Posted by
Always To The Right on Friday, February 29, 2008 10:27:32 PM
If there's anything more dumbfounding than the House's imposition of higher taxes on oil companies, thereby guaranteeing higher prices at the pump, it's the exemption voted for Venezuela's state oil firm.
On the surface, H.R. 5321 is awful all by
itself. Passing 236-182 last week, the bill scrapped the tax deduction
routinely given to the major integrated oil companies — Exxon, Chevron,
BP, Shell and ConocoPhillips — that helps them explore, extract, refine
and market the energy that drives our economy.
This will make it $18 billion more costly
for those companies to produce oil. To the House this is a good thing,
because large oil companies with large market capitalizations already
earn too much.
Don't worry, the $18 billion will still
be spent. It'll just be turned into pork for so-called alternatives and
renewables that thus far have failed to produce energy in a free market.
Congress made this even worse by
ensuring that its discrimination against the big oils would benefit
Citgo, which happens to be owned by those same companies' worst
tormentor abroad — the brutal leftist dictatorship of Venezuela's Hugo
Chavez.
Under this bill, the dictator's oil subsidiary keeps its 6%
deduction for U.S. domestic manufacturing — the one the American oil
companies lose — because Citgo, technically, buys from Chavez.
The bill will force these five companies
to pass $18 billion in costs on to buyers. Energy companies, like all
private enterprises, don't eat new taxes — their consumers do. We'll
pay at the pump.