Tax Earmarks, Pork and Other Bailout Bill Horrors The most egregious, most frightening aspect of this bill is its hidden attack on every aspect of our economy under the cover of anti-carbon measures contained in what is essentially an energy bill tacked on to the bailout -- an energy bill which would not pass Congress were it to come up for a vote. Section 117 of the bailout bill calls for this: “The Secretary of the Treasury shall enter into an agreement with the National Academy of Sciences to undertake a comprehensive review of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to identify the types of and specific tax provisions that have the largest effects on carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions and to estimate the magnitude of those effects.” So the radical environmentalists’ path to a ‘carbon trading’ system -- which both Sens. Obama and McCain favor -- would be cleared of underbrush so that our economy could be strangled with the European system as soon as possible. If you own a power plant, a steel factory, a dairy farm, or an airline company, or maybe even just a car, this is a large caliber weapon aimed directly at you. It’s the predicate to taxing carbon emissions...The bill doubles the subsidy for biodiesel production from 50 cents per gallon to $1.00 per gallon. Doesn’t the Senate realize that we can’t save the world by burning our food? Did they not remember the huge increase in food prices over the past two years due in large part to these subsidies diverting food and feed crops into our gas tanks? The energy provisions in the bailout also include darlings of the environmental left: tax credits for “small wind property,” “geothermal heat pump systems,” and “electricity produced from marine renewables.” While tax breaks for alternative energy aren’t necessarily objectionable, the inclusion of them in this bill removes incentive for Democrats to cooperate on a comprehensive energy bill which would include drilling for oil and gas or developing clean coal or nuclear power sources. The effect of this bill, then, will be to keep us from developing efficient large-scale energy sources. Small wind properties will not lower prices at the pump....