Political Bloviation

Can we muster the political will to do away with this kind of narrowly focused tax subsidy that benefits a narrow strata of the nation while hurting those who can least afford it?

Oils End - Outposts - Op-Extra Columnist - Opinion - - New York Times Blog
And then on Wednesday of this week, oil reached its all-time, inflation-adjusted high on the global market: $104 a barrel. Remember that number. Because when oil was half that price, three years ago, Bush said the market alone was sufficient incentive for Big Oil to make added investments. But now that the price is over the $100 mark, Bush wants to continue giving breaks to oil companies rather than shift those incentives to alternative fuels, as many in Congress would do.

For Exxon Mobil, there was $40.6 billion in incentive. That was their profit last year — earning $77,220 a minute. Fine. Greed is good. All hail the free-market and shareholders who are seeing a nice return on their oil stocks. But asking the American taxpayer to indirectly subsidize this is grand folly at a time when the world’s oil reserves will soon be in decline.

Bush implied that the oil industry would not build new refineries without tax breaks. Wait a minute — they haven’t built a refinery for 32 years. What they have done is take refineries out of commission. Scarcity is also good, as Enron showed when they ginned up the phony California energy crisis seven years ago.

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