The Tax Breaks That Are Killing the Planet
ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, hauled in a $32.6 billion profit last year. Chief executive Rex Tillerson got a 3 percent bump in his pay package, sending it above $28 million. And today, the company gets its annual boost from the federal government: an estimated $600 million in tax breaks.
All told, the government gifts as much as $4.8 billion to the oil industry each year, more than any other country. Much of that comes not as direct handouts but instead via loopholes in the tax code; deductions for depleting oil reserves, for example, and write-offs for the expense of drilling a new well. These reflect a long-past era in which oil exploration was financially risky, and prices were low. Now oil prices and profits are high, and the government is losing revenue while promoting the continued exploitation of carbon-intensive fuels. In the face of a changing climate and a constrained domestic budget, the lunacy of such preferential treatment is hard to overstate.
“Perverse” is the word the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found for such policies in its latest report, which was released in full on Tuesday. Globally, subsidies for fossil fuel production—amounting to $1.9 trillion in 2011, or 8 percent of government revenues, according to the International Monetary Fund —“prove to increase emissions and put heavy burdens on public budgets,” reads the report.
On the other hand, rolling them back could be a key part of a serious climate agenda. The IMF estimates that eliminating fossil fuel subsidies could lower emissions by 13 percent. That general principle, if not the exact figure, is supported by the IPCC, which wrote, “Lowering or removing such subsidies would contribute to global mitigation, but this has proved difficult.”
http://www.thenation.com/blog/179357/tax-breaks-are-killing-planet
= new reply since forum marked as read
and your snarkiness is really just willful ignorance ...
Last edited Tue Apr 15, 2014, 10:54 PM - Edit history (1)
should every cost of doing business be deductible ... ?
I do not believe the deduction of drilling a well is justifiably warranted today ...
I do believe that at one time, before technology, the cost could have been deducted over a certain time period because of the wildcat nature of drilling over 50 years ago ... when we supposedly had to have oil to build the supercalifragilistic society on top of the hill we have today ....
But today, in the Energy Industrial Complex, they have bought our political system to underwrite thru the tax code the exploration and development and now destruction of our world ....
and it is way past the time that the EIC pay at the very least, its fair share of taxes .... 
Is it moral or ethical, absolutely NOT ....
or is it a legal loophole, absolutely YES ...
it is a legal loophole .... 
Nothing incompetent about calling out a legal loophole that should have been closed over three decades ago ....
and 1 + 2 will not = you owe me $750.00
.. supposed to make sense? 
by stating we do not understand accounting principles ...
I made the statement that an accountant would not like the present tax system to change because he/she makes there living off the complexity of the current system ... if this does not compute, then you are not listening .... 
or did you mean something else ... ?
Cmon, I can understand apologists and there rationale but when you have 75,000 pages you just can not apologize often enough ...
and who said I do not want comments ...
and if you do not like what I am commenting, then go back to your IRS apologist role 
