- Joined
- Sep 30, 2005
- Messages
- 18,264
- Reaction score
- 6,649
- Location
- Utah
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Moderate
The whole point of the tax credit is help the environment, reduce foreign oil dependency, and promote environmental responsibility in this country. This is a national security issue and also a national issue because of the impact on the environment. Many of you probably don't favor the Mideast region and don't want to be dependent on oil from there. This tax credit helps reduce foreign oil dependency.
The free market is not a panacea, and does not care about the environment, only on maximizing profit. If it wasn't for regulation and the government, many of the products you use would contain lead, carcinogens, and other harmful chemicals. Companies would not bother to regulate their environmental impact and safety of their products because that costs money, and they could just hide or conceal any dangers from the consumer.
This tax break is not picking and choosing companies, its not picking LG over Mitsubishi, its treating all companies the same and its saying that this product will further our national interests than current products.
Again, many of you knock governmental regulation, but you enjoy the benefits of their protections, such as minimal acid rain and breathing relatively clean air with less SO2, CO, NO, and NO2. If catalytic converters weren't required by the government, car companies would probably not include them because they add to the cost. I doubt people would be environmentally conscious and purchase cars with catalytic converters too if they added to the cost.
I am a former nuke operator/Instrument tech/metrology tech, and can agree with Scarecrow and Opteron both, depending on points.
The free market SHOULD be the deciding factor on business decisions, but they still bear watching. When faced with the expense of disposing of waste products, it just seems to be too hard for too many businesses to dump their wastes in an environmentally safe manner. Speaking of golf carts, there is a business near my AZ home that routinely dumps battery acid right in plain sight. Anyone driving by can see the stained ground. That is blatant, and the guy should be jailed. But when I attempted to report it, I found the local agencies uninterested in such a small "spill". Seems there wasn't much money to be made from it. Years ago I saw a guy burning oil drained from transformers, he was recycling the metals and the oil was in his way. So he just poured it all in a barrel and burned it, in plain site of the freeway exit going into the center of Idaho Falls, Idaho. Don't know if there were PCB's in the oil or not, but again, try finding a govt agency that cares to do their job. So on the one hand we have those who don't mind polluting, and on the other hand we have govt that won't leave the comfort of their offices to look into dumping of hazardous wastes.
There needs to be serious prison time involved for those who would be so irresponsible.