11/6 Letters: GOP tax plan “unfair, uneven and difficult to understand”

Regarding “The Latest: Trump tweets praise for GOP tax overhaul” (Nov. 2): As a struggling golfer after a difficult round of golf I often grumble “what the golf course giveth, the golf course taketh away.” The Republican tax-reform proposals appears as unfair, uneven and difficult to understand and master as the game of golf. Very few will conquer the course or benefit from the proposed tax code. The party of conservative deficit hawks has appeared to bow to the pressure of getting something done legislatively and rewarding their wealthy donors. One can expect the Republican victors to reward their supporters.

Trying to sell their proposals as a middle class tax cut is highly questionable. Taxpayers in blue Democratic states with high property and income taxes will suffer. Elders with high medical expenses will lose this deduction as their medical expenses rise. Homeowners with mortgages and borrowing costs will be hurt. Charitable contributions may decline as taxpayers lose their incentives to itemize and write-off charitable giving. Even small businesses will not get all they were promised with only a partial reduction in their income being taxed at the lower rate. Let’s see if big money’s loopholes and special deductions or new revenue make-up taxes come out of the Republican backrooms.

Value fuel diversity

For nearly a decade, low electricity market prices driven by low natural gas prices, environmental regulations, and federal and state policies have led to under-recovery of operating costs for nuclear and coal power plants. Coal and nuclear power plants provide the electric grid stabilizing inertia and fuel diversity critical to reliable and resilient electric services. They keep fuel on-site in comparison to the just-in-time fuel delivery of natural-gas-fired power plants, and they are available when sun or wind generation is not generating power. Coal and nuclear keep the lights on when other sources are not available.

Since the current electricity markets don’t price for that resilience, the Department of Energy has a proposal to make changes to the electricity market rules that properly value the resilience provided by fuel diversity with the existing baseload coal and nuclear power plants. Allowing these baseload power plants and the other capable technologies to recover their costs would make our electric grid more reliable and resilient before a suitable replacement for nuclear and coal is cost-effectively implemented. Considering costs of outages due to lack of fuel diversity makes a lot of technical and economic sense.

This story was originally published November 5, 2017 at 6:00 PM with the headline "11/6 Letters: GOP tax plan “unfair, uneven and difficult to understand”."