Magic Buggy Whip Industry Keeps Tax Breaks Kentucky Can't Afford

You know you're in a third-world kleptocracy when the government's response to alien corporations' raping the populace is to give them more money to keep raping the populace.

Kentucky treasure John Cheves nail it:

This winter, before the General Assembly decides how much further it may have to cut education, social services and public safety to balance the budget, more than $111 million is already off the table.

That's the estimated annual total for tax breaks devoted to the coal industry. The next year, regardless of Kentucky's fiscal health, it's set to rise to almost $114 million, or as much as Kentucky spends on its Department of Juvenile Justice.

These exemptions in the sales and coal-severance taxes make it cheaper for mining companies to dig for coal and for utility companies to burn it to produce electricity.

When the legislature passed the first of them, in 1960, coal was a major industry in Kentucky. But in the past three decades, the number of people employed in coal mining has fallen from about 50,000 to fewer than 20,000, which is only about 1 percent of the state's workforce.

At the same time, concerns have arisen about coal's role in global warming. Climatologists and other scientists believe that the gases produced by burning fossil fuels gradually increase the Earth's temperature. Studies also link pollution from coal-fired power plants to lung cancer, heart attacks, asthma and other ailments.

Now, as other states and countries look at different energy sources, from natural gas and nuclear power to solar and wind energy, critics say Kentucky seems locked onto coal, even at the cost of subsidizing it.

Read the whole thing.

Call or email your legislators today to tell them you're tired of playing serf to the state's feudal barony.

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