My Nissan Leaf Forum

It does look like you have to scroll 3/4 of the way down before you find anything related to short title of the bill.

Sorry, I'm not a specialist in corporate finance and tax law and don't follow all the details. I do know that the tax code is riddled with special exceptions for this and that for all sorts of companies.

There's a funny line in this article on the subject:
http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/04/news/co ... /index.htm

I doubt oil companies "enjoy" anything; that choice of wording suggests they need to be punished. But there won't be any punishment of oil companies, they don't care, just take that $4B and tack it onto the pump price of the 140B gallons of gas, and you get a 2.8 cent a gallon increase. Have you really solved anything? Seems like all you did was raise taxes on Americans by $4B.

As for royalties not being paid, I suppose that comes from the belief that all things are first property of the state. The net effect will likely be less production in the Gulf, and the U.S. being that much more of a net importer.

So it always is with tax policy evaluated in a vacuum, on the assumption you can change one variable in the equation without creating other effects, sometime unintended.

There are many more externalities besides the $80 billion. And no, this is not a "suspiciously round number", it's an approximation because there is no way to give you and exact number, like that would matter to you anyway.

You "suspiciously" ignored the cost of the Iraq war. The $1.5 trillion cost of that war (another rounded number), should calculated in, or at least a significant percentage. As for the cost of a life, that's hard to pin down, but I'd peg it pretty high.

Then there are the costs of the tens of thousands of Americans who die prematurely every year due to the effects of internal combustion pollution. Many of these people are children who, through no fault of their own, happen to live near freeways or downwind of refineries.

Add to that the costs of the massive environmental damage from the extraction, shipping, refining, distributing and burning of that oil and you have a very large number.

And yes, these costs should all be paid by the end user, the consumer. No one should be able to cause harm to others without paying the cost of it. The "big bad oil companies" will continue doing what they are doing, but their product's price needs to reflect all of its cost in order for the market to work properly.

This does not raise taxes at all, it simply shifts the burden from the country as a whole to those who buy gasoline, where it belongs.

Only in crazy conservative land.. Conservatives always are supposed to press for fairness and responsibility and lower taxes, thus ending welfare for gas guzzlers must be portrayed as an unfair tax increase.

my conservative friends:

As for royalties not being paid, I suppose that comes from the belief that all things are first property of the state. The net effect will likely be less production in the Gulf, and the U.S. being that much more of a net importer.

WTF? In what world does oil extracted from lease sales belong to anyone but the public and the commons?
And this goes for offshore oil, too?

You assume private ownership of dinosaurs that died millions of years ago and whose remains are under public lands?

and by the way, every state in the union has an extraction tax but CA, which almost approved via referendum this decade, but the oil companies weighed in with tens of millions to defeat the referendum.

The irony of this discussion is I agree with everything you just said. But will adding 2.8 cents to a gallon of gas and sending that money to Washington solve these problems?

"The irony of this discussion is I agree with everything you just said. But will adding 2.8 cents to a gallon of gas and sending that money to Washington solve these problems?"

Where'd you get 2.8 cents? The external costs of oil are measured in many dollars. not a couple of cents. The $80 billion in military costs alone equate to 55 cents/gallon.

Paul.

That was the added cost per gallon of collecting an additional $4B in taxes spread across 140 billion gallons of gasoline a year.

$4B / 140B gallon x 100 = 2.85 cents per gallon

Actually that should have only been half, or 1.4 cents per gallon, since only (about) half of oil goes to gasoline.

Is the data flawed or did I make a math error?

My question was whether that really constitutes "tackling the issues of our time".

Happy Easter BTW. It's nice to discuss issues with smart people.