In 2013, Carrier won a $5.1 million “stimulus-funded tax credit from the Department of Energy — for the sole purpose of creating and maintaining green jobs in the United States.”
In other words, it was stimulus money being spent to prop up green manufacturing — yet another failure of the Obama Administration’s green agenda.
In all likelihood, no actual money changed hands; it was, after all, a tax credit, not a cash subsidy.
So Joe Donnelly needs to get off his high horse and admit that, yet again, government efforts to force manufacturers to make green products that nobody wants have failed — probably because the company couldn’t get sufficient concessions from the unions in addition to the tax credit to pay for all the expensive changes it was going to have to make to its manufacturing processes and to its products. What happened here was technically no different from GM producing the Chevy Volt and only being able to avoid terminal sticker shock by begging subsidies for buyers from its (at the time) majority stockholder, the US Government.
We paid over $7K three or four years ago to replace our furnace and air conditioner with high-efficiency Carrier equipment. I hate to think what that cost would have been for even more efficient equipment. (For historical comparison, my Dad used to install Bryant central air conditioning for just under $1,000 back in 1972. A new furnace installed at the same time jacked the price up about $200.)
Green manufacturing and green industries have not demonstrated that they can survive without massive infusions of subsidy cash. It’s time for the left to admit that, and time for us to start letting the market determine whether or not products and companies survive.
ETA: Somebody needs to ask Donnelly when Solyndra is going to pay back the $535 million in federal loan guarantees it left taxpayers holding the bag for. When he can answer that, then we can talk about the government going after Carrier for its paltry $5.1 million tax credit.