Subsidizing the Devil (Not Cheney)

In our discussions on oil prices I keep getting complaints about the BIG OIL (emphasis for humor, just imagine God calling it out from Heaven) companies getting "subsidies" (I'll explain the quotes in a moment).

So to begin, let's define subsidy (from merriam-webster.com):

: a grant or gift of money: as a: a sum of money formerly granted by the British Parliament to the crown and raised by special taxation b: money granted by one state to another c: a grant by a government to a private person or company to assist an enterprise deemed advantageous to the public

Now I'm all for stopping the practice of having government give out money to solve problems. The dipshit that came up with this insanity should betossed into a pack of horny cannibals covered in steak sauce. But he's probably been dead for years, so bring on the horny cannibal necrophiliacs. We pay out too much to too many people and too many companies, and this makes them rely on someone else to take care of them rather than making it on their own merits.

So I decided to go a-Googling and find out how much money we were giving the EEEVIL big oil companies. And I just picked the first two sites that came up, Grist and progress.org. After reviewing all the "subsidies" they declared that dirty, evil America-screwing oil companies were getting (and the appropriate Nazi Pelosi-approved green solution), I had my answer. The answer is:

NONE.

Okay, I know this is confusing, but let me break this down. First of all, when the liberals refer to subsidies, they are talking about tax breaks designed to allow our domestic production to compete with government-controlled foreign oil. This is the most maddening part of any discussion. These are not subisities, because the government is not giving money to them, it's just not taking as much. The same semantics are used with the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is not a credit, but a but a transfer of wealth to people with low incomes and children. In other words, it IS a subsidy.

Sometimes, (as in the progress.org article, they lump in other costs as subsidies, like:

• Construction and maintenance of roads and bridges.
• Costs of complying with federal mandates that the government currently pays
• Costs of military deployment in oil-rich areas
• Fire, police, and emergency services
• Sickness and death, crop failutes, urban sprawl, traffic jams, the destruction of man and all his works, dogs and cats, living togater, mass hysteria*

Okay, the last couple of things come from the movie GhostBusters, but you get the idea. Essentially, there is a belief in some quarters that our oil-based culture is a cancer and that we must engineer our tax structure and culture to cut it out:

The first step toward getting the public to recognize the damage caused by the United States' gasoline dependance is getting the public to recognize how much they are paying for this damage. The best way, in turn, to accomplish this goal is to eliminate government tax subsidies, program subsidies, and protection subsidies for petroleum companies and users, and to internalize the external environmental, health, and social costs associated with gasoline use. This would mean that consumers would see the entire cost of burning gasoline reflected in the price they pay at the pump. Drivers faced with the cost of their gasoline usage up front may have a more difficult time ignoring the harmful effects that their addiction to automobiles and the internal combustion engine have on national security, the environment, their health, and their quality of life.[emphasis added]

Essentially, the problem with all this is that, with the tax system as convoluted as it is (can you guess what's coming?), it becomes hard to distinguish what is a subsidy, what is a tax break, and what is simply political bullshit. As it is an election year, the whole mess is amplified to the utterly insane.

There are several things we could do to solve this. First of all, we need to fix the tax code, which changes with the political wind. The solution there is theFairTax (if you guessed it, give yourself a pat on the ass), of course. this would put everyone on a level playing field, as the tax would be there at the pump. I'm sure they could even build it in on the pumps to show you. As for this "addiction", the answer to getting away from oil is to have something cheaper out there for us to run on. I know there are people running on waste cooking oil, the price of hybrid, flex, and battery technology is getting closer, and there are plenty of practical clean technologies (nuclear) that we have yet to embrace. And on the horizon, there's more to come.

And to expedite all the technology we could be embracing, let's just stop listening to the enemies of alternative energy: The environmentalist wackos. These are the people who oppose oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, ethanol, tidal, hydroelectric, wind, solar (they actually use the term "Big Solar" in here!), wood, and any other energy that might give us the power we need to succeed. Holy piss in the holy water, people. The only alternative these fruitcake shitboxes give us is to move into mud huts and go back to wearing goat skins (except that would require murdering the proud and noble goat).

To drive economies, we need the cheapest sources of power out there. This is not a liberal or conservative idea, it is a fact. And as long as we cloud the issue by mislabelling and fighting against acquiring that energy, we're never going to reach our potential, and neither will the rest of the world.