US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3764

On August 25 2022 00:42 LegalLord wrote:
Thankfully people remember that gas prices are $1 less than two months ago more than they remember that it's $2-3 more than a year ago. Good for midterm prospects.

One in six U.S. homes, or 20 million households, have fallen behind on their energy bills as power prices rise and inflation eats up incomes, Bloomberg reports, citing data from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA), which has said this is the worst crisis it has ever documented.

In June, NEADA had already warned that “Electricity prices are expected to increase significantly this summer as result of rapidly rising natural gas prices, a primary feeder fuel for electricity and a warmer summer creating additional demand for electricity.”

A total of 19.9% of all U.S. households reported that they kept their home at a temperature that felt unsafe or unhealthy for at least one month in the last year, according to the Census Household Pulse Survey, covering April 27 – May 9, 2022, cited by NEADA at the start of this summer.

Now there will be “a tsunami of shutoffs,” Jean Su, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, which tracks utility disconnections, told Bloomberg.

Electricity prices in the United States have surged in recent months due to the rise in natural gas prices, which briefly hit on Tuesday $10 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) for the first time since 2008. Natural gas has the largest share of U.S. electricity generation, so the rally in U.S. benchmark gas prices is driving up electricity bills, too.

Last year, the average nominal retail electricity price paid by U.S. residential electric customers rose at the fastest rate since 2008, increasing by 4.3% from 2020 to 13.72 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh), according to data from the EIA.

In July this year, the average price U.S. households have to pay jumped by 15% year over year, for the biggest annual rise in data since 2006, according to Bloomberg.

On August 25 2022 00:30 KwarK wrote:

Yes.

On August 25 2022 02:17 Acrofales wrote:

I'm confused. Doesn't it depend a lot on how the debt was incurred? At least here in Spain it does. When my parents loaned me 50k to help buy a house, I had to explicitly tell the taxman that it was a loan, and then I didn't have to pay tax over it. Obviously my parents forgiving that debt I would then have to pay tax over it, as it is then no longer a loan, but a gift. However, my student loan was counted as income (although at the time that was irrelevant, because overall my income was low enough that it still fell in the tax-free bracket). So I already payed income tax over that, and if the government were to forgive that, I shouldn't have to pay income tax over it a second time. Right?