This issue is not that simple. If a corporation pollutes an area, and then the corporation disappears, who should pay for the clean up? Should we target corporations in a certain industry, even though they are not responsible, or should we spread the burden over the entire taxpayer base?
Should we target corporations in a certain industry, even though they are not responsible, or should we spread the burden over the entire taxpayer base? Doesn't really matter, honestly, as long as it gets done. The expense is relatively small -- seems to be about $400 million per year, from that second article. For reference, the federal government spends about 500 times that in annual interest payments due to our current debt total. Also, to say the corporations being taxed aren't responsible is only partially true. The tax is on the type of companies that produce pollution. While they may not have contributed to these particular toxic zones, they do harm the environment in other ways. If you think of it more as a general environmental tax, it makes sense that the people polluting are paying for the fund that the US uses to clean up pollution.
It is heart warming to hear that poor people are being respected, instead of watching guilty liberals pat them on the head while micromanaging their lives. I'm not sure liberals have all that much to feel guilty about. After all, conservatives are the ones who fought against evil things like civil rights, allowing women to vote, and ending slavery. I would think conservatives would feel much more guilty for their history of fighting to screw people over and deny them rights. Now, if you meant having compassion and feeling bad for people who got screwed through no fault of their own, then yeah, liberals probably tend to feel that way.
There are actually grandfather laws in which the current leasee has to pay the bill for infractions by previous companies (I worked on a cleanup of Herriman in UT, where KUC bought an old Silver mine, and Pb > 5000 ppb was all over the town and the EPA said 'hey, nice land, you'll clean it up or we'll clean it up for you and it'll cost 10x the amount'). Actually, I think the other day while Bush was admiring his suit and repeatedly pronouncing 'triscuit' someone tricked him into repealing that law. I'll have to check on its current status. I don't necessarily care. My wife and I are 'dinks' and we certainly pay out the friggin whazoo for other people's children to go to school. Try to convince the republicans to protect little ol' me on that note. It's not going to happen. Life is unfair. And core administrative portions of our government, ie killing bad people when they attack us, or building roads, or cleaning up after abandoned mines, or making sure planes don't hit one another in the air, costs money. If we could do away w/ the asinine portions of govt spending, such as trying to protect ourselves from nonexistent 'rogue nations' from shooting nonexistent nuclear weapons at us, then I think everything will be aok. Then again, if Bush can work the word 'legacy' into his Star Wars plan, weeellll, I'll support it. Not.
I forget, what is the road to hell paved with? Handbags. http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/1999/03/02feature.html I don't see the relevence.
Applying the logic used in the public housing example above, I guess the corporation's parents, relatives, and friends/acquaintances should all pay. Find those bastards and evict them all! Seriously, corporate polluters do share some similarities with drug users. Only instead of ruining their own bodies and generally making things more dangerous around them, like druggies, they are ruining the environment that we all have to share -- with little or no accountability, thanks to the profiteers in GW's rabidly pro-business administration.
Great post. This is the second time you have said NOTHING, and offered up a personal attack with a little smilie. Pitiful. btw, no hard feelings. I promise not to point out your erroneous kneejerk reactions if you promise to educate yourself about these issues before you incorrectly attack good people. You can email me anytime if you need direction in your search for correct information. Have a great day.
Apparently, nobody really cares where the money comes from, as long as the mess gets cleaned up. I don't necessarily care. My wife and I are 'dinks' and we certainly pay out the friggin whazoo for other people's children to go to school. Try to convince the republicans to protect little ol' me on that note. It's not going to happen. Lets extend this analogy properly. Let's say you live in West University Place, an affluent area of Houston. Politicians decide that they need money to renovate schools in the fifth ward, and that only West U. denizens will be taxed. Most people in town don't care, because hell- those folks in West U. have more money than they need anyway. How do you feel about this scenario? Should a law abiding company be targeted to foot the bill for a mess they did not create just because they operate in a similar industry as a polluter? How is this an ethical plan to penalize the shareholders of a company that has never polluted? How is this scenario any different than applying a targeted tax on West U. residents for Fifth Ward school renovations?
Everyone is so quick to criticize the government and provide if/and/or/buts, but I yet to see anyone provide a sure way to solve problems. If the government is doing such a bad job, then why don't YOU run for office and do it right.
You can get kicked out of an apartment for a lot less than having a kid smoking crack. Are these people not free to find another place to live? What is wrong with not wanting parents/grandparents who cannot control the people who live under their roof to live in your apartment complex?
I'm guessing once you get evicted out of a Federal Housing Project, there's not many more places you can go.
Last time I checked....it was the Southern Democrats, Texans who fought ending slavery. I'm a conservative and am for civil rights as long as they don't infringe on others' civil rights. Today's liberals the last time I checked were against the civil right to bear arms (damn I really wanted a H-bomb too).....liberals are just for the civil rights that they want like smoking pot which they say is harmless (sorry for the overgeneralization). Its those bloody Texans fault slavery persisted for so long. Blame them. Back to the issue. Taxing environmentally friendly companies makes it tougher for them to compete and you'll run them out of business. My solution to the problem...companies that create, use chemicals that can be toxic in large amounts be forced to get financial assurance. The cost of financial assurrance would be for a third party to clean up the site. It would be like insurance. The insurance companies would drop or increrase rates on shaddy companies making it beneficial economically to be enviromentally friendly.
Hey, why don't you ease up on the righteous indignation act, sport? It gets real old, real fast. There are a lot of strong-mind people, with a lot of differing opinions on this board. We all have our little dust-ups and then we make nice. That's how it works. Not everyone is going to agree with you, but that's no reason to begin sneeringly calling them "libs" or sanctimoniously decrying their lack of sensitivity when they make jokes with one another. There are a lot of very educated people of all stripes who post here, and we don't all neatly fit into your sweeping generalizations of political categories. So you only make yourself look foolish when you assume that those who disagree with you are somehow less intelligent. Did my joke go to far? Probably. Was that any reason for you to come unglued? I doubt it. Hey, but no hard feelings -- I've come to expect that type of behavior from hard-line "cons" like you.
Who is becoming unglued? I ended my posts with a nice smilie, despite the fact you basically told me to go to hell. I see you continue to make this a personal attack, despite the fact I have tried to keep this thread on topic. You emotional thinkers should take a deep breath every time to want to attack somebody personally and collect your thoughts. I bet you can stay on topic too if you try hard enough. I am rooting for you!
Back to the original thread topic, please remember that ALL media has an agenda - it's a good idea to search out a few differing sources before jumping to any conclusions. Here's a little more info on the Superfund budget brouhaha brought about by the NYTimes: Toxic Smear Job The Times "Slashes" Bush with its bogus Superfund budget-cuts story. By Jack Shafer http://slate.msn.com/?id=2067699 The terrifying headline, "Bush Slashing Aid for E.P.A. Cleanup at 33 Toxic Sites," which fronted the New York Times on Monday, July 1, was enough to make you zip your hazmat suit. Quoting a report by the inspector general of the Environmental Protection Agency, Times scribe Katharine Q. Seelye found that some of the nation's "most seriously polluted" Superfund cleanup sites in 18 states would go wanting for dollars this year because of Bush administration stinginess. Seelye writes: Among the sites that for now would receive less money—in some cases, none—are a manufacturing plant in Edison, N.J., where the herbicide Agent Orange was produced, several chemical plants in Florida and two old mines in Montana. As the American media's news-agenda dictator, the Times inspired dozens of pieces by newspapers, wire services, and broadcasters across the country. Many papers, such as the Orlando Sentinel and the Bergen County Record, localized their stories by mentioning Superfund site cutbacks in their backyards. Although the Times story spewed Superfund hysteria, it never went as far as the Record, which reported (erroneously) that the administration planned "to reduce spending for the nation's Superfund program." That's not the case. The "slashing" cuts of the Times headline, delineated in the seventh paragraph of the story, were merely the difference between what EPA regional offices had requested from the EPA's Washington headquarters ($450 million) and what headquarters had deigned to allocate ($228 million) to clean up 33 specific sites in FY 2002. It's as if you asked Santa for a BMW and accused him of dealing you a cutback when he only gave you a Honda. In fact, spending on Superfund has remained steady in recent years, with $1.4 billion budgeted in FY 2000, $1.27 billion in 2001, $1.27 billion in FY 2002 (not counting homeland security add-ins), and a projected $1.3 billion for FY 2003, if the Bushies get their way. (Among other things, the Superfund budget covers legal enforcement, engineering, office overhead, and direct cleanup of sites.) Seelye notes the current budget in her piece but doesn't put it in the context of previous years' spending or the Bush administration's 2003 intentions. Based on these numbers, Seelye could have just as easily written a story titled, "Bush Superfund Budget Grows Slightly." Neither the next day's (July 2) Wall Street Journal or Washington Post bought the Times line. Both got a comment from the EPA, something Seelye didn't do. Agency spokesperson Joe Martyak told both papers that the numbers in the inspector general's report were only a "snapshot in time" and not accurate. Martyak added that some of the 33 Superfund sites didn't need more money and that 11 would win more funds in a later quarter. Why, then, all the horror show about the Superfund-slashing Bush? One can, in good conscience, criticize Bush as less aggressive than Clinton in his Superfund cleanup strategy, as National Journal did in its June 1 issue. Or one can argue that the program should be bumped up to $1.5 billion and $1.6 billion in this decade to complete the various projects, as Superfund maven Kathryn Probst at Resources for the Future holds. But that's not what's driving this story. Hill Democrats want to reinstitute the "Superfund tax," which ran from 1980 to 1995. The tax dunned chemical and oil companies, among other industries, for money to clean up "orphan" Superfund sites—sites whose owners have absconded or have gone bankrupt. The sites affected by Bush "cutbacks" are orphans and constitute 30 percent of all Superfund cleanups. (Culpable corporate parties, snared by EPA cops, pay for the remaining 70 percent of Superfund-designated sites.) The Superfund tax trust fund, which ballooned to $3.8 billion in 1996, is now nearly empty, and that's reignited the Hill debate about how to pay for the orphans' hygiene. Since 1995, Republicans have resolutely opposed a new Superfund tax and have largely agreed with industry that general tax revenues should cover the orphans (or that the feds should defer the matter to the states). The Democrats, led by Rep. John D. Dingell of Michigan and Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey, want the tax back, and they have been campaigning in the press since the beginning of the year for its return. In April, Dingell and Pallone commissioned the EPA inspector general—who is not an EPA employee—to investigate which Superfund cleanups the Bush administration was postponing or scaling back on. When they got the report, they delivered it to Seelye, apparently giving her one of the media's first peeks. To her credit, Seelye acknowledges the provenance of the report, discloses who gave it to her, and describes her benefactors as "opposing the cuts." But after doing so, she carries the Democrats' water for them, essaying at great length about their desire for the Superfund tax. One of the piece's subheads, "Superfund Is Drying Up," should be its headline (but that's been true for the last six years). And she echoes the enviros' and Democrats' point of view, accepting their dubious rhetoric that under the Superfund tax, "the polluter pays." Actually, the Superfund tax conscripts many companies that have never polluted and had no role in creating the orphan sites. And in describing the "cuts," she compares what the EPA regional offices requested—which, given bureaucratic imperatives, is likely to be more than they planned to get—with what the Bush administration allocated. The fair way to compute budget "cuts," of course, would be to compare what EPA spent last year against this year. But she doesn't get that number. Besides including no response by the EPA—not even a "no comment"—Seelye declines to talk to an industry flack or a think-tanker who might take issue with their Superfund alarmism. (Spokespersons from the Edison Wetlands and the League of Conservation Voters get their say.) Do any of the affected 33 sites pose immediate, grave danger to the public health? Are some better candidates for containment rather than immediate cleanup? Is the Bush administration actually doing the environment a favor by performing budget triage, funneling the most money to the neediest sites? I'm prepared to believe that the Bush administration's Superfund strategy poses serious health risks to hundreds, thousands, or maybe even millions. Or that George W. Bush personally poisons my tap water. But Seelye's rewrite of the inspector general's report hypes a legitimate debate about who should pay to clean up orphan Superfund sites by falsely suggesting that Bush is gutting the program.
Now who's generalizing? There's a lot more mockery of conservatives <b>by</b> liberals than there is liberals by conservatives. There is also more double-teaming. In another thread a few weeks ago, I bashed you and Major for chortling in conference about one of my positions about gun control. I think that is uncalled for and, frankly, should be stopped. Let me know if you find me doing it, please!
