Jeff Bingaman

Chairman Bingaman's Clean Energy Standard Act of 2012 is a very important step in that direction.

The proposal of Senator Bingaman and others to establish a Clean Energy Standard (CES) for the production of electricity in the United States.

Do you have any suggestions for improvements to the design of the proposed CES that would help in this regard?

The CES does not impinge on the role of the voluntary markets for clean, renewable energy.

We commend the leadership of the entire committee. Senator Bingaman in particular, for his years of leadership on this issue

The conversion to a cleaner energy system, as proposed through Senator Bingaman's 2146, is not only technically feasible

Senator Bingaman, thank you for introducing this bill and beginning the public debate on this promising approach to protecting the environment, public health and diversifying energy supply.

C2ES applauds Senator Bingaman's leadership in introducing this bill.

Senator Bingaman's bill embodies a number of innovative design features that reasonably balance the multiple objectives of a Clean Energy Standard.

Senator Bingaman's CES proposal embodies a number of design features, including the following, that are innovative and reasonably balance the multiple objectives I described earlier.

It would also allow each region to deploy clean energy using resources appropriate to that region.

By design it would drive continued diversity in our sources of energy.

We commend the leadership of Senator Bingaman and other cosponsors for having the foresight to introduce this legislation.

The purpose of the Clean Energy Standard is to establish a national standard for electricity.

This is not the first Clean Energy Standard to be proposed.

And he felt that there ought to be some more transparency, and more ability to rationalize this process.

Now, one of the things we were trying to do in the Affordable Care Act was to have health insurance exchanges established to get us to that kind of a circumstance where there would be more ability by consumers to choose, and more…

Well, all I can say is if you have 30 million people who are going to have coverage under the Affordable Care Act that do not have coverage today, presumably a lot of that will be done, I know, some of it will be done through Medicaid, but…

I see. So what is your reaction to that kind of proposal, Dr. Rogerson?

I think people value the fact that they are paying into the system, and they get out a form of social insurance both for Social Security and for Medicare.

My impression is that if you want to maximize employment in a society, you would try to find a way to keep the payroll tax as low as possible.

I do not see why we want to undermine that.

Allow the Bush tax cuts to expire at the end of the year, as they are scheduled to.

I know that the argument is made now that we've got to go back to the previous level of the payroll tax in order to fund the Social Security Trust Fund, but there are bound to be alternative ways to put funds into the Social Security Trust…

Well I have heard people refer to the Federal Government as a big insurance policy with an army.