Governor Romney is right: End the wind production tax credit

By: Bob Weeks (Diary)  |  August 29th at 08:08 PM  | 

U.S. Representative Mike Pompeo, a Republican who represents the Kansas fourth district, contributes the following article on the harm of government involvement in energy markets, wind power specifically. Pompeo has written extensively on energy; see Pompeo on energy tax simplification, Era of energy subsidies is over, and Free market energy solutions don’t jeopardize national security. He has also introduced legislation to end all tax credits | Read More »

Energy subsidies exposed

By: Bob Weeks (Diary)  |  August 20th at 01:55 PM  | 

On the campaign trail, President Barack Obama calls for an end to energy subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. It turns out, however, that this industry receives relatively little subsidy, while the president’s favored forms of energy investment — wind and solar — receive much more. Additionally, coal, oil, and gas industries paid billions in taxes to the federal government, while electricity produced by solar | Read More »

Pompeo: Impending tax increases threaten economic growth and jobs

By: Bob Weeks (Diary)  |  July 29th at 09:30 AM  | 

Following is an article from U.S. Representative Mike Pompeo. This week the House of Representatives will vote to stop the largest tax hike in American history, which, absent legislative action, is set to occur on January 1, 2013. I hope the Senate and President Obama will join us. Last week’s report of the economy growing at an anemic 1.5 percent is further evidence that tax | Read More »

Why Kansas had to cut taxes

By: Bob Weeks (Diary)  |  July 27th at 09:29 PM  | 

By Sam Brownback, Governor of Kansas When Jeff Colyer and I took office in January of 2011, tens of thousands of fewer Kansans were working in private sector jobs than a decade ago. Our state was losing residents to all surrounding states. We had the highest taxes in the region and ranked among the worst in private sector job creation. Something had to be done | Read More »

Brownback, Moran wrong on wind tax credits

By: Bob Weeks (Diary)  |  March 19th at 08:49 PM  | 

In the following commentary, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback and U.S. Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas make the case for extending the production tax credit (PTC) for the production of electrical power by wind. The PTC pays generators of wind power 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour produced. To place that in context, a typical Westar customer in Kansas that uses 1,000 kilowatt-hours in the summer pays $95.22 | Read More »

Pompeo to introduce ‘Energy Freedom and Economic Prosperity Act’

By: Bob Weeks (Diary)  |  November 1st at 09:50 PM  | 

This week U. S. Representative Mike Pompeo of Wichita plans to introduce the “Energy Freedom and Economic Prosperity Act,” a bill that would eliminate all tax credits related to energy. Tax credits, sometimes called tax expenditures, are spending accomplished through the tax code rather than by legislative appropriations. Two prominent tax credits related to energy production are the tax credit for producing and blending ethanol | Read More »

Obama job plan not likely to help

By: Bob Weeks (Diary)  |  September 7th at 01:06 AM  | 

In order to help the economy President Barack Obama promises to soon reveal a plan to create jobs. Today’s preview before a union audience in Detroit didn’t provide many details, but based on the president’s past actions and guesses as to what the plan is likely to contain, it’s unlikely the plan will work. Various news reports and commentary have mentioned these as possible elements | Read More »

Contrary to Buffet, government spending is not good

By: Bob Weeks (Diary)  |  August 22nd at 10:18 PM  | 

Recently wealthy investor Warren Buffet has been in the news for his advocacy of higher taxes. But is government — politics, in other words — the best way to allocate resources? In a statement on the KochFacts website, Charles Koch disagrees with Buffet: As part of the public discourse on government overspending and fiscal irresponsibility, Charles Koch offered the following public response to media queries | Read More »

We need a balanced budget amendment

By: Bob Weeks (Diary)  |  August 7th at 12:34 PM  | 

Despite claims made in a Wichita Eagle op-ed by its former editor Davis Merritt, we desperately need a balanced budget amendment to the United States Constitution. (Balanced-budget amendment is unworkable, August 2, 2001) Merritt calls the promise of a balanced budget amendment a “cruel deception” that “limits imagination and progress.” He gives three reasons as to why we should not adopt such an amendment: First: | Read More »

U.S. receipts and expenditures

By: Bob Weeks (Diary)  |  August 3rd at 09:53 AM  | 

A recent op-ed by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the Wall Street Journal (Why Americans Are So Angry: Republicans want the entire burden of deficit reduction to be carried by the elderly, the sick, children and working families), besides holding faulty reasoning in every paragraph, hold a few factual errors that deserve discussion. Raise tax rates to raise revenue For example, Sanders writes regarding | Read More »