Politics

A Congress of gas hypocrites

May 2008

By Andrew Peterson
For CoverUps.com

The increasingly indispensable Investors Business Daily (IBD) has weighed in with a must-read editorial that gives the hypocrites in Congress the spanking they deserve.

What are we talking about?

The show trial of oil industry executives by the Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming B.S. (alright, we made the "B.S." part up – not that it doesn't fit).

We especially like IBD's take on the general character of the proceedings. It's dead on:

The executives were asked, in essence, are you now or have you ever been profitable? "These companies are defending billions of federal subsidies ... while reaping over a hundred billion dollars in profits in just the last year alone," fumed Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass.

Typical of political carnivals like this is all the incriminating stuff the self-righteous inquisitors leave out, to avoid looking bad on national television and YouTube (although they end up looking bad anyway). But IBD fills us in:

Markey, et al., hide the fact that when oil companies "profit," so does Uncle Sam. In 2006, Exxon alone paid federal income taxes of $27.9 billion, leaving it with $39.5 million in after-tax income. Gas prices go up, but they also go down. Gas taxes never go down.

According to Tax Foundation data, U.S. oil companies cleared $630 billion after taxes while paying $518 billion in federal and state corporate taxes at an average rate of 45%. Over the same period, an additional $1.34 trillion in gas taxes was paid by consumers to state and local governments and the feds.

It's becoming common knowledge, even to the Democrats themselves, that they are the true culprits in America's energy woes. Unfortunately they're not yet under enough political pressure to force them to drop their big, phony act. In the interest of bringing that day just a little bit sooner, we quote again from the IBD editorial:

Our own growing economy will need 28% more oil by 2030, according to the Department of Energy, and 19% more natural gas than was consumed in 2005. Yet we are cut off from 10 billion barrels of oil in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska in addition to another 10 billion in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

At over $100 a barrel, that's a lot of untapped wealth and energy. Someone tell Markey that the oil recoverable in ANWR is roughly the amount produced by 41 of the 48 continental states and enough to satisfy all the oil needs of his Massachusetts for 75 years.

Our Take

Add to this absurd political posturing the  very real tragedy of worldwide food riots brought on by ethanol subsidies to Iowa corn farmers and you have a congressional Democrat majority in dire need of getting their posteriors kicked in November. Will it happen? To paraphrase Barack Obama, that's hope and change we can believe in. And fight for.

Read the original article.