At yesterday’s Senate energy hearings, one oil company executive gave the stiff, corporate managerialist answer when asked about the possibility of oil companies directly funding a winter heating assistance program…
The chairman and chief executive of ConocoPhillips, James J. Mulva, said he opposed a provision that would require oil companies to finance winter fuel assistance because it would create "a bad precedent" of a private company paying for a government program.If a private company paying for a government program is bad, then aren’t government payments to private companies equally as bad? According to Clay Risen, writing in the New Republic, the oil industry receives $7,400,000,000 in tax-breaks and subsidies each year. As Matt Yglesias points out…
How much sense does it make to take a heavily-subsidized industry and then slap a special excess profits tax on it? Wouldn't it be better to just eliminate the subsidies?Jonah Goldberg concurs…
I agree with Matt Yglesias, though I'm surely more hostile to a windfall profits tax, I think he's absolutely right that a better policy would be to simply cut government subsidies to the oil industry.The fact that the idea of a straightforward spending cut never crossed the mind of our elected officials provides a key insight into what is wrong with the whole big-government concept. Congress didn’t fund home heating assistance by cutting subsidies because achieving the immediate policy outcome -- making sure households have enough money for heat over the winter -- would have come at the expense of reducing the influence bought by oil subsidies. Congress was unwilling to take direct, effective action that would have reduced its long-term influence in the private sector.