Hurricane Sandy, the unemployment rate, a declining infrastructure, and the need for bipartisan cooperation motivate this proposal.
Currently many utility companies are satisfied with outages because of storms (limbs and snow falling on power lines) as well as routine trimming of tree branches around power lines because the expense of putting the lines underground is prohibitive.
A tax incentive, such as a higher than dollar for dollar deduction of salaries of new workers hired to exclusively work on putting lines underground would have the following advantages:
1. Accelerate existing efforts to bury power lines.
2. Decrease the number of lines vulnerable to storms
3. Hire unemployed workers--construction workers and engineers
4. Create a bipartisan jobs bill through tax expenses