Glaeser: Tax Credits for Home Heating Won't Help

Glimp professor of economics Edward L. Glaeser doesn’t like the Home Energy Affordability Tax Relief Act, which would give each American household a tax credit for a third of the household’s energy costs, up to a total of $500.

“High prices, painful as they may be, do more to encourage energy conservation than replaying every one of President Carter’s sweater-clad exhortations to turn down the heat,” he wrote in an op-ed that ran in the Boston Globe last week. “Tax credits for home energy use reward people for using more fuel. If anything, the environmental consequences of carbon emissions and the strategic repercussions of importing Middle Eastern oil suggest that lawmakers should be raising, not lowering, taxes on energy.”