Should corporations be taxed to pay for cleanup of Superfund sites (see details)?

Question

Why would congress get rid of the tax that corporations were paying to clean these sites up???

http://www.thebostonchannel.com/investigative/13794005/detail.html

Answer 1

Because corporations paid money to their favorite politicians to get rid of the tax that they were having to pay, because it was a drain on their enormous profits, so that they might have to cut back on bonuses for the corporate big-wigs. The average person can't give as much to politicians, so we will be stuck paying for the superfund sites one way or another.

Answer 2

Here's a RL example of the legal fun that is/was going on with SuperFund.

Burlington, Vermont built a city owned coal fired power plant about the turn of the century [ie about 1900]. This plant's waste product, coal ash and slag, was dumped by the city into a swamp a couple of miles down Lake Champlain from barges that were loaded at the plant.

Sometime in the 1930s, the entire operation was sold to a private enterprise outfit now known as Green Mountain Power Corp. They took over running the plant [which wasn't big enough to supply all the electrical needs of the city any more] and continued the practice of dumping the waste.

Later on, I think in the 1970's, the plant was closed.

Still later, the city decided to take the power operation back. They'd discovered that city owned power systems were eligible to buy very cheap power from Niagra Falls and this would lower their residents' power bills. [note that the total cost of power to everyone in the country would not go down because of this ... Burlington simply got a share of the cheap power that someone else had previously been getting. Their bills went down while someone else's went up.]

Burlington used 'eminent domain' powers to take the electricity system and the old power plant [it is on the waterfront] back from GMP. The court fight over how much the city would pay went on for years.

Still later, the swamp was determined to be a hazardous waste site under SuperFund laws because of the dumping that started so long ago.

Who pays the cleanup costs promptly went into court. GMP says that since Burlington seized the power plant and swamp under eminent domain that the city gets the bills. The city says that as a government entity, it is exempt and GMP gets the bills. GMP says that if that is so, then they need to re-open the compensation case from when the city seized the electricity system because it is prevented from spreading the cost of the cleanup to the properties that benefited from the power that was produced those decades ago [since the city owns the electric utility now].

You decide the case.

Who pays? GMP shareholders? If they do, can they recover their costs from the electric ratepayers in Burlington even though those ratepayers aren't GMP customers??

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Congress let the thing slide because the companies being taxed were not, in many cases, those who benefitted from the dumping so many decades ago. This made US companies unable to compete with foreign outfits and then highly paid US jobs disappeared overseas.

And then the companies couldn't pay anyway since they had no revenue !!


What a mess.


Stuff like this happens when science gets a better handle on what is actually happening. The people back in 1900 [or whenever] were doing what they thought was the best practice and were paying what they thought was the correct amount.

Science discovered differently decades later.

You can't go back and slap a tax on the pollution that has already occurred ... the consumption related to it is past and done.

Which companies have survived from the polluting period? Only the most successful ones. All the others are gone.

So who do you tax for the cleanup? Successful companies only and let newcomers in the same industry who never have polluted go untaxed? Doesn't work ... existing companies will all go bankrupt and lots of well paying jobs will be lost.

Tax the whole industry?

What about other industries that also polluted [the case above was electric power generation while the tax you cite was on chemical and oil companies.??

Ah, tax every industry then!!

Oh, wait -- we already do that. It is called corporate income tax. And the result is general fund revenues and thus SuperFund cleanup expenses come out of ordinary appropriations like other ordinary expenses of government.


[I still think Burlington ought to pay, don't you?]

Answer 3

Have you given any thought that the consumer of the products made by that corporation should pay for the clean up. If they never bought the products the corporation would not have made such a mess. Just a thought! I am sure that all of the corporation haters will agree with me that it is really the consumer that should pay.

Answer 4

The company that created the mess should be made to pay for the cleanup themselves. There's no need to levy a tax on any innocent party as long as the guilty party can be identified and be forced to pay for the cleanup.

Answer 5

Many of the corporations that caused the problems ended up in bankrupcy, and are no longer in business.