Congress Taxes Oil and Gives It To Renewables
Thomas Nast’s cartoon depicting Boss Tweed and the Tammany Ring
You know what? I give up.
Declaring a new direction in energy policy, the House on Saturday approved $16 billion in taxes on oil companies, while providing billions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives for renewable energy and conservation efforts.[cite]
It should be patently obvious that taking money from one private party and nakedly giving it to other private party is incompatible with a government grounded in support of liberty. They used to call that ‘theft’ - not a ‘tax.’ Never mind the fact that renewables would receive plenty of money from the market, if the technology was viable.
Congress may know how to legislate rosy headlines, but they forgot two things. First, oil companies aren’t being penalized by being taxed. The American people are. Oil companies have no choice but to pass on the increased cost to the pump.
The second thing that Congress forgot is that whenever it meddles in private affairs, costs go up and productivity goes down. And the problem isn’t as simple as one tax bill. Oil companies are under systematic attack by our government. Congress wanted to subpoena oil executives to explain their profits. Could you imagine being subpoenaed by Congress to explain how much money you made in a given year? Would you attend knowing that more than half of them are demonizing you to further a political agenda and that one of their tactics is to get you under oath to make you look like a crook and then go over your statements with a fine-tooth comb to charge you with perjury?
Hillary Clinton, in fact, wants to outright “take those [oil] profits” and put them into alternative energy. Watch her say it! I’m going to go on record and say that I’d like to take all of Hillary’s money too, but it ain’t gonna happen because of the rule of law. If only I were a Senator, where I wouldn’t be bothered by the Constitution!
There’s no doubt that the average board room in the petroleum industry spends the bulk of its 9 to 5 worrying about what Congress is going to do to them next - think of all the regulations, government inspections, where you can and can’t drill, so on and so forth. Never we mind that in the meantime our oil infrastructure is crumbling under excessive regulation - no new oil refineries have been built in the US since 1976. The ones we do have are operating at 100%, and Katrina shows us what that does to gas prices when anything happens to them. Congress seems to think that the way to end our dependence on foreign oil is to have no way to convert it to gasoline.
And did I say Congress only forgot two things? There’s actually a huge third thing they forgot: that it’s unconstitutional to tax a particular industry - and doubly unconstitutional to give it away to another industry.
Article I, Section 8. The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.
There’s nothing about taxing oil companies that is “uniform” in nature - it’s a targeted tax. This is obviously not what our founders intended. In fact, if today’s Congress wanted to put oil out of business, they could with $1,000,000 per-gallon gas tax. To contemplate having such power in a free society is absurd, yet it IS the power they wield - they just haven’t used it all the way yet. Save that for the next generation that grows up even more dependent on the government.
But the unconstitutionality doesn’t stop there. It’s also a violation of the takings clause. The takings clause reads as follows:
private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.
People are most familiar with this principle with regard to the powers of eminent domain (ex: when the government wants to widen a road and take a few feet of your property, they have to pay you fair market value). Usually, you think of a ‘taking’ as converting physical property. But, at what point does seizing financial property become a taking?
Obviously Congress has the power to tax. Does this mean they can take possession of your property for public use just by ‘taxing?’ For instance, consider a property tax, whereby the government takes one square foot of your property per year as payment. What would make this a tax and not a taking?
The difference is that a ‘tax’ is used to run the government and a ‘taking’ is used to convert private property to public property. We aren’t confronted with this difference because it just so happens that the government doesn’t require a continual acquisition of real estate to run itself like it does a continual acquisition of money. We’ve gone beyond simple taxing. We’re now taking private property and redistributing it publicly. To do so without just compensation is unconstitutional.
Spending money on renewable energy is also unconstitutional because it violates the 10th amendment, which states that “[t]he powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people.“
I can’t keep going on and on about the multitude of ways this violates the Constitution because, ultimately, the Constitution doesn’t matter to anybody in Washington. It sits in the National Archives, faded and forgotten. Congress will continue to give corporate handouts - it’s how they get all that attention and good publicity. Again recently, the house passed a measure to directly fund renewables and other technology by doubling the National Science Foundation’s budget.
“Many entrepreneurs and venture capitalists said that basic research is what will really help them, and keep the United States in the forefront of innovation,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Palo Alto Democrat.
You’re not one of the entrepreneurs Rep. Eshoo is talking about. You’re that other one they took the money from.
The bottom line is that targeted taxes and corporate welfare are wrong in all forms - and that holds true for both “Big Oil” and the “Big Hippie” renewables crowd. Things are getting to the point where companies and individuals don’t have to work to earn a living, they can just lobby Congress for it. With the right lobbyist, is there any doubt that I could secure $500,000 (just a smidgen of the $2.9 trillion budget) for the HitHimAgain Anti-Terrorism Task Force, or the HitHimAgain Solar Energy Think Tank? This is how the political machine works.
Based on the way things are headed, one thing is for certain. Whatever these oil companies are paying their lobbyists is too much.
[For a historical perspective on political machines, read about Boss Tweed - the creator of the first political machine: Tammany Hall. When accused of trading political favors for easy government money, he famously said “Well, what are you going to do about it?” Having spoken too soon, he died in prison in 1878.]
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