Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Chicken Manure Tax Credit

Are folks in the Grand Lake St. Mary's watershed using this:
You don’t believe there’s spending in the tax code???  Here’s a real life example:  the chicken-s**t tax credit.  Really, section 45 of the Internal Revenue Code.  You can look it up.  The late Senator Roth of Delaware (home of lots of chickens and “poultry manure,” as it’s euphemistically called) put this little goody into our tax laws.  Here’s the backstory:  the EPA said that enormous chicken farms could no longer put their poultry waste in pools or bury it because it poisoned the ground water.  One of the best options to meet the new requirement was to dry the vile effluent and burn it to make electricity, but that was still costly.  Roth didn’t want chicken farmer profits to plummet or chicken and egg prices to rise just because farmers couldn’t use the earth as a giant toilet, so he pushed through the chicken s**t tax credit to create a profitable market for that (as well as all sorts of other crap).
There are lots of chicken s**t tax subsidies.  The mortgage interest deduction is basically a housing voucher for rich people.  Those who really need help get bupkes.  The tax-free health insurance you get at work is heavily subsidized by the tax code, but those with low incomes rarely get health coverage and, if they do, the subsidy is worth little or nothing.  The ethanol tax credit is a farm price support program  that is literally starving people.
I am glad Republicans are around to stand up for multinational oil companies when evil Democrats try to take away their tax credits ($21 billion dollars over 10 years).

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