BTU tax

But he is not alone in his distaste for the BTU tax.

The toughest issue for me was the BTU tax.

Gore again pushed for the BTU tax, saying it would promote energy conservation and independence.

The BTU tax will survive in name, but it will look much more like a consumption tax.

In 1993, then President Bill Clinton proposed a BTU tax.

In other words, the BTU tax is the most complicated petrol tax in history.

A BTU tax is a type of energy tax (Baron, 1997, p. 14).

The BTU tax also has the advantage of being less unpopular than a petrol tax, partly because it is almost impossible to understand.

It was the BTU tax, more than anything else, which all but scuppered the budget in Congress on May 27th.

Mr Boren hopes to substitute deep spending cuts for the BTU tax.

Energy-producing states like Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas will not be the only ones hit by a BTU tax.

The BTU tax passed the House, but was rejected by the Senate in light of the lobbying effort mobilized against its adoption.

Convinced that an unreconstructed BTU tax will kill the budget in the Senate, the administration is busy signalling its willingness to compromise.

For families with incomes of $30,000 or less, the EITC would more than offset the cost of the BTU tax.

The Senate then took it up, and immediately scrapped the BTU tax in favor of a 4.3-cents-a-gallon increase in the gasoline tax and more spending cuts.

The Washington rumour mill suggests that the president secured his narrow majority only by promising all sorts of concessions on the BTU tax: trimming here, exempting there, scattering rebates everywhere.

Many of the House Democrats who voted for the tax and who lost their seats in the 1994 midterm election, blamed their loss on their vote for the BTU tax.

The bad news was that the gas tax would promote less energy conservation than the BTU tax; the good news was that it would cost middle-class Americans less, only about $33 a year.

Even the simplest VAT eats up 2-4% of its revenues in administrative costs; the BTU tax may eat up as much as 10-20%, turning it into a full-employment programme for bureaucrats.

Locals liken the potential impact of the BTU tax to the impact of the oil bust in the mid-1980s, when the oil price fell from an average of $18 a barrel in 1985 to $15.05 in 1986.

It is dubbed the BTU tax because energy can be measured in British Thermal Units: a BTU is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of a pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit.

Al said that while the BTU tax would be controversial in states that produced coal, oil, and natural gas, it would fall on all sectors of the economy, lessening the burden on ordinary consumers, and would promote energy conservation, something we badly needed more of.

A. "an outbreak of insanity in Washington" B. "the death of reason in Washington" C. "revitalization of that sleeping monster, the Energy Department" D. "an unhealthy obsession with oil industry profits" E. "revival of the Clinton-Gore BTU tax proposal" Answers are printed below.

A week later, we held a second meeting in which I abandoned the middle-class tax cuts; agreed to look at savings in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; and supported Al Gore's suggestion of a broad-based energy tax, called a BTU tax, on the heat content of energy at the wholesale level.