One year ago today President Obama imposed a moratorium on offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. It banned shallow-water and deepwater operations, setting the stage for a year of delays in permitting. Now a U.S. senator wants to put a moratorium on federal agencies. Sen. David Vitter (D-La.), an outspoken critic of the administration’s anti-drilling policies, introduced the Agency Overreach Moratorium Act, which would require congressional approval for federal regulations that restrict energy exploration on federal lands and offshore. Vitter said the legislation would expand domestic energy resources and …
Senator Max Baucus (D–MT) isn’t shy about picking winners and losers. Last December, he led the charge to keep in place a subsidy of $6 billion per year to the ethanol industry. Now he’s picking the oil and gas industry as losers by proposing to eliminate subsidies for big oil and using the increased revenue to subsidize a different set of political winners. Baucus would provide even more incentives for more fuel efficient vehicles and alternative energy fueling stations. But what Senator Baucus labels as an oil and gas subsidy …
For the second time in a week, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D–MT) has called for the suspension of pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) budget rules to pass necessary and vital tax policies. First, Baucus suggested waiving PAYGO as it pertains to the death tax. Now he’s calling for the Senate to rightly ignore PAYGO so it can keep the tax rate on dividends from skyrocketing to almost 40 percent from its current 15 percent level. The 2001 and 2003 tax relief packages expire at the end of this year. That means …
The federal estate tax, better known as the death tax, was eliminated this year after a decade-long phase-out. Nothing in Washington is permanent, however, and due to a quirk in budget law, it comes roaring back to life in 2011 (less than four months from now) at a 55 percent rate and only $1 million exemption—its levels prior to the phase-out—unless Congress acts before the end of the year. There have been sporadic efforts in the Senate this year to address this impending massive tax hike that will threaten the …
The Senate this week is considering amendments to Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) legislation to raise the debt limit. Reid’s bill is a substitute to the version that passed the House, which would add $925 billion to the federal debt ceiling, but his would hike the limit by $1.9 trillion so that the Senate does not have to take another troublesome vote on the debt limit before the 2010 election. Raising the debt ceiling to some degree is, unfortunately, necessary to avoid a default with perhaps catastrophic financial consequences for …
When President Barack Obama made his most recent big health care speech in September, he promised the American people his plan would cost only $900 billion. It took almost three months, but Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) finally produced a bill that CBO was willing to score at $848 billion. Problem is, the bill is filled with so many gimmicks that nobody believes that $848 billion score is the true cost of the bill. And yesterday on the Senate floor, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) actually admitted it. Watch:
Last week Senator Max Baucus joined several mainstream environmentalists in adding pine beetle outbreaks to a long list of things that can be blamed on climate change. As Baucus said in a Congress Quarterly report, Running on the trails by my home in Helena, seeing the red forests destroyed by pine beetles or seeing sustained drought and increased wildfires, we feel the impacts of climate change.”
A Lewin Group study commissioned by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, finds that although the Baucus health care bill (the legislation that recently passed the Senate Finance Committee) is often touted as the most fiscally responsible of all of Congress’s reform plans, it “relies on certain cost containment approaches that have not worked in the past” and therefore “does not bend the total health care cost curve downward.” Rather than fundamentally realigning incentives in the health sector to lower the overall cost of care, the Baucus bill imposes top down …
Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus made headlines this week for something other than healthcare. On October 27 Senator Baucus said he has “serious reservations” about the cap and trade bill, especially the increased near-term target of 20 percent carbon dioxide reduction below 2005 levels by 2020 – up from 17 percent in the passed House bill. No changes can be made within the cap and trade approach can alleviate his concerns. Changing the targeted emissions reductions for 2020 from 20 percent to 17 percent might reduce the near-tem economic impact, …
On Monday the Senate Finance Committee unveiled the legislative text of S. 1796 — dubbed “America’s Healthy Future Act” — revealing to fans of legislative “bloatware” a new one for the record book! Not only does this latest entry in the Congress League’s 111th season “monster bill” competition outstrip all other current contenders in the Health Division, it even eclipses the previous all-time division titleholder. At a staggering 1,502 pages, the Finance Committee bill dwarfs the Senate HELP Committee’s 839 page bill (S.1679), and is nearly one-and-a-half times the size …
