effectively paid them another $1.2B - effectively a -4% income tax. Under the IRA th

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      It's a similar concept to Alternative Minimum Taxes [*], which you probably haven't experienced with your own taxes. Basically, deductions that corporations can normally claim are disallowed and then their taxes are calculated at the lower rate. If the result is more than they would pay with the higher rate and broader set of deductions, then they have to pay it rather rather than the normally-calculated amount. So it doesn't apply to all corporations, or maybe even most, but it extracts additional revenue

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    No they aren't, they are paid for by higher prices and fees. Corporations pay no taxes, We pay it all.

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    Funny how prices in general went up by about that much, huh? 'Inflation.'

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      They didn't. They went up variable amounts, often higher, depending on what they were. And those prices went up YEARS before this legislation was passed, so the link you're implying is imaginary.

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  Know what makes something more affordable? Throwing enormous amounts of money at it. Works with student loans. Works with housing. Works with military hardware. Works with space shuttles. Make it clear that there is an unlimited supply of money in a sector and watch those prices come tumbling down.

• It's not free

  you need to build a solar farm. The teleco subsidies are pretty much handed out w/o strings attached but if you tried to just sign up for this one you'd find yourself in jail in about 6 years when they caught up with you and prosecuted you for fraud.

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  It's about time we gave free money to someone other than oil companies and coal miners. Glad to see a government that is spreading around the joy to everyone. And we didn't even need to cause cancer or poison anyone to get it.

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    It's about time we gave free money to someone other than oil companies and coal miners.

    
    
    Isn't it funny how people conveniently forget the decades we've been giving money to these two? How many billions (trillions?) of dollars have we the taxpayers been forced to hand over to these companies? Shall we include all that free money handed over to corn famers for their ethanol subsidies?

    
    
    At least if people would be consistent in their "outrage" they might be heard more.

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  Saving the Planet may require a bit of socialism. What would Jesus decide?

• Accounting

  Remember when the pentagon found $60 billion in the couch cushions to give to Ukraine last year? Good times...

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    You mean a single digit percentage of its yearly allocated budget?

• Meh, if it gets us off fossil fuels

  then it's good. Would I prefer the government just build it out themselves? Sure, but I'm guessing most of the folks bitching about this subsidy would shit kittens if we did that.

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    The propaganda of the Chicago School of Economics has been terrifically successful in convincing most Americans that large products can be produced for less money (and same quality) by allowing for a profit margin

    Of course it stands in opposition to all of the work created by the WPA, that is still in use to this day, but as an Atreides might say, "The PROFITS Must Flow!"

    It is also widely disproved by the need for the US Blood supply to be managed by non-profit entities so that profit-inclined cost cutting

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      I doubt that the original legendary Atreides [wikipedia.org] would have ever said something so peaceful. They were not nice people.

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• Re: What about interconnects?

  The target is November 2024. You are not paying attention.

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  Not exactly red tape, more like electrical company recalcitrance to preserve their own profit base

  • local utility greed

    > more like [local] electrical company recalcitrance to preserve their own profit base

    We wanted solar panels that could power our house directly if there were a power outage, which have been too common of late. But the local power co. rules are that you can't have such unless you also have a battery system, which greatly adds to the price. We'd be happy with day-time-power-only during a general power-outage such that batteries are not worth the extra cost & maintenance. (Yes, we know we may not be ab

• That's for nuclear

  and it's the estimated time to build the entire plant. For solar you don't have to worry about melt downs so there's a hell of a lot less regulation. You'd be looking a a few weeks to a month to make sure nobody did something stupid, and most of that is waiting on inspectors which the $7b is I believe meant to help address (though that funding might be coming from a different pot)

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  Congress and their powers to tax and spend in general. That doesn't vary by specific technologies like solar vs oil, etc.

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    So Congress has unlimited power. Correct?

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      The idea was that having a public election every handful of years will vote out the serious abusers, but here we are - stuck with no term limits and unlimited scope Bills.

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      Unless SCOTUS officially rules "Unconstitutional", essentially. That's the check and balance we have.

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        So according to you, Congress has unlimited power unless the Supreme Court says they don't?

        What if Congress votes to repeal Article III and there is no Supreme Court?

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  Maybe the same way that they paid for the electrical grid and projects like the TVA and Hoover Dam

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    Both of which would be called "Socialist" and "Big Government Overreach" if they were to be proposed today.

    $DEITY forbid that the United States Government actually does anything useful for the citizens any more.

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  US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 1.

  Congress can spend whatever they want on the general welfare of the United States. Any steps taken to mitigate climate change obviously count.

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    Oh I see, so the geniuses who wrote the Constitution crafted Article 8 like this:

    1. Congress has unlimited power.

    2. Here is a list of Congress' enumerated powers.

    Then they ratified the 10th Amendment which says "Congress has no power except what is specifically granted in the Constitution."

    Do you find it odd nobody brought up the fact Congress was granted unlimited power in Article I when the Bill of Rights was being deliberated?

    Do you find it odd 13 colonies would ratify a document that granted Congress th

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  Commerce Clause. It's been that way for over a century. It's why the TVA could exist. We stopped pretending states were little fiefdoms in the late 1800s. The interconnected nature of them in a modern economy ("modern" here meaning anything after the Industrial Revolution) triggers the Commerce Clause and in turn gives them the authority needed.

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    Been that way for over a century? What was it before?

    > We stopped pretending states were little fiefdoms in the late 1800s.

    Oh? The Ninth Amendment and Article V were both repealed? Do you have a date for that?

    > triggers the Commerce Clause and in turn gives them the authority needed.

    So all they need to do is find some ephemeral justification by invoking the Commerce Clause and every Congress member is fitted for a crown?

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      So all they need to do is find some ephemeral justification by invoking the Commerce Clause and every Congress member is fitted for a crown?
      
      It's not quite as bad as that, but if memory serves, the feds once found a way to use the Commerce Clause to interfere with the operations of a restaurant because it was using pepper, which was brought in from another state.

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        > It's not quite as bad as that

        How bad is it, then? Do you find it alarming that we are even discussing a government with no limits on its power? One would think people who visit Slashdot would be smarter than that since they're all scientists and engineers.

        But here we are.

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    Yeah. I was afraid of that. The only sorts of solar power projects that could conceivably affect interstate commerce are the really big ones. Not the little "put panels on my roof or the roof of a small business" subsidy stuff. Which are typically the bailiwick of state and local utilities and regulators. Because that's all the farther the electricity is likely to go.

    Another "gibs" for the big boys.