Posted on 04/25/2011 3:46:37 PM PDT by Qbert
At a time of skyrocketing gas prices and near-record profits for oil companies, House Speaker John Boehner made a major concession today: Congress should consider cutting multi-billion dollar subsidies to oil companies.
"Everybody wants to go after the oil companies and, frankly, they've got some part of this to blame," the Ohio Republican told ABC News today.
Blame aside, what about the cold, hard cash -- the billions of dollars in tax breaks and other subsidies big oil receives every year? President Obama has proposed doing away with many of them, which he says would save $45 billion over the next 10 years.
"It's certainly something we should be looking at," Boehner said. "We're in a time when the federal government's short on revenues. They ought to be paying their fair share."
That is a major departure for the speaker on an issue that Republicans have long defended as necessary to encourage domestic oil production.
The speaker said that while he wanted to "take a look" at oil subsidies. He also wanted to "see all the facts" first.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Yep.
Hopefully, wise GOP presidential candidates will see the light and distance themselves from this bozo’s arguments.
BOEHNER MUST GO. BOEHNER MUST GO. BOEHNER MUST GO.
My primitive posting skills don’t permit me to post this chart. Maybe Boehner should take a look at it:
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2011/04/those-nefarious-and-evil-oil.html
What they are talking about is depletion allowance, which applies for all extractive mining, not just oil. Also capitalization of intangible costs.
But real economic conservatives, including many TPers, have been advocating eliminating corporate welfare like agriculture subsidies, to not grow, etc.
So Boehner’s remarks are consistent with that.
Finally oil companies don’t vote, but people who buy gasoline do vote.
Ok. So he accepts Obama’s argument, and then will probably offer a scheme to advance Obama’s goal-—but at a slower pace or a lesser extent than the rat proposal.
“We’re in a time when the federal government’s short on revenues. They ought to be paying their fair share.”
The government isn’t short on revenues. It’s out of control and short on self-discipline.
Big Oil is subsidized? Since when? Every person here that rags about ethanol brings up subsidies and says Big Oil isn’t...
But , after the civil war we stopped rampantly killing each other so oil has to be sucked from idiots with invisible friends in the sky, that way they buy weapons off our rack & we get our money back.
LOL...all I got was a big white square with a tiny red “x” in the corner.
Maybe my computer is allergic to graphics. heh
“But real economic conservatives, including many TPers, have been advocating eliminating corporate welfare like agriculture subsidies, to not grow, etc.
So Boehners remarks are consistent with that.”
—But implicit in that view is the notion that the tax code will also be reformed in order to have something along the lines of a flat or fair tax. That’s not what he’s planning on attempting anytime soon.
We get rid of our outdated, confiscatory, extremely confusing tax system and make everyone pay taxes based on what they consume rather than their income ... and ensure there are ZERO loopholes for anyone to slither through?!?!
Yeah, I know - I just made it on the CPAs' and tax lawyers' hit list.
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I fail to see the problem with cutting subsidies. There’s no reason taxpayers should be paying oil companies to drill.
The federal taxes that U.S. “big oil” firms pay - which, unlike GE, they actually pay - are greater than what they keep in “profits”.
So, in as much as the share of the world’s reserves that are owned or controlled by the U.S. oil majors amounts to about 7% of the world’s reserves; which means to supply the big oil appetite of the U.S. economy they have to drill whereever they can and where some of their biggest competition is from foreign countries government-owned oil companies and in the process buy more from foreign sources;
so Boehner, just like Obama, thinks we can get more out of our domestic oil companies,
BY RAISING THEIR COSTS SOME MORE???
while we simultaneously stymie their efforts to produce more locally??
Seeing as how our “imports” are mostly what THE OIL COMPANIES HAVE TO BUY/IMPORT, from foreign sources, to supply their U.S. refineries, which means a good portion of the high import prices are high costs to the oil companies as well; so how will raising their costs further make them better suppliers of the oil products we need?
It won’t.
Boehner is as much an idiot about the global oil business as Obama.
Here ya go:
No they don’t, Boner, the federal leviathan, of which you are part, bears 100% of the blame.
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