The Campaign Update: A Fascinating Phone Call From a Democrat ex-Congressman
Religious Dogma of the Left is Hard to Overcome
I’ve debated with myself about writing about this call, since I gained a degree of respect for the former congressman, a Democrat from an oil producing state, who called me out of the blue in early October. He had read a story I wrote for Forbes.com back in August, in which I discussed his party’s fraudulent allegations that oil and gas companies enjoy tax “subsidies” from the federal government.
Here, in part, is what I wrote then:
The oil and gas industry does not receive “subsidies” of the type that wind, solar and electric vehicles enjoy, i.e., direct transfer payments from the government to enormous corporations like Tesla, General Motors and Ford totaling billions of dollars every year. Some in the industry - mainly small producers and royalty owners - do benefit from the expensing of intangible drilling costs, which is similar to appliance manufacturers or pharmaceutical companies expensing their own cost of goods sold every year. Small independents and royalty owners also benefit from percentage depletion, a provision that is similar to depreciation of inventory in other industries. Biden proposes to single oil and gas out by repealing those oil and gas-related provisions, which have existed in the tax code for more than a century.
In all, [Biden’s] Green Book contains a whopping total of $147 billion in new industry taxes, which would negatively impact mainly the red states where oil and gas is produced in the U.S.: Texas, Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, Louisiana, North Dakota, Ohio and Pennsylvania. In most respects, it is the same nakedly political move that was attempted during all 8 years of the Obama/Biden administration without success. We’ve seen it all before; most of it, anyway.
[End]
I’ve written about this subject for many years. You can read about it in much more detail if you’d like to in a story I published way back in January, 2013. I spent my first 15 years in the oil industry as an accountant for several companies. I know this stuff like the back of my hand. Trust me, these are not “subsidies” by any honest definition.