Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is campaigning on a tax plan that includes budget-busting tax cuts for oil companies and large corporations. He made a pledge to raise “no new taxes,” and believes that higher taxes on oil company profits are “dangerous.”

However, his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK), saw nothing dangerous about raising taxes on the profits of oil companies.

Last year, she “raised taxes on oil profits by $1.5 billion a year” in Alaska, “a step that has generated stunning new wealth for the state as oil prices soared.”

In a statement released after signing the tax bill, she said the tax increase would give Alaskans “an equitable share for our resources”:

By receiving an equitable share for our resources, we are now in a position to demand more accountability and seize opportunities to save for future generations.

The Seattle Times wrote earlier this month that the higher tax “helped push the state’s total oil revenue — from new and existing taxes, as well as royalties — to more than $10 billion, double the amount received last year.” Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), unlike McCain, has proposed a windfall profits tax on oil companies.

Make no mistake – Palin is still a champion for Big Oil, who favors drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge over developing alternative energy. Still, will McCain embrace Palin’s profits tax as oil companies rake in record amounts? Or will Palin disavow her past to aid McCain, the oil companies’ “million dollar maverick?”

Digg It!

Our guest blogger is Rick Weiss, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Is McCain’s choice for vice president a creationist? The record offers worrisome evidence that the first woman to make it onto a Republican presidential ticket holds to this backward and wholly unscientific view of reality.

As reported in the Anchorage Daily News during her race for the governorship of Alaska, Sarah Palin offered up a classic anti-evolution answer when asked during a televised debate whether creationism should be taught with evolution in the public schools:

“Teach both,” Palin said. “You know, don’t be afraid of information… I am a proponent of teaching both.”

“Teach both” and “teach the debate” have long been the mantras of the religious right and the Intelligent Design crowds, which have struggled over the years as court after court has batted down their efforts to inject unscientific teachings into the nation’s science classes.

The legal record suggests that Palin’s approach is not just ignorant of the facts, but a plain violation of the Constitutional boundary between church and state.
Recall, for example, the December 2005 United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania decision in Kitzmiller vs. the Dover Area School District. At issue was the legality of a 2004 Dover Area School District decision to inform all students that they should “keep an open mind” about evolution and to encourage students to peruse Of Pandas and People, which the school district gamely referred to as “a reference book,” to gain an understanding of a competing view of how life came to be, known as Intelligent Design.
Read more

Our guest blogger is Adam Jentleson, the Communications and Outreach Director for the Hyde Park Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Sen. John McCain has a long record of opposing equal pay for women. Given that his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK), is a member of Feminists for Life, an anti-choice group that also calls for equal pay for women, it would be interesting to know her views on McCain’s votes against legislation designed to close the pay gap between men and women. One such piece of legislation is the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which the Senate voted on (and McCain opposed) just this spring.

Last night at the Democratic convention, a former Republican named Barney Smith spoke of the need for economic policies that “Help Barney Smith, not Smith Barney.”

Watch it here:

Ironically, according to Sarah Laskow at the Center for Public Integrity who analyzed Palin’s disclosure forms, Sarah Palin’s financial portfolio is managed by none other than Salomon Smith Barney.

Furthermore, by joining McCain on the ticket, Palin is now endorsing a radical $300 billion in tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy that would leave out millions of American families while delivering $45 billion in tax breaks for America’s 200 largest companies and at least $6.3 billion for America’s largest financial firms.

During an appearance on CNBC yesterday, Carly Fiorina, an economic adviser for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), was pressed by Larry Kudlow to explain what McCain’s proposed tax policies will do for the middle class. Kudlow said that he believes the McCain campaign will be “in a squeeze for the lack of a comprehensive middle class tax cut.”

Fiorina responded that “what we need to do for middle Americans” is “drill, drill, drill” for oil, while adding vaguely that “we need to make sure the economy is growing again.” Watch it:

Kudlow was absolutely right to say that McCain’s tax plan lacks a middle class tax cut – his proposal delivers nearly half of its benefits to the top 1% of taxpayers, and gives the top 0.1% a $1 million tax cut. According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, “those in the middle fifth of the income distribution would receive an average cut equal to 0.7 percent of income” or just $319. Under Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) proposed tax plan, middle class families would receive three times as much.

Furthermore, Fiorina’s claim that drilling for more oil will help the middle class is simply ridiculous. The Energy Information Administration has said that drilling for oil in the Outer Continental Shelf “would not have a significant impact” on oil prices before 2030. The McCain campaign has already conceded as much, as economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin has said drilling won’t affect current oil supply or prices.

Where offshore drilling will help is in lining the pockets of oil executives and their wealthy investors. But the oil and gas industries have donated heavily to McCain, particularly since he advocated lifting the federal moratorium on offshore drilling, so they are the ones McCain’s tax policies cater to, at the expense of the middle class.

Today’s new census numbers confirm the disproportionality of President Bush’s economic expansion. Unfortunately, the president’s economic policies — which were supposed to serve as “a rising tide that raised all boats” — have redistributed wealth to the richest Americans and left the middle and lower classes behind.

And while the new data “did show an uptick for 2007,” years of declining income and earnings outweigh this most recent growth.

Taking the new census numbers into account, most Americans lost money during the Bush expansion:

- Median household incomes down: 0.6% lower in 2007 than in 2000

- Men’s earnings down: 0.38% less in 2007 than in 1999

- Women’s earnings can’t keep up: continued upward swing but were unable to “overcome other drags on household income”

- More Americans in poverty: 5.7 million more people lived in poverty in 2007 than did in 2000

The Center for Policy and Budget Priorities notes, “never before on record has poverty been higher and median income for working-age households lower at the end of a multi-year economic expansion than at the beginning. The new data add to the mounting evidence that the gains from the 2001-2007 expansion were concentrated among high-income Americans.”

A new Center for American Progress report graphically presents the severity of the income redistribution:

Today, during an appearance on Fox News, McCain adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer dismissed the Tax Policy Center’s conclusion that Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) tax plan would increase the deficit. Pfotenhauer argued that the center was a “liberal think tank” that did not analyze “the spending side” of McCain’s plan:

[We'll] keep the growth rate in federal spending to about 2.4 percent. I love Austin’s statement that we are going to somehow balloon the deficit. First, the Tax Policy Center is a liberal think tank run by former Clinton-ites and Jason Furman worked there up until about two months ago. But set that aside. They don’t look at the spending side, they only look at the tax side.

Watch it:

But even conservative economists who have looked at the “spending side” of the senator’s plan, believe that his proposal would only add to the deficit:

- “The spending cuts are far too vague to be counted on for significant savings and, even if they were more specific, I can’t see how they would come close to offsetting the level of tax cuts he recommends.” [Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition]

- “[But] I am worried that continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will tear apart our social fabric and defeat any economic proposal to reduce the deficit and stimulate growth. Guns are crowding out butter.” [Michael Connolly, Professor of Economics, University of Miami]

- “He’s not going to balance the budget.” [William Albrecht, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa]

In July, the McCain campaign falsely suggested that 300 economists agreed that the senator’s economic plan could reduce the deficit and balance the budget by 2013. When contacted by reporters many of those economists — Connolly and Albrecht included — actually expressed deep reservations about McCain’ pledge to reduce the deficit.

Our guest blogger is Brian Levine, a senior policy advisor at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

This morning, we learned that 37.3 million Americans are living in poverty. Every year, the release of these numbers brings a wave of attention to the plight of the poor. This year, it might even prompt some curious voters to check out the websites of the presidential candidates. But don’t bother scouring JohnMcCain.com looking for the Senator’s poverty plan – it doesn’t exist.

Visitors to JohnMcCain.com can learn where the Republican nominee stands on the Second Amendment, “liberal judicial activists” — even the space program. While John McCain “understands the importance of investing in key industries such as space,” he apparently does not understand the importance of helping the 37.3 million Americans living in poverty right here on Planet Earth.

You can’t really blame John McCain for ignoring poverty. After all, it would take $90 billion a year to cut poverty in half. That might seem like a reasonable cost for lifting more than 18 million people over the poverty line. But McCain doesn’t have room in his budget – he needs $100 billion a year for his corporate tax break and there better be enough left over to deliver a $992,000 tax cut to each household in the top 0.1 percent of the income scale.

Maybe John McCain will come up with a poverty plan sometime between now and the election. In the meantime, at least we know that in a McCain Administration, the poor will be protected from activist judges and anti-astronaut zealots.

Two weeks after the Government Accountability Office reported that “two-thirds of corporations operating in the United States did not pay taxes” between 1998 and 2008, The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) released a new study revealing that the American tax payer is subsidizing “executive pay excess” to the tune of $20 billion a year.

In fact, “the more that corporations shell out for executive pay, the more they pocket in profit at the expense of average taxpayers.” Through a series of bureaucratic rules and loopholes, the federal government is transferring billions of dollars to the most privileged Americans:

Large increases in executive pay have had an inverse relationship to falling unionization rates — during the 1980s, as workers began losing their ability to check executive compensation by bargaining with employers for fair wages and benefits, CEO compensation steadily increased.

“Thirty years ago, chief executives averaged only 30 to 40 times the average American worker paycheck.” In 2007, top executives faced almost “no institutional challenge from their workers,” and earned “344 times the salary of the average American worker”:

As the report notes, to restore the balance of power in the workplace, lawmakers should pass the Employee Free Choice Act, “legislation that would help workers
realize their right to organize into unions and bargain collectively with their employers.”

Full disclosure: American Rights At Work is currently advertising for the Employee Free Choice Act on this site, though they had no role in any part of this post.

As we’ve known for quite some time, John McCain’s budget numbers just don’t add up.

A new analysis from the non-partisan New America Foundation’s U.S. Budget Watch should be read cautiously because it uncritically accepts many of John McCain campaign’s most egregious budget distortions.

Matthew Yglesias has already called out the $159 billion in “unspecified budget cuts” which the group allows McCain to claim. The Washington Post called these empty promises to slash spending McCain’s “voodoo economics, based more on wishful thinking than on hard data or carefully considered policy proposals.”

But that’s not the end of it.

U.S. Budget Watch also accepts that, in 2013:

–McCain’s tax cuts are as his adviser’s describe them, not how McCain describes them: An earlier study from the Tax Policy Center found a $2.8 trillion gap between McCain’s proposals as he describes them on the stump, and what his advisers tell analysts in private. In 2013, his plan as his stump speech would suggest costs $260 billion more than the plan as detailed by his advisers.

–McCain’s ‘high risk pools’ will only cost $8 billion: McCain’s campaign insist they will put money towards “high risk pools” to cover people with chronic conditions left out of McCain’s health care plan. Douglas Holtz-Eakin says the campaign might even spend $20 billion to fill the hole, but the Tax Policy Center says it would take at least $100 billion to adequately cover everyone who would need coverage.

–McCain will cut $35 billion in earmarks: Even the conservative Heritage Foundation acknowledges that there are only about $9 billion in earmarks that could be eliminated. Even John McCain acknowledges that if the process of earmarking were eliminated, many of the same programs would still be funded, only from other parts of the budget.

–McCain’s alternative tax system will be revenue neutral: U.S. Budget Watch does acknowledges that it’s possible that “because most taxpayers will choose the system in which they pay lower taxes, significant revenue would be lost.” What they don’t mention is that the Tax Policy Center has estimated the annual cost of such a system: $115 billion in 2013. (Note: This $115 billion is included in McCain’s “rhetoric gap” described above.)

These low-ball cost estimates for McCain’s tax-cuts and spending proposals suggest that even the $159 billion in “unspecified budget cuts” that McCain needs to balance the budget is far, far too optimistic. The real cuts needed would be much more devastating.

As the Tax Policy Center says, “the promises Senator McCain makes (or implies) in his speeches could not be sustained without a radical and unprecedented downsizing of government.”

Our guest blogger is James Kvaal, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In a now-famous political moment, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) suggested Saturday that the definition of “rich” is earning $5 million or more a year. As Ezra Klein pointed out, by this definition more than 99.9 percent of Americans are poor or middle class.

McCain said it doesn’t matter what he considers rich because “I don’t want to raise anybody’s taxes. I really don’t. In fact, I want to give working Americans a better shot at having a better life.” So which households does he give a better shot at having a better life? According to data from the Tax Policy Center:

– The top 0.1 percent of households – which include a handful of “middle-class” families under McCain’s definition — earn an average of $6.7 million. They would collect at least 18 percent of McCain’s tax cuts, including the extension of the Bush tax cuts.

– Under McCain, each of these super-rich households would receive $992,000, on average.

– In contrast, McCain’s tax plan gives no help to tens of millions of American families, including nearly all middle-class families without dependents and another 34 million who do not owe income taxes (although they do pay other taxes).

Our guest blogger is Amanda Logan, a Research Associate at the Center for American Progress.

On Meet the Bloggers on Friday, I – along with Isaiah Poole, host Cenk Uygur, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) – discussed the fact many Americans are hurting while only a small few continue to prosper. As CAP Senior Fellow Scott Lilly explained in his recent paper on “Bushenomics,” the Bush administration has overseen a period in which the overall U.S. economy grew by 18 percent, highly driven by a 19 percent increase in the hourly productivity of workers, while the average income for America’s middle class families has actually declined by 2 percent.

Meanwhile, this administration didn’t exactly support the increase in the minimum wage, has opposed the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and increasing the opportunities for workers to unionize, chiefly by coming out against the Employee Free Choice Act, all while implementing very regressive tax cuts that have allotted 30 percent of the cuts to the top one percent earners in the nation.

It seems like the some members of the media and law makers are at least beginning to get a sense of the severity of the situation that many middle-income Americans, let alone lower-income Americans, have been experiencing for quite some time. Numbers don’t lie, and recent economic data across the board have highlighted everything from the weakening labor market and stagnant wages, to lackluster GDP growth, to sharp increases in the cost of necessities, to lower consumer spending, which is very important to note given that the current business cycle has largely been driven by consumer spending. Read more

Our guest blogger is James Kvaal, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

After eight years of economic mistakes, unemployment and inflation are both rising and American families are hurting. By one measure – the “Misery Index” made famous by Jimmy Carter – the economy is in its worst shape since mid-1991.

The Misery Index is simply the combination of the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. It reached 11.3 percent in July. While still well below its heights in the 1970s and early 1980s, the Misery Index is now at its highest level since the first George Bush was president according to data from www.miseryindex.us.

The Misery Index was designed by Carter advisor Arthur Okun, who noted that inflation and unemployment figures often point in opposite directions and therefore neither gives a broad picture of the economy. The index climbs during periods of stagflation, which combine stagnant economic growth, high unemployment, and high inflation.

Stagflation puts Fed policymakers in a box. Cutting interest rates to spark the economy could make inflation even worse, while raising rates to fight inflation could worsen the downturn. Meanwhile, families are feeling the bite of hard times.

Our guest blogger is Adam Jentleson, the Communications and Outreach Director for the Hyde Park Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Today, the St. Petersburg Times ran a piece implying that our claim that John McCain wants to give the 5 biggest oil companies in the U.S. a $4 billion per-year tax break is inaccurate because it takes facts out of context. “The claim wrongly implies that McCain is proposing a special tax cut for oil companies,” they write.

We have to agree with the Times/Politifact on one score – it’s true that McCain is not just proposing a tax cut for the big oil companies. He also wants to give huge tax breaks to the big health insurance companies ($710 million a year for UnitedHealth alone), the big retailers ($1.4 billion a year for Wal-Mart alone), the big banks ($1.3 billion a year for Bank of America alone) – you name the big corporation, McCain wants to give them a huge tax cut.

Altogether, McCain’s tax plan would give $175 billion per year in tax breaks to corporations, including $45 billion a year to the top 200 corporations alone.

It is also true that McCain’s tax cuts for big corporations are only half the story. The other half is that McCain’s tax plan also stiffs the middle class. Nearly 60% of the benefits in McCain’s corporate tax cuts go to the top 1% of individuals. And when you factor in McCain’s health care plan, millions of middle class families who have not gotten a raise since 1998 could end up paying higher taxes under McCain’s proposals.

So that’s the full context of our oil company tax break statistic; it is highly misleading for the Times and Politifact to imply that the context changes its meaning. To the contrary, the full context throws into even starker relief how McCain’s tax plan is dramatically tilted towards big corporations and the very wealthy at the expense of the middle class.

In short, the Times’ attempt to rebut our argument completely ignores the argument itself. We assume they would be critical of candidates’ efforts to employ such a tactic, and wonder why they allow themselves that same liberty.

Our guest blogger is Amanda Logan, a Research Associate at the Center for American Progress.

Last month, Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) economic adviser Phil Gramm accused America of being “nation of whiners.” But Americans aren’t whining, we’re hurting.

Inflation hit a 17-year high last month, and home foreclosure filings increased 55% in the past year. As my co-author Christian Weller and I determined in our recent report, not only are America’s middle-class families financially stressed today, they’ve been increasingly struggling since early 2001.

Battered by inflation: The price of seemingly everything is increasing, but wages aren’t keeping up. After inflation, weekly wages were 0.3% lower in June 2008 than they were in March 2001. But the price of food is up 25% over the same period, transportation by 36%, fuels and utilities by 53%, and college tuition—the key to the middle class—by 68%. As Harvard law professor and economic security expert Elizabeth Warren recently stated, “there have never been since the Depression so many families standing right on the edge.”

Squeezed by medical costs: In 2007, only 34% of families had enough money to cover the cost of a medical emergency, down from 43.7% in 2000. The share of private sector workers with employer-sponsored health insurance dropped from 64% in 2000 to 60% in 2006, while the costs associated with medical care increased 35% from March 2001 to July 2008.

Drowning in debt: Only 29% of families could withstand an unspecified emergency equal to three months of income, down from 39% in 2000. Household debt averaged 130% of disposable income in the first quarter of 2008, higher than any point prior to the first quarter of 2007. Additionally, the total value of all homes fell by 2.5%, or $417 billion, in the first quarter of 2007—the largest drop since the second quarter of 1974.

Threatened by unemployment: According to our estimates, only 44% of families had enough wealth to withstand a spell of unemployment, down from 51.0% in 2000. 2008 has already proven to be a difficult year for the labor market, with the economy losing a total of 463,000 jobs since the beginning of the year and the unemployment rate hitting 5.7% in July—the highest level since March 2004.

As Election Day approaches and Americans’ budgets continue to belly flop, we’re sure to hear non-stop economy talk. On Friday, I’ll add to the dialogue by joining Isaiah J. Poole, who contributes to the Campaign for America’s Future Blog for Our Future, for this week’s edition of Meet the Bloggers, Brave New Foundation’s live online video show. Following a live interview with Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT), my fellow panelists and I will discuss the state of the economy and what it means for average Americans.

Our guest blogger is Christian E. Weller, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Social Security’s anniversary – August 14 – is the perfect time to consider policies that could raise retirement security for tens of millions of Americans, who have seen their wealth decimated by crashing financial and housing markets. Cutting Social Security benefits – Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) favorite approach – would exacerbate what is already a crisis by reducing the last sure thing in retirement safety. Maybe his answer to the retirement crisis is to do as he does: work until you’re well into your 70s. Working becomes the new retirement with Sen. McCain.

Policymakers need to protect Social Security benefits, especially for vulnerable groups and create more wealth, especially for low-income and moderate-income families.

How do the presumptive presidential candidates address these goals? Sen. McCain’s mantra is “cut, cut, cut.” He sees a world of higher retirement age, smaller cost-of-living adjustments, and fewer benefits for moderate-income and higher-income earners, among other possible, yet unspecified cuts. And, it is not clear that he has abandoned the costly and ineffective idea of privatization that he championed in 2000 and that President Bush unsuccessfully peddled in 2005.

This is no way to get started on addressing the retirement crisis. Household wealth dropped by a whopping $3.0 trillion from the middle of 2007 to the first quarter of 2008, but who is counting? Apparently, a lot of people are. The Employee Benefits Research Institute reported in April 2008 that only 18 percent of workers were very confident that they will live comfortably in retirement – the primary reason for people to build wealth. This is the lowest level of retirement confidence since 1993.

Contrast this with Sen. Obama’s proposals. Sen. Obama has proposed to protect Social Security by opposing privatization and a higher retirement age, while also looking to increase revenues by expanding the cap, above which earnings are not subject to Social Security taxes, currently $102,000.

Moreover, Sen. Obama wants to make it easier for people to save. He would require that employers automatically enroll their employees in retirement savings plans and, if employers don’t offer such plans, they would have to offer employees an easy way to contribute to Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) through payroll deduction. On top of this, he would vastly improve the current system of public matches for people’s contributions to their retirement savings accounts, at least for families making less than $75,000. Sen. McCain has no such proposals.

The candidates need to tell voters how they will address their concerns. It is clear that wanting to cut Social Security amid rapidly dwindling wealth doesn’t accomplish that.

A cornerstone of Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) economic plan — Jobs for America — is cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, which McCain claims will turn America into a “low-tax business environment.” But as it turns out, even with the rate at 35 percent, most corporations are not paying taxes.

Today, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report showing that between 1998 and 2005 “about two-thirds of corporations operating in the United States did not pay taxes.” Corporations have a “variety of reasons” for not paying, including “the cost of producing their goods, salary expenses and interest payments on their debt.”

McCain, meanwhile, has derided the U.S. corporate tax rate as the “second highest in the world.” While his statement is technically accurate for the purely nominal rate, U.S. tax revenue as a share of the economy is significantly lower (See graph below), and is below the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average. The U.S. raises less revenue from corporations than Japan, the United Kingdom, and even Ireland, which the McCain campaign cites as a country with a competitive corporate rate.

The reasons for low U.S. revenue are the tax loopholes, shelters, and giveaways that minimize, or completely eliminate corporate taxes, and which McCain has not proposed fixing. A loophole allowing corporations to keep profits offshore aided Hewlett-Packard, whose CEO at the time was McCain economic adviser Carly Fiorina, in defering taxation on $14.4 billion. This lowered Hewlett-Packard’s effective tax rate from 35 percent to 12 percent.

As ABC’s George Stephanopolous pointed out during an interview with Fiorina, McCain’s proposed cut in corporate taxes won’t entice any corporations to bring money back to the U.S. “if they can pay no taxes” by taking advantage of offshore loopholes.

UPDATE: During an interview on CNBC today, Center for Economic & Policy Research co-director Dean Baker explained that it “doesn’t make any sense” to say that the corporate tax rate is “smothering the economy.” (4:20 into the video)

Baker: We used to have a 50 percent tax rate in the 50’s and 60’s when the economy had its most prosperous period, so I think you’re pretty hard-pressed to make the case that taxes are smothering the economy […] [T]he idea that somehow the tax rate, which is lower now than its been in years past, is strangling corporations, it doesn’t make any sense.

If elected president, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) would provide $39 billion in federal help for oil and gas companies over the next five years, a new report from the Center for American Progress Action Fund finds.

Some of these subsidies already exist: Current subsidies for the Oil & Gas industry total $33 billion over the next five years. John McCain would repeal some of them, but preserve many of them.

He would also pass a corporate tax cut that would be worth more than $22 billion to America’s five largest oil companies over the next five years.

These same dollars could be spent investing in efficiency and alternative sources of energy, which would save American families money, create thousands of new jobs, and help power millions of homes with clean, renewable sources of energy.

Here’s what the money could do:

– Weatherize over 14 million American homes: This would save each household an average of $360 dollars every year in reduced utility bills, and dramatically reducing energy usage and carbon emissions.

–Invest in wind power: This money could be used to build enough wind power plants to power approximately 6 million homes and create over 46,000 new high-quality jobs.

–Invest in geothermal energy: The same money could be invested in enough geothermal power plants (which generate electricity from heat stored below the earth’s surface) to power over 9.7 million American homes,creating at least 120,000 jobs in the process.

This money comes from Americans in all 50 states. Click here to see your state’s share in these subsidies.

Read the full report here.