Oil Subsidies

[RidgeHunter]

Good catch.

On a related note: The KeystoneXL oil pipeline.
A 1661 mile pipeline that would transport oil straight from Canada to gulf ports where it could be shipped anywhere in the world.

http://johanns.senate.gov/public/?p=trans
http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/08/pipeline-protesters-keystone-xl-tar-sands

It's caused a big fuss in Nebraska.
Apparently politicians in NE are threatening to employ eminent domain laws to force farmers to allow the pipeline on their property and it turns out the oil interests have been donating large sums of money to those politicians, coincidentally.

Yeah, I'm not altogether sure how this post is a "related note" to the post of mine you quoted.

 

[Hobbes]

Yeah, I'm not altogether sure how this post is a "related note" to the post of mine you quoted.

Easy, this is from one of the links you posted:

Thanks to increasing supplies from the Rocky Mountain states and Canada's oil sands, plus a lack of pipelines to move that oil out, there's currently a big glut of oil in Cushing. That's pushing the price of West Texas crude down.

Didn't you read it?

 

[Hobbes]

Here's an interesting little factoid I found today:

Audrey McClendon, CEO of natural gas giant Chesapeake Energy. Since 2008, he has doled out $158,600 in political donations to both parties, the majority going to the GOP. (Start from the early 1990s and the sum of his personal donations shoots up to $329,000). A sample: He gave $28,500 to the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2007, while at the same time giving the maximum ($2,300) to the campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. A few months ago, he gave another $10,000 to the GOP congressional campaign committee, and he has been extremely generous to the congressional delegation from Chesapeake's home state of Oklahoma.

McClendon took in over $21 million in compensation last year, while the company paid no federal income taxes.
________________________________________________________



Aubrey made sure he had all of the contingencies covered.

 

[RidgeHunter]

Easy, this is from one of the links you posted:



Didn't you read it?

Ya chief, I read it. I posted 5 links that contain, oh, let's just call it several...sentences. They also addressed, eh, a couple...subjects. I wasn't sure exactly which point you were addressing.

Now that we've got that far, what are you gettin' at here, Mojambo? I'd love to argue with you, as I have inferred that you think we should, but I really can't see how that particular post of yours contains anything untrue, or even anything I disagree with. Maybe I'm misreading you and you're just agreeing with me? If so, that's totally blowing my mind. This is the internet; we don't do that here.

 

[Hobbes]

Ya chief, I read it. I posted 5 links that contain, oh, let's just call it several...sentences. They also addressed, eh, a couple...subjects. I wasn't sure exactly which point you were addressing.

Now that we've got that far, what are you gettin' at here, Mojambo? I'd love to argue with you, as I'm inferring you think we should, but I really can't see how that particular post of yours contains anything untrue, or even anything I disagree with. Maybe I'm misreading you and you're just agreeing with me? If so, that's totally blowing my mind. This is the internet; we don't do that here.

Mostly I was agreeing with you because I wasn't up on the whole 'oil glut in cushing' thing and huge price discount between brent and WTI crude until you posted those links.
And then I found the article about the pipeline expansion that would solve the bottleneck at cushing.
It's amazing how little press that is getting. I haven't heard a word about it on local TV or on newsok.

 

[RidgeHunter]

Keystone XL is a huge issue now, and the environmental concerns, protests, arrests, money and politics are getting way more coverage than the price difference in gas and oil, for obvious reasons. Looks like Clinton and Obama are gonna give it a go. Lots of people furious, lots of people elated.

If they do get more out of Cushing, unless I'm missing something, I see it helping to close the gap between gas and oil prices but it's not going to have much of an affect on the prices themselves. WTI will meet Brent in the middle if they can move all of it they wanna move. Same beef I have with the "drill baby drill" crowd. Oil is a global commodity and we really can't affect the price of it that much. Oil prices aren't set locally, unless they are held captive, like the Cushing deal. That's how I understand it to be anyways.

Cheap oil and gas are gone forever. And it reality, and for the long term good, that's probably a really good thing.

 

[victor152]

We will never get off of oil. Just Google how many different products, besides motor fuels, are made from crude oil. The Prez is pushing electric cars as a way of getting off of oil. One of the major components in batteries is made from crude oil. We will use it until it runs out.

 

[RidgeHunter]

We will use it until it runs out.

All other things aside, the above is true.

And we'll keep using a ridiculous amount until consumption radically tops production and starts the downhill (uphill) slide of prices that make us come to the sudden realization we caint go on like this forever. Countries are developing and the human population is expanding. We drink your crudeshake. WE DRINK IT UP!



ETA, what's ironic is I didn't even think about what the above movie is about before I posted the milkshake line. Lawlers.

 

[_CY_]

it's extremely find hard tax data without wading through a massive amount of paperwork.
for years 2001 to 2003 of the largest 500 companies in America, 275 made their tax information publicly available. source for below is from actual information from the 275 companies themselves and can be verified.

statistics for those 275 very profitable companies are startling!

82 paid no income tax at all .. 28 enjoyed negative returns and got a check from US government. etc, etc.

------------

Eighty-two of the 275 companies, almost a third of the total, paid zero or less in federal income taxes in at least one year from 2001 to 2003. In the years they paid no income tax, these companies earned $102 billion in pretax U.S. profits. But instead of paying $35.6 billion in income taxes as the statutory 35 percent corporate tax rate seems to require, these companies generated so many excess tax breaks that they received outright tax rebate checks from the U.S. Treasury, totaling $12.6 billion. These companies' "negative tax rates" meant that they made more after taxes than before taxes in those no-tax years.

Twenty-eight corporations enjoyed negative federal income tax rates over the entire 2001-2003 period. These companies, whose pretax U.S. profits totaled $44.9 billion over the three years, included, among others: Pepco Holdings (-59.6 percent tax rate), Prudential Financial (-46.2 percent), ITT Industries (-22.3 percent), Boeing (-18.8 percent), Unisys (-16.0 percent), Fluor (-9.2 percent) and CSX (-7.5 percent), the company previously headed by current Secretary of the Treasury John Snow.

In 2003 alone, 46 companies paid zero or less in federal income taxes. These 46 companies told their shareholders they earned U.S. pretax profits in 2003 of $42.6 billion, yet they received tax rebates totaling $5.4 billion. Almost as many companies, 42, paid no tax in 2002, reporting $43.5 billion in pretax profits, yet receiving $4.9 billion in tax rebates. From 2001 to 2003, the number of no-tax companies jumped from 33 to 46, an increase of 40 percent.

In 2001, the Treasury paid corporations $40 billion in tax refunds, a third more than the 1998-2000 average.

Then in 2002 and 2003, after the law was changed to expand tax subsidies and make it easier for corporations to carry back excess tax breaks to earlier years, corporate tax refunds skyrocketed to an average of $63 billion a year - more than double the 1998-2000 average.

 

[RickN]

The simple and most effective solution is to lower the corporate tax rate while closing the loopholes. As it is we have the highest tax rate so many companies that can not find a loophole, shift most of their profits overseas to countries with lower rates. Latest estimate that I have seen said 2 trillion dollars in taxable income is kept in other countries where the US can not touch it.