




Project will be nation's largest solar farm













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RE: Makes sense
By FITCamaro on 3/22/2011 6:12:11 PM , Rating: 1
Small things add up. Well with the 2nd highest (soon to be highest) corporate tax rate in the world, companies have reason to try to avoid paying taxes in the US and pay them in other countries instead. Our government has only itself to blame for discouraging companies to pay taxes here and preferring to move their profits overseas.

RE: Makes sense
By Gzus666 on 3/22/2011 6:18:49 PM , Rating: 2
I didn't blame the companies, I blamed government corruption. Usually if people are trying to save money, they work on the big things first. If you make billions and pay no taxes, that is an issue. Meanwhile, I make a few ticks below six figures and I have to pay more than 1/4 of my pay in taxes. Clearly that is not fair by any stretch of the imagination.

RE: Makes sense
By FITCamaro on 3/22/2011 11:16:16 PM , Rating: 1
Well again, its not that they don't pay taxes. They just don't pay them here. If a company can save money, its going to do so. To not would be bad business.

Unless we bring our corporate tax rates down to the 20-25% range, this will continue.

One thing I love is all the bitching you hear about the oil companies from liberals in the House and Senate (despite said oil companies paying massive amounts of taxes and fees), yet a company like GE paying no taxes(2010) isn't even mentioned. Why? Because their CEO is on Obama's friends list.

RE: Makes sense
By Azethoth on 3/23/2011 1:51:43 AM , Rating: 2
Hear Ye, Hear Ye. I am not a liberal but I hereby officially bitch about the ($30 billion a year?) subsidies we provide to oil companies. There is no sense in subsidizing a supremely profitable 100 year old industry.

I am also ok with some temporary subsidies for solar. Why? It is clearly very close to ramping scale and efficiency to the point of competing. It is also the only source other than nuclear that can actually power the future in the volumes required.

However, once it scales I am goddamned if I want to see subsidies continue. 100 years later would make me throw up in my mouth.

RE: Makes sense
By Keeir on 3/23/2011 3:57:54 AM , Rating: 2


Not only would local solar be very expensive in most of the US, 5-10 times Nuclear and Coal Wholesale rates, Solar will always face the problem of availibity. (The Palo Verde firm on peak spot is 0.03492 dollars per kWh... in comparison, Germany provides a FiT rate of 21.1 EuroCents per kWh ~ .3 USD dollars per kWh for Solar installations... which is in addition to the wholesale rate they get for the power)

If you want 100% power supply from Solar, you need to have large amounts of Battery or Pumped Hydro storage... or deal with around the globe transmission losses. These are issues that are not dealt with yet..

Its not that I am against Solar. It certainly could make sense if you live in a state with high electricity rates, high solar isolation, and could lower your installation and maintainence costs with a little elbow greases.

But even in Arizona, its hard to make Solar an economically attactrive alternative at retail rates, let alone wholesale rates or even worse, wholesale rates - grid balancing costs.

RE: Makes sense
By Gzus666 on 3/23/2011 12:17:24 PM , Rating: 2

Well, I don't really care what they do elsewhere, as I live in America. They pay taxes elsewhere because they have to, they don't here because they don't have to. The obvious fix is to make them pay them here.

The amount of the taxation is another issue to take up entirely. If they would pay taxes when they were in the 20-25% range, why don't they just pay 20-25%? They paid nothing, some cases they got money back.

I don't care about oil companies at this point, I care about fairness across the board. Favoritism is one of the major issues in this country. Corporatism is becoming the norm, that is not good for any citizen of this or any society. The goal is a working society that is beneficial to all, not a society that benefits sociopathy.

At the end of the day, I'm not starving. I make good money and I have no financial issues. I would like to pay less taxes, but I don't get that choice, lobbyists do.

The problem I see is the lower middle class that do jobs that not anyone can do, but don't pay well. Many of these jobs are very taxing mentally, require degrees and in depth knowledge such as teaching, but don't pay for crap. These people get taxed to the point where they are basically broke and GE doesn't pay a dime.

GE isn't exactly a grand company, they turned the Hudson river into a toxic swamp. They dumped toxic chemicals into water bodies pretty frequently in the past, so obviously letting them just do what seems convenient for the company doesn't work. But since most every large corporation pays to lobby our government, corruption runs rampant. The problem runs to the core, the no taxes is just a symptom I hate.

