Congress grills oil companies

[ryan costa]

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/art ... 182763.htm

Congress has to walk on their tippy toes. Making oil companies pay their taxes might cancel out much smaller campaign contributions later.

If I remember my high school book keeping class correctly, Profit = Revenue - Expenses.

The tricky part is determining what is an expense and what is the purchase of an asset. When you purchase assets you have to depreciate them over years, so that is income you get taxed on. the salaries and wages of workers are all expenses, so that part of revenue isn't taxed. Armies of lawyers and accountants work hard to determine what are expenses and what are assets and how much those assets depreciate or qualify for credits and rebates and stuff. These are highly skilled workers who contribute more to GDP than manufacturing laborers.

It takes a lot of money to find more oil and pump it out of the ground and figure out new ways to sell it to people. If you hire a third party or subsidiary to do that it might count as an expense immediately, so that is revenue you aren't taxed on.

Our own President made a career of heading small petro-industry companies that got paid by larger oil companies and investors. Each one lost money until getting bought out by a larger company. That is ok. He deserved it. Because he was against Eisenhower-type taxes. And he was for the war on Vietnam, just like Ted Nugent, John Bolton, and Rush Limbaugh were. And it gave him an official career until he was experienced enough to enter politics. To cap it off he traded some of his stocks for shares in a Baseball team whose creation depended on Tax payers fronting a few hundred million to build a stadium.

Making the oil companies pay their own taxes might hurt America. They are providing a valuable service. by coveting revenue they keep gas prices higher on the hypothetical free market, which spares our leaders from beleaguring us with intelligent information about conservation and the geopolitics(invade Iraq) of oil. Beleaguring us with information about conservation and geopolitics might hurt consumer confidence, and hurt retail. Making the oil companies pay their own taxes also raises the taxes of people who aren't oil companies and oil company executives and cronies: that is just money i would spend on junk food.