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Show A CONGRESSIONAL REPORT BY DAN MARRIOTT r ' we are spending $45 billion a year. This money is goingto the Middle East and parts of Africa to pay them for their oil and gas production, to keep their workers employed, em-ployed, and to increase their gross national product. READ THE WANT ADS! The American public has been fooled into thinking that the Carter administration energy proposals are the best solution to our energy problems, when actually the present bill is not really an energy bill at all. It's more like an energy destruction act, because it's basically a tax bill, and takes the emphasis off development and production of our natural resources. The right idea for a sound energy plan is to encourage our producers of coal, gas, oil and other resources re-sources to get out and get busy and produce our needed need-ed resources so we can meet our objective of becoming energy -independent by 1985. When we burden a national energy plan with all sorts of extras like gasoline taxes, automobile taxes, crude oil taxes, price controls, and electric utility rate reforms, as the bill presently stands, and then take those taxes and use them for social security programs or rebates to the public, or more food stamps, or whatever else the revenue is needed for, we have missed the point of an overall energy en-ergy plan. There is one redeeming point about the plan, however, how-ever, where the tax incentive incent-ive is aimed in the right direction, and that is that the tax credit is extended to individuals who conserve energy by improving their furnace systems, by installing install-ing stronger glass in their windows, or by thoroughly insulating their homes. The bill also provides for a solar conversion credit, which means that if homes convert their energy source to solar instead of gas and oil, there will be some additional tax credits. However, as simple a solution as this sounds, it is not that easy to shift to solar energy use from gas and oil systems. Since solar heating today can only provide pro-vide up to 60 of our energy needs, we will still need to have a gas or some other type of furnace to supplement supple-ment their solar heating. But this would still allow us the proper perspective in our energy outlook. And as we begin more experimentation and development into solar resources and their full capacity ca-pacity for providing 100 of our energy needs, then we can begin to solve our problems prob-lems without relying on gas and oil. It was appalling to me to discover that in 1972 we were spending $5 billion dollars a year to OPEC countries to purchase gas and oil from them. And it is even more shocking to realize that today |