Just wow. Can you hurt the working class any more? There’s an elite with an agenda that doesn’t even care anymore. I’m sure there’s many moderates running for office that don’t want this albatross around their neck but they’ll be forced to wear it.

This will not raise gasoline prices at all. /s

“As long as the federal government is only going to raise taxes on companies, fine.”

That’s about the dumbest thing I seen posted here on FR.
Who the hell do you think pays taxes? The companies pass it along to the consumers.

NO !

Ping

I think it was a joke.

... and about the time you realize your payoff you will need to replace the solar panels as they will be producing virtually no power.

What really annoys me about solar ownership stories is that panel efficiency drops significantly each year but that cost is never part of the original estimates. It seems that payback time-frames are calculated using first-year power generation numbers.

Wealth redistribution.

“That’s about the dumbest thing I seen posted here on FR.”

In post 18 another member of this forum explained what was written: “Funny. Although sarcasm, there are way too many people out there who actually think this way.”

A tax on oil is a tax on the consumer. Gasoline will get more expensive.

The White House said Americans should pay higher taxes to ensure we can keep blowing money in ideas that keep failing.

"and about the time you realize your payoff you will need to replace the solar panels as they will be producing virtually no power"

That might be true with other folks and maybe true with solar panels and batteries in the recent past. But not in newer ones and certainly not with me. Before I make a major purchase like this I study the specs and assume a 10% reduction between reality and advertised (which was practically spot on so far with the solar system). My solar inverter has a nice data export recording activity in 5-minute candles, most notably power consumed and power pulled from the grid (the difference being power saved). Once every few days I import that into a T-SQL database and view the numbers from running a few SELECT queries. Once per month when I get my power bill I add a record to a table with the meter reading date, the # kWh bought from them, and the total bill. After subtracting the $15.86 monthly flat fee (really that's 2 fees in one plus 4% tax totaling $15.86) from the bill I have what I consider the usage charge for the month. I divide that by the # kWH bought from them and I have the true rate per kWh that I'm paying. I multiply that by the kWH saved (# of kWH my inverter says I consumed during that period minus # of kWh the power company says I bought from them) and I get my true dollar savings that month. Last month that was 13.356 cents per kWh. Now that I'm coming up on the 1 year anniversary I know how much power I save each month (I already knew how much power I consumed each month because I studied the past 3 years before I bought solar). Once per month I copy the numbers into an Excel sheet to help me predict future years. (In T-SQL you can do future calculations with recursive queries, but they're a major resource hog and all of this is running on my laptop not a powerful PC like you'd normally have a database server on.)

In my calculations I did accommodate for my panels having a 25-year warranty with a gradual decline but guaranteed to still be operating at 70% in the last year of the warranty. The same for my batteries having a 19-year/50% warranty. So what you said may not be as much a drag on efficiency as it used to be, but to your point it's still very much a factor.

Yet that's nowhere near as much of an impact as the automatic lowering of my HELOC payments by virtue of my payments paying down the balance. My minimum payment is 1% of the balance. Right now my HELOC payment + power bill is a little over the $300/month I was spending in 2019 for power + gas (I used 2019 as my standard for comparison to give me a pre-Brandon and pre-covid normalcy to try to achieve in my budget for expectations going forward.)

So this year on most months I pull a little from the HELOC to "help" me pay each month's power bill and HELOC payment (so that my budget "feels" like it's paying $300/month to power my house.) Even though I take money from the HELOC (which increases the balance owed) my payment pays down on the balance more than my withdrawal increases the balance. Thus, in the long run my HELOC is being paid down, which is making my payments go down.

Around the end of the 2nd year (about a year from now) my HELOC payment + power bill will average $300/month (assuming a 3% inflation rate in power rates). Two years from now I'll be averaging less than $300/month (even with the decline in throughput from my solar system).

My solar system will really "pay for itself" sooner, but to be honest part of that is investing trickery. When I get extra money (either tax refund this year for the tax credit, or when my energy costs are below $300/month) I'll put that extra into an investment account instead of paying extra onto the HELOC balance. Nothing fancy -- investing in simple mutual funds like my retirement is invested in. To keep it simple I don't talk about that timeline when I try to convince my fellow small-government-minded Americans to consider solar as a freedom option. I talk about the timeline as though I was paying down on the HELOC. Assuming a 10% ROI on the investment account it will have all "paid for itself" about 8.5 years.

The solar system has already achieved goal #1, which was to have a steady $300/month home energy costs for my budget (counting the HELOC payment as part of the "energy" costs). Basically, it's like we haven't had horrible natural gas inflation and power rate inflation over the past 3 years.

Goal #2 will be achieved when my investment balance + amount saved not invested is greater than or equal to the HELOC balance (how much I owe on the overall costs of installing solar and replacing my two nat gas appliances with electric ones). For me that'll be about 7 to 8 years from now (8 to 9 years from the day it was installed).

Goal #3 will be achieved when my investment balance is enough to replace my existing solar system with one that's 2 to 3 times as better. That will happen around year 15 (assuming solar equipment prices remain steady, which the past 10 or so years they've gone down like computers go down in price for the processing power they have).

That is, unless my wife and I get an EV, which I'm in the market for, and if I do that I've already looked into upgrading my solar system so that my power usage is 90% supplied by solar, including charging the EV enough for my wife and I to drive ~200 miles per week at about 2 miles per kWh. That will pay for itself on about the 12th year (that's the overall costs for original solar system + upgrade + EV): assuming $55K for a Mustang Mach e, 1.9% interest rate on payments, increasing car insurance by about $90/month for the difference in comprehensive insurance on a new car vs liability only on driving old used cars like I've done for decades, replacing the battery for $10K on the 10th year, but also not replacing the old used car with another one every 7 years for $10K, saving on gasoline at $3.50/gallon (my prediction for the bottom on when it'll quit going down and the Dims will expect us to be happy about it) but going up 3% inflation each year from that, saving on $60 oil changes twice per year but that too rising 3% inflation, no differences in other costs (i.e. tires or other repairs because my old used cars need repairs somewhat often but it's cheap to repair them vs a new EV would need repairs less frequently but when it happens it'll be costly). If I get an EV my monthly base expectation in my budget will be $450/month instead of $300/month (I was spending about $150/month for gas in 2019 to drive my used car about 200 miles per week) because the money I was spending on gas will be expected to help pay for power and solar upgrade. We'll still have one gas car so that we have the best of both worlds, but drive the EV more often to save money. (Thus I'm using the cost of gas for one car we were driving ~200 miles/week, not two cars since we're not replacing 2 cars with EV's.)

OK, I missed the punch line.

The only energy tax we need is a tariff on IMPORTED crude oil. Domestic oil is duty free.