Somehow, I managed to get myself on Sen. John Cornyn's mailing list. Usually, I just ignore the e-mails. I do not consider myself a republican or a democrat. They both smell about the same.
Anyway, the mailing list included this piece. It sounds rather "protect big business" to me. I know he says it is about small, independents, but I do not trust politicians any further than I can throw them.
Does anyone have a counter-point to this article? I would like to see both sides of the argument and determine for myself which one is lying less.
The incentives are tax breaks given to companies to begin new oil/gas drilling operations. The incentives don't apply to existing wells.
The Fed.Govt. Only wants to remove the incentives and have no plans to raise taxes on the existing companies. So existing independent oil/gas companies wouldn’t be affected by the having the incentives removed one way or the other. The only companies that would be affected are the ones involved with oil/gas exploration.
90% of all American oil/gas exploration is done by the big 3 energy corporations who have the resources to do so without any government assistance.
To sum up the new taxes aren’t new taxes they are just the existing taxes being applied to the energy companies.
The removal of incentives will only hurt the largest energy companies who don’t need incentives to begin with.
A few independent oil/gas exploration companies would be effected but the job loss would be 2 to 3 thousand not 300,000.
Any links, Xabulba?
The less oil and gas we produce here, the more dependent we are on foreign suppliers.
That's true only in the short term, while oil and gas remain the dominant drivers of industrialized life. Sen. Cornyn's insistence that the "entrepreneurial spirit" applies only to oil and gas implies that he assumes this will always be the case, and neglects the whole idea of America moving to the forefront of emerging/alternative energy markets. Yeah, he makes a quick mention of nuclear power at the end, and then ducks out of sight real quick, but the writing is on the wall.
In essence, the incentives use tax dollars to subsidize exploration, and thereby give us all a nice excuse to ignore the future, and comfortably allow America to wallow in the dark ages while the rest of the world swiftly moves ahead with other technologies.
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