ABSTRACT
My comments focus on the “fuel bill assistance” portion of the Cohen-Hollenbeck paper. The authors of this paper reach recommendations for improvements in fuel bill assistance programs, and implicit in any such recommendations, especially recommendations for a program which deals so directly with income distribution, are value judgments about equity. Unfortunately, the authors do not devote adquate attention to developing fully their views of equity, with the result that their empirical work is less helpful than it might otherwise have been. In these comments, I will lay out a framework for value judgments about the goals of an energy assistance program, discuss problems with the views implicit in the paper, and then outline a few other issues which are important in the design of an effective energy assistance program.
