How Would A Windfall Profits Tax On Oil Companies Affect Us?

Liberals and their allies in the green movement love to rail against oil companies and their seemingly enormous profits while threatening to impose additional taxes on them. The truth is oil companies pay about $3 in taxes for every after tax dollar they earn in profit and that is passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices which are also taxed at the pump. My friend Jane at the American Petroleum Institute sent along this study they commissioned about the other affects higher taxes on them would bring on the American public. Not only would it cause the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs it would burden the American people with higher energy bills but it would send an additional hundreds of billions of dollars to foreign suppliers of that oil and natural gas. Why not keep those jobs and that money here?

This comes along with news that the Obama team is stopping the exploration for oil and NG in Utah that Bush opened up, bad move, at the cost of jobs and government revenue from one of the few sources that is not from taxes. Why not open our vast reserves of oil and natural gas, by some estimates more than Saudi Arabia, to exploitation since it will create jobs and actually grow the economy.

I am not against green technology and future energy sources but until we get there we are going to need oil and natural gas till those technologies are developed and perfected to a cost sensible point without government subsidies to keep them going. There is one thing that all the greenies seem to miss is that even their alternatives have a cost to the environment equal to or greater than the use of fossil fuels.

Batteries for hybrid/electric cars, wind and solar power require metals that must be mined and refined often with far greater environmental impact and energy use than fossil fuels. Biofuels even of the the non-food based variety also require vast land resources that could be put to better uses than providing fuel, like parks and such or growing food. Wind power is unreliable, unattractive and very expensive to maintain and set up. Solar power is slowly getting very close to the cost/benefit line for certain parts of the country but still would be better for individual households and businesses than to run a grid on any large scale. Nuclear power remains the cleanest and most efficient producer of power there is and we need to expand its development.

The point is we need to expand our energy options not shrink them while at the same time expanding our economy not hamstringing it with excessive regulation and taxation that will only do more harm than good. That is just good old Barnyard common horse er goat sense.