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California PG&E joins proposal to set utility rates based on income

58 points by ImOssir 3y ago

raylad 3y ago
This is a horrible proposal. Power should still cost per KWh, but that price should be the sliding scale. If there's no economic incentive to save power, people will tend to do it less.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  California has fucked up so badly by not nationalizing PG&E, and instead allow it to continue to be poorly run as a for profit enterprise while proposing and enacting suboptimal pricing dynamics and redistribution strategies for energy. If you want to help the poor, directly subsidize solar panels and batteries for them (thorough the state and federal gov, not the investor owned utility), or community utility scale renewables and storage where on site generation and storage is infeasible. (Designing a 20kw ground mount expansion for a friend outside of Sacramento on SMUD to work towards going off grid if needed)
  - ihsw 3y ago
    PG&E has made every effort to capture regulators and it has paid off handsomely -- residential solar in CA is being shut down by policy. Reducing actual demand for PG&E electricity is not in the best interest of regulators, that much is clear.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > residential solar in CA is being shut down by policy. Residential solar is being mandated by policy, slightly reducing the incentive to build it by shaving off a portion of the per kWh charge and replacing that portion with a connection fee wouldn’t kill it even if the mandate wasn’t there. Which, again, it is.
  - culturestate 3y ago
    > California has fucked up so badly by not nationalizing PG&E Is this…a thing California could even do? Is there some state-actionable version of nationalization that I’ve never heard of?
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34017163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34017163 (citations in comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34015491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34015491 (thread)
    - aidenn0 3y ago
      Most (all?) states have Eminent domain rights. They would have to pay fair-market value, but recently PG&E was bankrupt so...
      - culturestate 3y ago
        I might be wrong, but I was under the impression that eminent domain wasn’t available to states for transactions like this. A quick search turned up this article[1] talking about an attempt to do exactly what we’re talking about here, but it was ultimately settled out of court and as far as I can tell it’s still an open question as to whether a state government can legitimately exercise eminent domain in this context. 1. https://mckinneylaw.iu.edu/ilr/pdf/vol38p55.pdf https://mckinneylaw.iu.edu/ilr/pdf/vol38p55.pdf
  - danans 3y ago
    > community utility scale renewables and storage where on site generation and storage is infeasible. This can't come soon in enough in CA where a huge number of people don't have the option of rooftop solar because they are apartment and condo dwellers and/or renters. Apparently a law was finally passed in 2022 to allow community solar [1], but Energy Sage community solar searches [2] turn up nothing in any of the populous zip codes I entered. 1. https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/electrical-energy/demand-side-management/community-solar-in-california https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/electrical-ene... 2. https://www.energysage.com/local-data/community-solar/ca/ https://www.energysage.com/local-data/community-solar/ca/
  - wyager 3y ago
    > instead allow it to continue to be poorly run as a for profit enterprise The Californian government is famous for all its well-run programs. "The trains are always on time in California", as they say.
- jwagenet 3y ago
  Is there a risk if rates are too low with a transition to residential/on-site solar that PGE will further be unable to afford critical maintenance? Although transition to EVs may mitigate a drop in grid consumption due to solar.
- vasco 3y ago
  I agree but if you read the article you see this is a measure on top, not of instead of per usage.
- zamalek 3y ago
  The problem is that you aren't paying for kWh alone (about 20% of your bill goes to that), you are also paying for grid maintenance. With people (typically well-off people) going solar the money for grid maintenance needs to come from somewhere. I support the goal here, but I don't like the implementation. Something such as a fixed monthly cost for grid-tied systems would make much more sense.
- danans 3y ago
  > This is a horrible proposal. Power should still cost per KWh, but that price should be the sliding scale. Both of those things are still true in this proposal - it's not proposing a fixed price for electricity based on income. Electricity will still be priced per kWh (although at a slightly lower rate) over and above the flat income-based fee, and the price will continue to vary by time of day (AKA time-of-use) instead of by income. The income-based fees will cover all the state-mandated programs run by the utilities to provide support for low-income residents, among other things. Yes, that's effectively a redistributive tax that should be done via regular state legislation and state programs to help lower income people install solar and batteries, thereby increasing their resilience and decreasing their dependency on utility rates. But such measures are unpopular because nobody will vote for a tax raise to help poor people pay for equipment to help them save money on electricity bills. That's a privilege for the well-off. These issues are left between the conflicting interests of a shareholder owned utility and the state.
- abeppu 3y ago
  The authors _want_ you to use more power. But they think it's going to be in the form of buying an EV or an electric furnace, as versus just running your AC more days per year. They frame this specifically in terms of meeting our carbon emission targets. But this only can work if (a) most of the increased electricity use is supplanting fossil fuel use and (b) they can bring more green power sources online faster than people's electricity use increases. > Achievement of California’s GHG reduction goals increasingly require more electricity consumption via building electrification and electric vehicle (EV) adoption. It is imperative that the Commission takes steps to reduce volumetric rates. IGFCs can reduce volumetric rates in a manner that eases affordability pressures on low-income customers and improve access to electrification, when done correctly. from pages 4-5 of this doc: https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/-/media/cpuc-website/divisions/energy-division/documents/demand-response/demand-response-workshops/advanced-der---demand-flexibility-management/public-advocates-opening-testimony---rate-design.pdf https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/-/media/cpuc-website/divisions/energ...
- systemvoltage 3y ago
  Why should we conserve energy? Why is it “morally wrong” to use massive amount of energy? Shouldn’t we make energy immeasurably abundant and essentially free? Are we going to run out of Sun? It seems like with the criticism of non-renewables, the current zeitgeist has convinced everyone of degrowth ideology wholesale. The debate about renewables and non-renewables is orthogonal. Humans IMO should have an ambition to consume all the wasted energy radiating out in outerspace by the Sun and capture it for our use. Energy conservation has religious cult-like faith-based undercurrents. Brainwashed.
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    > Are we going to run out of Sun? No, but this is the same orgiastic mentality that prevailed when oil was cheap in the 90s. It bit us in the ass when demand increased. Just because capacity exists doesn't mean we should maximize usage. > consume all the wasted energy radiating out in outerspace That's not wasted, it's just not captured. Capturing it requires strip-mining of the planet for the materials needed to build the damn panels, just so we can do dumb shit like generating fake money and running air conditioners with the windows open because it has no apparent cost to us ("free energy from the sun!"). Your logic literally drove the buffalo to near-extinction. People were killing and leaving them for dead just because they could. It's parasitic behavior.
    - systemvoltage 3y ago
      Your logic is literally going to lead to depopulation of millions. Conserving the buffalo is completely orthogonal and completely unrelated to what I am saying; a strawman.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Power should still cost per KW It will under the proposal, though that cost is less than without it. Its splitting the rate to a fixed and variable component, not going all fixed. > If there's no economic incentive to save power, people will tend to do it less. Part of this is shifting incentives from non-electric-grid energy use (natural gas appliances, ICE cars) to grid electricity use (electric appliances, BEV cars). We don't want people to save grid electricity by using more polluting energy sources, and overpricing per-kW grid use incentivizes that undesirable behavior.
MostlyStable 3y ago
I'm a fan of having a fixed connection fee. But varying it by income seems stupid. Why are you making transfer payments so complicated? If poor people in the state need more money, then just do that. This adds needless overhead and is unnecessarily complicated. Poor people pay a higher proportion of their income on _lots_ of things and it would be assinine to try and price every single one of them based on income rather than just doing a single, simple transfer payment.
- itake 3y ago
  Exactly! They should just lower taxes on poor people and increase taxes on rich people. No need to create administration overhead and costs (sucking more value from poor people). This seems so obvious, but I am curious why someone thinks this is a good idea? My only guess is the people driving this change don't have the power to do it 'right' so this is the closest they can do?
  - MostlyStable 3y ago
    If it was anywhere other than CA, I'd guess that this was the only way they thought they could pass increased transfer payments. But with the current power balance in CA, I find that hard to believe. Maybe they just think this will be more politically palatable than changing taxes? If so, I'm skeptical it will work out for them. This is pretty blatantly obvious.
    - Guvante 3y ago
      Honestly it looks like Power companies trying to get a fixed payment predicting that their costs will go down overtime leading to a net win for them.
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        It moves part of the rate to a fixed payment, and its still subject to the usual periodic CPUC rate process, which includes cost analysis, so if their costs really were going down, they’d see the rates cut. The point is to deal better with the economics of established widespread distributed generation and to avoid disencentives to displacing existing residential gas use with electricity, and to similarly improve the incentive structure of home-charged BEVs vs. gasoline vehicles. Doing that takes splitting payment for generation (per kW) from connectivity (fixed) rather than inflating per kW costs to capture the average costs of connectivity.
throwaway5959 3y ago
This would raise our energy bill by 25%. It’s already absurd as it is.
- swarnie 3y ago
  In reality what do you pay for energy? a 25% hike sounds blissful compared to northern Europe last year. Just checking this isn't another situation where gas went from 8c/l to 11c/l and every lost their minds.
  - Xorakios 3y ago
    73cents/kwh in Palm Springs, CA is very common for peak pricing
  - throwaway5959 3y ago
    Hundreds of dollars a month for a 2 br condo.
  - buzer 3y ago
    Tier 1 rate for me is currently about $0.35/kwh and tier 2 about $0.41/kwh from PG&E. They don't directly tell you the transmission cost, but about $0.145/kwh comes from generation. For my 1 br apartment living alone the total bill has been about $100-$150 but can jump to up to $250 during summer months. Sounds like this will almost double my costs for most of the year.
- bonestamp2 3y ago
  For most months, this would raise my bill by 50%. Easy solution though, I simply won't tell my electric company what my income is. Surely the government won't hand over this info, right? Right?
  - kinghajj 3y ago
    I think their plan is to charge the highest fee by default, unless forms to validate placement at a lower fee tier is submitted.
Ancalagon 3y ago
Huge kick in the nuts for everyone that installed solar. Especially those of us in San Diego county.
- midasuni 3y ago
  How much do you need the grid vs storage in winter? Can you increase your generation?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Ancalagon 3y ago
    I would need to install a battery. The generation even in winter is plenty for our needs.
    - midasuni 3y ago
      Seems that 30kWh of batteries would be enough to take you off grid completely?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  >Huge kick in the nuts for everyone that installed solar. Especially those of us in San Diego county How so? Did you not invest in solar in order to decrease your carbon footprint? If you did it to save money, the evidence is pretty clear that without subsidies a lot of green industries are unsustainable. Government policy can change on a whim.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    This sort of smug "Did you not invest in solar in order to decrease your carbon footprint?" with the implied "Why did you expect it to save you money?" argument is not going to be productive if your goal is reducing emissions. Selling solar as a means to lower your costs in an environmentally friendly way, then raising prices in a way that cancels out those savings and smugly telling angry people that they were supposed to do it for the environment without concern for cost to themselves is only going to make them less receptive to your cause.
downWidOutaFite 3y ago
One consequence of this is that it's going to kill rooftop solar. I was about to enter a $30k contract for solar, heat pump, and other upgrades but I backed out when I heard this news. Thats $30k not being invested into clean energy for California. It was kind of shady how everybody was rushing to get solar earlier this year so they could get grandfathered in before NEM 3 took effect, making all these complicated long-term ROI calculations, but this other new policy that would invalidate all those calculations was kept secret until after NEM 3 took effect.
- creato 3y ago
  I don’t know, I think this proposal means a neighborhood scale “grid” + solar + batteries is cheaper than PGE for a high income area. What happens to the grid when it’s only poor people left connected to it?
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    Private opulence and public squalor.
    - downWidOutaFite 3y ago
      How is solar opulence? It runs the toaster just the same as pge's power. I don't really gain anything out of investing 10s of thousands into clean energy. I'm basically paying a decade of utility bills up front in order to burn less co2.
      - aidenn0 3y ago
        The hypothetical series of events is like this: 1. PG&E adds a monthly surcharge that disproportionately affects those with high incomes 2. This makes those with high incomes switch to off-grid to avoid the surcharge 3. Assuming that high-income is a decent proxy for politically influential, now nobody who is politically influential cares if the grid is properly maintained 4. The poor now have an unreliable grid, while the wealthy are off-grid.
- 3y ago
gustavus 3y ago
From the article > In the power companies’ joint submission to the California Public Utilities Commission, they suggest these fixed fees for each customer’s income range. > Households with incomes earning less than $28,000 a year would pay a $15 monthly fee in the Edison and PG&E service territories and a $24 monthly fee in SDG&E service territory. > Households earning $28,000 to $69,000 a year would pay $20 to Edison, $30 to PG&E or $34 to SDG&E each month. Households earning $69,000 to $180,000 would pay $51 to Edison or PG&E, or $73 to SDG&E. > Households earning more than $180,000 would pay $85 to Edison, $92 to PG&E or $128 to SDG&E. Additional quotes that for some reason seem funny to me from the article. > But the utility companies say the measure would reduce electricity bills for the lowest income customers. Those residents would save about $300 per year, utilities estimate. > California households earning more than $180,000 a year would end up paying an average of $500 more a year on their electricity bills, according to the proposal from utility companies. It seems like this is just a fee the utilities companies want to charge that is based on income. Am I misunderstanding that? Is this intended to incentivize something or help anyone? It just seems to give more money to the utility companies.
- hedora 3y ago
  Ok, so taking the difference between the second lowest band (which is probably the fair price) and the highest, that’s $62/month extra for rich people to pay. That’s $744 a year. The incremental cost of going full off grid vs. solar + batteries is about $20K. So, if this were the only way PG&E screwed over you, it would take 26.4 years for a full off grid system to pay for itself. I’d guess the true time to ROI will be under 10 years if this passes. At that point, the grid will probably start a death spiral, just like the landline phone network.
  - abeppu 3y ago
    But if you already have a substantial PV setup, and you're within shooting distance of providing power to cover your own use, it may be come worth it to expand (or decrease your use) if you're faced with paying $1536/year (128 * 12) just for being connected to the grid.
- 3y ago
iamleppert 3y ago
Note this is a brand new fee that just so happens to be based off income. It has absolutely nothing to do with making energy cheaper for poor people. Gotta love California! Brought to you by the same people who charge for license plate stickers based on the value of the car.
- sparker72678 3y ago
  Interesting. Do other states not tax registration based on the value of the vehicle in some way? I don't live in California, but my registration is variable to the value of the car.
  - ericmcer 3y ago
    Some do a flat fee, others do a weight based fee (which is logical for offsetting road repair costs), CA does a value based fee. Value based is definitely the option to get as much money as possible out of citizens.
no_wizard 3y ago
>Some state Republican lawmakers are warning the changes could produce unintended results, such as weakening incentives to conserve electricity or raising costs for customers using solar energy. Finally on the right side of history these guys. In this instance, they're right. It makes the economic incentives to conserve electricity and invest in rooftop solar completely backward. You're undermining conservation efforts and clean energy all in one swoop, just so more profits can be reaped by the power companies
- paxys 3y ago
  Now ask these Republicans what they think about nationalizing this utility company which is in charge of providing power to most of the state vs having it run as a private for-profit enterprise.
  - polski-g 3y ago
    Has the Californian government proved to you that they would be a good steward of a state-run energy utility?
- bonestamp2 3y ago
  I guess time will tell if they're right or not. I do think they're on to something, or at least the utilities are wrong about something. The utilities are pulling the same move the cable companies did -- rapidly increasing prices as competition (solar in this case) encroaches on their turf. It's a classic attempt to increase short term profits while ignoring the long term effects, not to mention doing it in the most lazy way possible (increasing the price instead of lowering costs). If they anger all of their rich customers they will drive them away even faster (to solar and batteries, and they won't even need to be on the grid). I'm sure with regulatory capture they'll be able to get a law passed that requires houses to be connected (and pay the $95+ fees every month), if they haven't done that already.
theptip 3y ago
In general I think you should push your redistributive interventions into the system as early as possible, rather than distorting the market. Just reduce the income tax on low-income households, don’t make it harder for every business to operate by adding pricing complexity! Add a UBI or negative income tax if you need to get more coverage for under-/un-employed. I think the overhead of interventions like this is strongly under appreciated.
thereisnospork 3y ago
Nothing more California than funneling middle-class money upwards under the pretense of doing it for the poor. Taxing people to pay other people's PG+E because PG+E is too expensive is asinine, its just a windfall for PG+E with no economic justification. The correct lesson is to make power (et al.) affordable[0]: Tax people to make electricity cheaper - sure, but cheaper prices would mean PG+E makes less money. [0]Like it is in much of the country
Justin_K 3y ago
What a load of garbage. This only increases revenue for the utilities and government. It does nothing to lower costs for low income customers.
zapdrive 3y ago
[flagged]
paxys 3y ago
One part of the article says that there will be a single flat fee for low income residents, but later the same article says that the there will also be a variable charge based on usage. So which one is it?
- mistercheph 3y ago
  It's both. Residents will pay both a variable charge based on usage and a flat fee to PG&E.
coding123 3y ago
How are they going to know your salary?
- quickthrowman 3y ago
  State income tax returns…
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Yep, I would bet the state revenue service will set up a system that allows the utility company to query income information and go off of that. If they don't already have the customer's SSN they will have to collect that, but I'd guess they already have it (in part so they could run a credit check).
bob1029 3y ago
The only fair system is to make everyone pay in (near) real-time for the actual cost relative to demand. Everything else is ultimately going to rip off some party (whether they are a party you like or not is irrelevant). Basic physics is fairly strict about all of this. Some of us were briefly allowed to do this in Texas (and presumably some other regions). I was on griddy for a few years and was strongly incentivized to pay attention to my consumption patterns. My bill "ticked" every 5 minutes. Nothing educated me more about how much power my appliances suck down than a proper, real-time variable rate plan. Any other form of conservation "education" is going to pale in comparison to real time economic pressure. If you had a lot of time to worry about money, you could make your power bill cheaper than a MVNO phone bill. The reason some think variable rates are broken or won't work could probably be traced back to the fact that very few grid participants (outside of a few industrial partners) are impacted by the actual, real-time cost of electricity. The thing that pissed me off more than anything was watching the politicians in my state cast variable rate plans as an attack on the poor. Nothing could be further from the truth in my own mind, but only if one is willing to explore the incentives & side effects at every step along the way.
- danaris 3y ago
  > The only fair system is to make everyone pay in (near) real-time for the actual cost relative to demand. That's only "fair" if you're limiting your view to the specific transaction at hand. The reason we try to make systems like this is because many of us recognize that when you zoom out, your definition of "fairness" has to change. If you look at the whole current socioeconomic system, it's very clear that it is not fair to charge a family of 5 living on a minimum-wage salary (or even two or three) the same amount for a basic necessity like power as you charge a Silicon Valley billionaire—unless the amount you're charging is zero.
  - wyager 3y ago
    The only useful definitions of fairness are those that produce prosocial incentives. Your definition does not.
- thereisnospork 3y ago
abeppu 3y ago
I spent some time digging into this a while back. I think this is a really poorly thought-out policy, in part b/c it's conflating three separate issues: 1. Low and moderate income families should be able to afford their energy bill, and the "basic" energy use going forward may need to be higher esp as people need AC more of the year, etc. 2. There's a push to move people off natural gas appliances and onto electric appliances sooner rather than later, with the intention that eventually almost all of that electricity would be from green sources, and similarly to encourage people to switch to EVs. In order to do that, they partly want the marginal cost of electricity to be lower for everyone, even for people who end up paying more per month than they do currently. Everyone's supposed to feel an incentive to switch appliances. 3. There's a claim that the current pricing structure means that people with PV setups aren't paying their fair share for grid/infrastructure maintenance. Paying ~$0 for power b/c you use ~0 kwh shifts the 'burden' for maintaining the grid to people that don't have the ability to install solar. You can be in support of point 1 ... but we already have subsidies for low-income residents. If we need to expand those, we should have those conversations! But part 2, lowering the marginal cost of power by use has multiple downsides: - it _does_ penalize people who conserve energy. My own PG&E bill may roughly triple, in a small, well-insulated urban condo without AC. And because the income brackets are _so wide_, someone who makes substantially more money and who uses substantially more energy (e.g. private pool, EV, large house) can see their bill _decrease_ due to this change! - it's not clear that incentivizing people to replace appliances (or vehicles) before the end of their useful lives is a net carbon-saving move; the intrinsic carbon is real - for the medium term, a substantial fraction of CA power does still does come from natural gas; increasing home electricity use which does not replace home natural gas use (e.g. just running your AC more days b/c it becomes cheaper) will in some cases mean _more_ emissions - as an incentive structure, it's not even clearly effective; e.g. landlords won't be pushed meaningfully to update appliances which would lower their tenants energy bills - if it worked really well, and everyone tried to move to all electric appliances and EVs next year, the grid may not be able to handle it anyway Part 3 is a concern, but I don't think this is the way to address it. This says that people making over 180k would be paying up to $1536 just to be connected to the grid, before they draw their first kwh of power. People who are within reach of generating enough power to live off of will be nudged to consider disconnecting entirely. If they take that exit ramp, are the rest of us better off in any way? Lastly, of course, a fee that basically everyone in the state will be obliged to pay, which is based on income ... seems a lot like an income tax, but it's going to a private company. In my case, that company is a felon with multiple convictions.
spacedcowboy 3y ago
[rant start] I have powerwalls because PG&E are fricking terrible at actually supplying power. Doing a quick check on the app shows me I have had 10 power outages this year so far, with the longest being >24 hours. If PG&E want to charge me an extra $500/year (their estimate, so double that in reality) then they ought to get their service working better first. It's a rare day that the outage tracker on their website shows no outages... Perhaps if they invested the money into infrastructure instead of executive bonuses, their service might work better. [rant end]
- deleted 3y ago
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vladslav 3y ago
I see in this a subliminal message - "We are full. Move out of the state." There is not enough electricity for everybody, and it seems like conservation is not an option. So these companies will try to squeeze the working class even more. The problem, there is not enough juice left for me to give.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > There is not enough electricity for everybody, and it seems like conservation is not an option. That is not the issue. The issue is that distributed generation (i.e., rooftop solar) has become so popular that charging only by per-kW charges has become a subsidy from working class (who are less likely to participate in such generation) to wealthier segments who do. > So these companies will try to squeeze the working class even more. This proposal would reduce total bills for the working class, by splitting the rate into a mix of fixed fee and a (lower than current) is per-kW rate, and giving the working class a discount on the fixed fee. It would raise total costs for those generating their own power (because of lower per-kW rates) and for the wealthy (who would pay above the average cost on the fixed fee, and particularly on people who are both.) This would reduce the incentive to new distributed generation slightly (but then, given that both widespread adoption has been achieved and there is now a residential construction mandate for that, the effect of incentives is less.)
  - vladslav 3y ago
    > This proposal would reduce total bills for the working class. I sure hope so, but I still doubt whether it will happen. I'm sorry for my ignorance on the topic, and I need to research it more. But it is counter-intuitive to me. We pay much more than the rest of the country already. We are the utility's source of revenue. We should get a fair price if we generate enough electricity through solar and other means by switching to market rates. Why can't they just adjust the expense for those who generate electricity? Or directly lower the incentive by removing tax cuts and credits since the widespread adoption is ongoing anyway. I am still trying to understand why I have to share costs with wealthy people without clear benefits.
horsawlarway 3y ago
Seems like a poorly planned and badly designed program to me. It introduces fixed fees to bolster a private utility with little oversight. I struggle to understand why California allows its utilities to behave the way they do. Any time the vested interest is saying that its own pricing structure is unjust and needs to be amended... and that the change is "unlikely to increase or decrease its profit" you should be reeling from the amount of bullshit in the air.
ralph84 3y ago
Every business wants to price discriminate in order to capture consumer surplus as revenue. This is just another way for PG&E to leverage their monopoly to price discriminate.
deleted 3y ago
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NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
I draw benefits from a number of federal entitlements, and that means I need to supply full details of my financial records to these offices on a regular basis. This includes paystubs, bank statements, letter of income from friends or family. Whenever I fill this stuff out, I feel vulnerable and exposed. This is way more than anyone needs to share with the IRS or anyone else. I've declined financial assistance from hospitals because they'd need to dig deeply into my finances the same way. This may be a great way to tax the rich and stick it to Elon Musk, but I feel like any such program had better be optional, and what happens to all those juicy financial records they receive, when they start leaking?
morninglight 3y ago
Maybe they should base the rates on net worth.
- akomtu 3y ago
  If the poor could tax the rich, they wouldn't be poor.
aidenn0 3y ago
Doesn't every business wish they could charge rich people more than poor people?
scoofy 3y ago
This is about incentivizing folks to switch from natural gas appliances to electric appliances. Anyone in the thread who is saying the plan is "insane" clearly doesn't understand it. There are plenty of reasons to discuss why it's imperfect, but the folks screaming bloody murder obviously haven't looked at it or considered the second-order effects this will create.

58 points by ImOssir 3y ago

This is a horrible proposal. Power should still cost per KWh, but that price should be the sliding scale. If there's no economic incentive to save power, people will tend to do it less.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
California has fucked up so badly by not nationalizing PG&E, and instead allow it to continue to be poorly run as a for profit enterprise while proposing and enacting suboptimal pricing dynamics and redistribution strategies for energy. If you want to help the poor, directly subsidize solar panels and batteries for them (thorough the state and federal gov, not the investor owned utility), or community utility scale renewables and storage where on site generation and storage is infeasible. (Designing a 20kw ground mount expansion for a friend outside of Sacramento on SMUD to work towards going off grid if needed)
- ihsw 3y ago
  PG&E has made every effort to capture regulators and it has paid off handsomely -- residential solar in CA is being shut down by policy. Reducing actual demand for PG&E electricity is not in the best interest of regulators, that much is clear.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > residential solar in CA is being shut down by policy. Residential solar is being mandated by policy, slightly reducing the incentive to build it by shaving off a portion of the per kWh charge and replacing that portion with a connection fee wouldn’t kill it even if the mandate wasn’t there. Which, again, it is.
- culturestate 3y ago
  > California has fucked up so badly by not nationalizing PG&E Is this…a thing California could even do? Is there some state-actionable version of nationalization that I’ve never heard of?
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34017163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34017163 (citations in comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34015491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34015491 (thread)
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    Most (all?) states have Eminent domain rights. They would have to pay fair-market value, but recently PG&E was bankrupt so...
    - culturestate 3y ago
      I might be wrong, but I was under the impression that eminent domain wasn’t available to states for transactions like this. A quick search turned up this article[1] talking about an attempt to do exactly what we’re talking about here, but it was ultimately settled out of court and as far as I can tell it’s still an open question as to whether a state government can legitimately exercise eminent domain in this context. 1. https://mckinneylaw.iu.edu/ilr/pdf/vol38p55.pdf https://mckinneylaw.iu.edu/ilr/pdf/vol38p55.pdf
- danans 3y ago
  > community utility scale renewables and storage where on site generation and storage is infeasible. This can't come soon in enough in CA where a huge number of people don't have the option of rooftop solar because they are apartment and condo dwellers and/or renters. Apparently a law was finally passed in 2022 to allow community solar [1], but Energy Sage community solar searches [2] turn up nothing in any of the populous zip codes I entered. 1. https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/electrical-energy/demand-side-management/community-solar-in-california https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/electrical-ene... 2. https://www.energysage.com/local-data/community-solar/ca/ https://www.energysage.com/local-data/community-solar/ca/
- wyager 3y ago
  > instead allow it to continue to be poorly run as a for profit enterprise The Californian government is famous for all its well-run programs. "The trains are always on time in California", as they say.
jwagenet 3y ago
Is there a risk if rates are too low with a transition to residential/on-site solar that PGE will further be unable to afford critical maintenance? Although transition to EVs may mitigate a drop in grid consumption due to solar.
vasco 3y ago
I agree but if you read the article you see this is a measure on top, not of instead of per usage.
zamalek 3y ago
The problem is that you aren't paying for kWh alone (about 20% of your bill goes to that), you are also paying for grid maintenance. With people (typically well-off people) going solar the money for grid maintenance needs to come from somewhere. I support the goal here, but I don't like the implementation. Something such as a fixed monthly cost for grid-tied systems would make much more sense.
danans 3y ago
> This is a horrible proposal. Power should still cost per KWh, but that price should be the sliding scale. Both of those things are still true in this proposal - it's not proposing a fixed price for electricity based on income. Electricity will still be priced per kWh (although at a slightly lower rate) over and above the flat income-based fee, and the price will continue to vary by time of day (AKA time-of-use) instead of by income. The income-based fees will cover all the state-mandated programs run by the utilities to provide support for low-income residents, among other things. Yes, that's effectively a redistributive tax that should be done via regular state legislation and state programs to help lower income people install solar and batteries, thereby increasing their resilience and decreasing their dependency on utility rates. But such measures are unpopular because nobody will vote for a tax raise to help poor people pay for equipment to help them save money on electricity bills. That's a privilege for the well-off. These issues are left between the conflicting interests of a shareholder owned utility and the state.
abeppu 3y ago
The authors _want_ you to use more power. But they think it's going to be in the form of buying an EV or an electric furnace, as versus just running your AC more days per year. They frame this specifically in terms of meeting our carbon emission targets. But this only can work if (a) most of the increased electricity use is supplanting fossil fuel use and (b) they can bring more green power sources online faster than people's electricity use increases. > Achievement of California’s GHG reduction goals increasingly require more electricity consumption via building electrification and electric vehicle (EV) adoption. It is imperative that the Commission takes steps to reduce volumetric rates. IGFCs can reduce volumetric rates in a manner that eases affordability pressures on low-income customers and improve access to electrification, when done correctly. from pages 4-5 of this doc: https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/-/media/cpuc-website/divisions/energy-division/documents/demand-response/demand-response-workshops/advanced-der---demand-flexibility-management/public-advocates-opening-testimony---rate-design.pdf https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/-/media/cpuc-website/divisions/energ...
systemvoltage 3y ago
Why should we conserve energy? Why is it “morally wrong” to use massive amount of energy? Shouldn’t we make energy immeasurably abundant and essentially free? Are we going to run out of Sun? It seems like with the criticism of non-renewables, the current zeitgeist has convinced everyone of degrowth ideology wholesale. The debate about renewables and non-renewables is orthogonal. Humans IMO should have an ambition to consume all the wasted energy radiating out in outerspace by the Sun and capture it for our use. Energy conservation has religious cult-like faith-based undercurrents. Brainwashed.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  > Are we going to run out of Sun? No, but this is the same orgiastic mentality that prevailed when oil was cheap in the 90s. It bit us in the ass when demand increased. Just because capacity exists doesn't mean we should maximize usage. > consume all the wasted energy radiating out in outerspace That's not wasted, it's just not captured. Capturing it requires strip-mining of the planet for the materials needed to build the damn panels, just so we can do dumb shit like generating fake money and running air conditioners with the windows open because it has no apparent cost to us ("free energy from the sun!"). Your logic literally drove the buffalo to near-extinction. People were killing and leaving them for dead just because they could. It's parasitic behavior.
  - systemvoltage 3y ago
    Your logic is literally going to lead to depopulation of millions. Conserving the buffalo is completely orthogonal and completely unrelated to what I am saying; a strawman.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Power should still cost per KW It will under the proposal, though that cost is less than without it. Its splitting the rate to a fixed and variable component, not going all fixed. > If there's no economic incentive to save power, people will tend to do it less. Part of this is shifting incentives from non-electric-grid energy use (natural gas appliances, ICE cars) to grid electricity use (electric appliances, BEV cars). We don't want people to save grid electricity by using more polluting energy sources, and overpricing per-kW grid use incentivizes that undesirable behavior.

MostlyStable 3y ago

I'm a fan of having a fixed connection fee. But varying it by income seems stupid. Why are you making transfer payments so complicated? If poor people in the state need more money, then just do that. This adds needless overhead and is unnecessarily complicated. Poor people pay a higher proportion of their income on _lots_ of things and it would be assinine to try and price every single one of them based on income rather than just doing a single, simple transfer payment.

itake 3y ago
Exactly! They should just lower taxes on poor people and increase taxes on rich people. No need to create administration overhead and costs (sucking more value from poor people). This seems so obvious, but I am curious why someone thinks this is a good idea? My only guess is the people driving this change don't have the power to do it 'right' so this is the closest they can do?
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  If it was anywhere other than CA, I'd guess that this was the only way they thought they could pass increased transfer payments. But with the current power balance in CA, I find that hard to believe. Maybe they just think this will be more politically palatable than changing taxes? If so, I'm skeptical it will work out for them. This is pretty blatantly obvious.
  - Guvante 3y ago
    Honestly it looks like Power companies trying to get a fixed payment predicting that their costs will go down overtime leading to a net win for them.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      It moves part of the rate to a fixed payment, and its still subject to the usual periodic CPUC rate process, which includes cost analysis, so if their costs really were going down, they’d see the rates cut. The point is to deal better with the economics of established widespread distributed generation and to avoid disencentives to displacing existing residential gas use with electricity, and to similarly improve the incentive structure of home-charged BEVs vs. gasoline vehicles. Doing that takes splitting payment for generation (per kW) from connectivity (fixed) rather than inflating per kW costs to capture the average costs of connectivity.

throwaway5959 3y ago

This would raise our energy bill by 25%. It’s already absurd as it is.

swarnie 3y ago
In reality what do you pay for energy? a 25% hike sounds blissful compared to northern Europe last year. Just checking this isn't another situation where gas went from 8c/l to 11c/l and every lost their minds.
- Xorakios 3y ago
  73cents/kwh in Palm Springs, CA is very common for peak pricing
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  Hundreds of dollars a month for a 2 br condo.
- buzer 3y ago
  Tier 1 rate for me is currently about $0.35/kwh and tier 2 about $0.41/kwh from PG&E. They don't directly tell you the transmission cost, but about $0.145/kwh comes from generation. For my 1 br apartment living alone the total bill has been about $100-$150 but can jump to up to $250 during summer months. Sounds like this will almost double my costs for most of the year.
bonestamp2 3y ago
For most months, this would raise my bill by 50%. Easy solution though, I simply won't tell my electric company what my income is. Surely the government won't hand over this info, right? Right?
- kinghajj 3y ago
  I think their plan is to charge the highest fee by default, unless forms to validate placement at a lower fee tier is submitted.

Ancalagon 3y ago

Huge kick in the nuts for everyone that installed solar. Especially those of us in San Diego county.

midasuni 3y ago
How much do you need the grid vs storage in winter? Can you increase your generation?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Ancalagon 3y ago
  I would need to install a battery. The generation even in winter is plenty for our needs.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    Seems that 30kWh of batteries would be enough to take you off grid completely?
deleted 3y ago
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itsoktocry 3y ago
>Huge kick in the nuts for everyone that installed solar. Especially those of us in San Diego county How so? Did you not invest in solar in order to decrease your carbon footprint? If you did it to save money, the evidence is pretty clear that without subsidies a lot of green industries are unsustainable. Government policy can change on a whim.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  This sort of smug "Did you not invest in solar in order to decrease your carbon footprint?" with the implied "Why did you expect it to save you money?" argument is not going to be productive if your goal is reducing emissions. Selling solar as a means to lower your costs in an environmentally friendly way, then raising prices in a way that cancels out those savings and smugly telling angry people that they were supposed to do it for the environment without concern for cost to themselves is only going to make them less receptive to your cause.

downWidOutaFite 3y ago

One consequence of this is that it's going to kill rooftop solar. I was about to enter a $30k contract for solar, heat pump, and other upgrades but I backed out when I heard this news. Thats $30k not being invested into clean energy for California. It was kind of shady how everybody was rushing to get solar earlier this year so they could get grandfathered in before NEM 3 took effect, making all these complicated long-term ROI calculations, but this other new policy that would invalidate all those calculations was kept secret until after NEM 3 took effect.

creato 3y ago
I don’t know, I think this proposal means a neighborhood scale “grid” + solar + batteries is cheaper than PGE for a high income area. What happens to the grid when it’s only poor people left connected to it?
- aidenn0 3y ago
  Private opulence and public squalor.
  - downWidOutaFite 3y ago
    How is solar opulence? It runs the toaster just the same as pge's power. I don't really gain anything out of investing 10s of thousands into clean energy. I'm basically paying a decade of utility bills up front in order to burn less co2.
    - aidenn0 3y ago
      The hypothetical series of events is like this: 1. PG&E adds a monthly surcharge that disproportionately affects those with high incomes 2. This makes those with high incomes switch to off-grid to avoid the surcharge 3. Assuming that high-income is a decent proxy for politically influential, now nobody who is politically influential cares if the grid is properly maintained 4. The poor now have an unreliable grid, while the wealthy are off-grid.
3y ago

gustavus 3y ago

From the article > In the power companies’ joint submission to the California Public Utilities Commission, they suggest these fixed fees for each customer’s income range. > Households with incomes earning less than $28,000 a year would pay a $15 monthly fee in the Edison and PG&E service territories and a $24 monthly fee in SDG&E service territory. > Households earning $28,000 to $69,000 a year would pay $20 to Edison, $30 to PG&E or $34 to SDG&E each month. Households earning $69,000 to $180,000 would pay $51 to Edison or PG&E, or $73 to SDG&E. > Households earning more than $180,000 would pay $85 to Edison, $92 to PG&E or $128 to SDG&E. Additional quotes that for some reason seem funny to me from the article. > But the utility companies say the measure would reduce electricity bills for the lowest income customers. Those residents would save about $300 per year, utilities estimate. > California households earning more than $180,000 a year would end up paying an average of $500 more a year on their electricity bills, according to the proposal from utility companies. It seems like this is just a fee the utilities companies want to charge that is based on income. Am I misunderstanding that? Is this intended to incentivize something or help anyone? It just seems to give more money to the utility companies.

hedora 3y ago
Ok, so taking the difference between the second lowest band (which is probably the fair price) and the highest, that’s $62/month extra for rich people to pay. That’s $744 a year. The incremental cost of going full off grid vs. solar + batteries is about $20K. So, if this were the only way PG&E screwed over you, it would take 26.4 years for a full off grid system to pay for itself. I’d guess the true time to ROI will be under 10 years if this passes. At that point, the grid will probably start a death spiral, just like the landline phone network.
- abeppu 3y ago
  But if you already have a substantial PV setup, and you're within shooting distance of providing power to cover your own use, it may be come worth it to expand (or decrease your use) if you're faced with paying $1536/year (128 * 12) just for being connected to the grid.
3y ago

iamleppert 3y ago

Note this is a brand new fee that just so happens to be based off income. It has absolutely nothing to do with making energy cheaper for poor people. Gotta love California! Brought to you by the same people who charge for license plate stickers based on the value of the car.

sparker72678 3y ago
Interesting. Do other states not tax registration based on the value of the vehicle in some way? I don't live in California, but my registration is variable to the value of the car.
- ericmcer 3y ago
  Some do a flat fee, others do a weight based fee (which is logical for offsetting road repair costs), CA does a value based fee. Value based is definitely the option to get as much money as possible out of citizens.

no_wizard 3y ago

>Some state Republican lawmakers are warning the changes could produce unintended results, such as weakening incentives to conserve electricity or raising costs for customers using solar energy. Finally on the right side of history these guys. In this instance, they're right. It makes the economic incentives to conserve electricity and invest in rooftop solar completely backward. You're undermining conservation efforts and clean energy all in one swoop, just so more profits can be reaped by the power companies

paxys 3y ago
Now ask these Republicans what they think about nationalizing this utility company which is in charge of providing power to most of the state vs having it run as a private for-profit enterprise.
- polski-g 3y ago
  Has the Californian government proved to you that they would be a good steward of a state-run energy utility?
bonestamp2 3y ago
I guess time will tell if they're right or not. I do think they're on to something, or at least the utilities are wrong about something. The utilities are pulling the same move the cable companies did -- rapidly increasing prices as competition (solar in this case) encroaches on their turf. It's a classic attempt to increase short term profits while ignoring the long term effects, not to mention doing it in the most lazy way possible (increasing the price instead of lowering costs). If they anger all of their rich customers they will drive them away even faster (to solar and batteries, and they won't even need to be on the grid). I'm sure with regulatory capture they'll be able to get a law passed that requires houses to be connected (and pay the $95+ fees every month), if they haven't done that already.

theptip 3y ago

In general I think you should push your redistributive interventions into the system as early as possible, rather than distorting the market. Just reduce the income tax on low-income households, don’t make it harder for every business to operate by adding pricing complexity! Add a UBI or negative income tax if you need to get more coverage for under-/un-employed. I think the overhead of interventions like this is strongly under appreciated.

thereisnospork 3y ago

Nothing more California than funneling middle-class money upwards under the pretense of doing it for the poor. Taxing people to pay other people's PG+E because PG+E is too expensive is asinine, its just a windfall for PG+E with no economic justification. The correct lesson is to make power (et al.) affordable[0]: Tax people to make electricity cheaper - sure, but cheaper prices would mean PG+E makes less money. [0]Like it is in much of the country

Justin_K 3y ago

What a load of garbage. This only increases revenue for the utilities and government. It does nothing to lower costs for low income customers.

zapdrive 3y ago

[flagged]

paxys 3y ago

One part of the article says that there will be a single flat fee for low income residents, but later the same article says that the there will also be a variable charge based on usage. So which one is it?

mistercheph 3y ago
It's both. Residents will pay both a variable charge based on usage and a flat fee to PG&E.

coding123 3y ago

How are they going to know your salary?

quickthrowman 3y ago
State income tax returns…
- freedomben 3y ago
  Yep, I would bet the state revenue service will set up a system that allows the utility company to query income information and go off of that. If they don't already have the customer's SSN they will have to collect that, but I'd guess they already have it (in part so they could run a credit check).

bob1029 3y ago

The only fair system is to make everyone pay in (near) real-time for the actual cost relative to demand. Everything else is ultimately going to rip off some party (whether they are a party you like or not is irrelevant). Basic physics is fairly strict about all of this. Some of us were briefly allowed to do this in Texas (and presumably some other regions). I was on griddy for a few years and was strongly incentivized to pay attention to my consumption patterns. My bill "ticked" every 5 minutes. Nothing educated me more about how much power my appliances suck down than a proper, real-time variable rate plan. Any other form of conservation "education" is going to pale in comparison to real time economic pressure. If you had a lot of time to worry about money, you could make your power bill cheaper than a MVNO phone bill. The reason some think variable rates are broken or won't work could probably be traced back to the fact that very few grid participants (outside of a few industrial partners) are impacted by the actual, real-time cost of electricity. The thing that pissed me off more than anything was watching the politicians in my state cast variable rate plans as an attack on the poor. Nothing could be further from the truth in my own mind, but only if one is willing to explore the incentives & side effects at every step along the way.

danaris 3y ago
> The only fair system is to make everyone pay in (near) real-time for the actual cost relative to demand. That's only "fair" if you're limiting your view to the specific transaction at hand. The reason we try to make systems like this is because many of us recognize that when you zoom out, your definition of "fairness" has to change. If you look at the whole current socioeconomic system, it's very clear that it is not fair to charge a family of 5 living on a minimum-wage salary (or even two or three) the same amount for a basic necessity like power as you charge a Silicon Valley billionaire—unless the amount you're charging is zero.
- wyager 3y ago
  The only useful definitions of fairness are those that produce prosocial incentives. Your definition does not.
thereisnospork 3y ago

abeppu 3y ago

I spent some time digging into this a while back. I think this is a really poorly thought-out policy, in part b/c it's conflating three separate issues: 1. Low and moderate income families should be able to afford their energy bill, and the "basic" energy use going forward may need to be higher esp as people need AC more of the year, etc. 2. There's a push to move people off natural gas appliances and onto electric appliances sooner rather than later, with the intention that eventually almost all of that electricity would be from green sources, and similarly to encourage people to switch to EVs. In order to do that, they partly want the marginal cost of electricity to be lower for everyone, even for people who end up paying more per month than they do currently. Everyone's supposed to feel an incentive to switch appliances. 3. There's a claim that the current pricing structure means that people with PV setups aren't paying their fair share for grid/infrastructure maintenance. Paying ~$0 for power b/c you use ~0 kwh shifts the 'burden' for maintaining the grid to people that don't have the ability to install solar. You can be in support of point 1 ... but we already have subsidies for low-income residents. If we need to expand those, we should have those conversations! But part 2, lowering the marginal cost of power by use has multiple downsides: - it _does_ penalize people who conserve energy. My own PG&E bill may roughly triple, in a small, well-insulated urban condo without AC. And because the income brackets are _so wide_, someone who makes substantially more money and who uses substantially more energy (e.g. private pool, EV, large house) can see their bill _decrease_ due to this change! - it's not clear that incentivizing people to replace appliances (or vehicles) before the end of their useful lives is a net carbon-saving move; the intrinsic carbon is real - for the medium term, a substantial fraction of CA power does still does come from natural gas; increasing home electricity use which does not replace home natural gas use (e.g. just running your AC more days b/c it becomes cheaper) will in some cases mean _more_ emissions - as an incentive structure, it's not even clearly effective; e.g. landlords won't be pushed meaningfully to update appliances which would lower their tenants energy bills - if it worked really well, and everyone tried to move to all electric appliances and EVs next year, the grid may not be able to handle it anyway Part 3 is a concern, but I don't think this is the way to address it. This says that people making over 180k would be paying up to $1536 just to be connected to the grid, before they draw their first kwh of power. People who are within reach of generating enough power to live off of will be nudged to consider disconnecting entirely. If they take that exit ramp, are the rest of us better off in any way? Lastly, of course, a fee that basically everyone in the state will be obliged to pay, which is based on income ... seems a lot like an income tax, but it's going to a private company. In my case, that company is a felon with multiple convictions.

spacedcowboy 3y ago

[rant start] I have powerwalls because PG&E are fricking terrible at actually supplying power. Doing a quick check on the app shows me I have had 10 power outages this year so far, with the longest being >24 hours. If PG&E want to charge me an extra $500/year (their estimate, so double that in reality) then they ought to get their service working better first. It's a rare day that the outage tracker on their website shows no outages... Perhaps if they invested the money into infrastructure instead of executive bonuses, their service might work better. [rant end]

deleted 3y ago
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vladslav 3y ago

I see in this a subliminal message - "We are full. Move out of the state." There is not enough electricity for everybody, and it seems like conservation is not an option. So these companies will try to squeeze the working class even more. The problem, there is not enough juice left for me to give.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> There is not enough electricity for everybody, and it seems like conservation is not an option. That is not the issue. The issue is that distributed generation (i.e., rooftop solar) has become so popular that charging only by per-kW charges has become a subsidy from working class (who are less likely to participate in such generation) to wealthier segments who do. > So these companies will try to squeeze the working class even more. This proposal would reduce total bills for the working class, by splitting the rate into a mix of fixed fee and a (lower than current) is per-kW rate, and giving the working class a discount on the fixed fee. It would raise total costs for those generating their own power (because of lower per-kW rates) and for the wealthy (who would pay above the average cost on the fixed fee, and particularly on people who are both.) This would reduce the incentive to new distributed generation slightly (but then, given that both widespread adoption has been achieved and there is now a residential construction mandate for that, the effect of incentives is less.)
- vladslav 3y ago
  > This proposal would reduce total bills for the working class. I sure hope so, but I still doubt whether it will happen. I'm sorry for my ignorance on the topic, and I need to research it more. But it is counter-intuitive to me. We pay much more than the rest of the country already. We are the utility's source of revenue. We should get a fair price if we generate enough electricity through solar and other means by switching to market rates. Why can't they just adjust the expense for those who generate electricity? Or directly lower the incentive by removing tax cuts and credits since the widespread adoption is ongoing anyway. I am still trying to understand why I have to share costs with wealthy people without clear benefits.

horsawlarway 3y ago

Seems like a poorly planned and badly designed program to me. It introduces fixed fees to bolster a private utility with little oversight. I struggle to understand why California allows its utilities to behave the way they do. Any time the vested interest is saying that its own pricing structure is unjust and needs to be amended... and that the change is "unlikely to increase or decrease its profit" you should be reeling from the amount of bullshit in the air.

ralph84 3y ago

Every business wants to price discriminate in order to capture consumer surplus as revenue. This is just another way for PG&E to leverage their monopoly to price discriminate.

deleted 3y ago

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NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

I draw benefits from a number of federal entitlements, and that means I need to supply full details of my financial records to these offices on a regular basis. This includes paystubs, bank statements, letter of income from friends or family. Whenever I fill this stuff out, I feel vulnerable and exposed. This is way more than anyone needs to share with the IRS or anyone else. I've declined financial assistance from hospitals because they'd need to dig deeply into my finances the same way. This may be a great way to tax the rich and stick it to Elon Musk, but I feel like any such program had better be optional, and what happens to all those juicy financial records they receive, when they start leaking?

morninglight 3y ago

Maybe they should base the rates on net worth.

akomtu 3y ago
If the poor could tax the rich, they wouldn't be poor.

aidenn0 3y ago

Doesn't every business wish they could charge rich people more than poor people?

scoofy 3y ago

This is about incentivizing folks to switch from natural gas appliances to electric appliances. Anyone in the thread who is saying the plan is "insane" clearly doesn't understand it. There are plenty of reasons to discuss why it's imperfect, but the folks screaming bloody murder obviously haven't looked at it or considered the second-order effects this will create.