I’m very gung-ho on using as much of this stimulus money as possible to jumpstart a green economy. That’s actually the major shortcoming I see in most of the proposals I’ve seen on how this 500 or so billion is going to be spent. But I’m not sure I get the response to Obama’s apparent decision to shelve the windfall profits tax on the big oil companies. As the name implies, windfall profits taxes are intended to tax windfall profits. But the cost of oil has now dropped to something like a third of what it was when this idea was floated. So I’m really not getting how this is breaking a promise or currying favor with the oil companies. This seems like a pretty straightforward case of adjusting policy to take account of demonstrable and undeniable changes in the economic picture.
What am I missing?
