House Speaker John Boehner told ABC News today he's willing to cut the $4 billion a year of tax breaks given oil companies. He also wants the federal government to get out of the way of U.S. oil companies that want to drill for new domestic energy supplies.
Boehner said he wants to look at all the facts on the tax breaks first, but if it turns out they make no sense, and President Obama already says they're bad, then get rid of them. I'm still not sure what these tax breaks are supposed to encourage. The ABC News story carefully gave us no information on that. But if the breaks are unjustified gifts to the oil companies, they should be abolished and the members of Congress who enacted them should go to jail.
For the next few decades, let's replace foreign oil with American oil. Oil companies don't need subsidies, but at a time of mounting U.S. debt and shortages of economical energy, the oil companies also don't need obstacles.
Frank Warner
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Note: The Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate voted 61-35 a few months ago to KEEP those tax breaks for oil exploration. Is it possible those tax breaks are more cost-effective at finding new economical energy than the solar-panel tax breaks?
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