Let's Cut Entitlements!

 
The joint House/Senate "Super Committee" is about to get down to work, looking for $1.2 trillion in budget cuts by Thanksgiving. Some parties are urging the participants to target the so-called "entitlement" programs: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. But Grandpa and Grandma aren't the only entitled ones out there, and the just-released 2011 Green Scissors report has lots of helpful suggestions ($380 billion worth, in fact) of environmentally harmful subsidies they say we could well do without. Here's their fossil fuel section:

Like the man said, $29 billion here, $6 billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money. Nor is this just the usual enviro wishlist; in addition to Friends of the Earth and Public Citizen, Green Scissors includes the deficit hawks at Taxpayers for Common Sense and free marketeers from The Heartland Institute. (Inclusion of the latter gives our friends at Climate Progress heartburn.) Aside from ending the fossil fuel subsidies, Green Scissors also proposes to snip subsidies for the nuclear industry and--ouch!--renewable energy loan guarantees. If that's what it took to finally get rid of subsidies to the oil industry, though . . . At least we wouldn't have to shake down Grandma for the cash.

--Paul Rauber