End Corporate Welfare

People try to devise these triple bank-shot solutions to our most pressing problems, involving miniscule increases in tax rates to raise revenue, or incentives for engaging in particular actions above a certain threshold, or experimental pilot programs that may be turned into laws at a later date, when in actuality, the simplest and most effective way to solve so many of our problems is just to stop giving away the federal treasury to corporations that don't need the money:

Senate Democrats are seeking a major reversal of energy tax policies that would take billions of dollars in tax breaks and other benefits from the oil industry to underwrite renewable fuels.

The tax increases would reverse incentives passed as recently as three years ago to increase domestic exploration and production of oil and gas. The change reflects a shift from the Republican focus on expanding oil production to the Democratic concern about reducing global warming.

On Tuesday, the Senate Finance Committee will take up a bill that would raise about $14 billion from oil companies over 10 years and would give about the same amount of money on new incentives for solar power, wind power, cellulosic ethanol and numerous other renewable energy sources. The bill is one of the signature issues this year for Democrats, along with immigration and the war in Iraq, and one in which they hope to clearly distinguish themselves from the Republicans.

There's no reason that oil and gas companies need billions of dollars in incentives for domestic exploration. Their incentive to find oil is that they can sell it for a lot of money. That's how capitalism works, I thought. They spend the capital to extract the product, and then sell it at a profit. But we don't have capitalism in this country, we have a rigged system of corporate welfare payouts where a company gets to a certain size where they don't have to spend a dime in labor costs or taxes or infrastructure because it's all paid for them by the government. And we talk about the evils of "nationalizing" industry.

Take away the incentives and subsidies, demand royalties for drilling on federal land and shore, and plow that money into renewables (which, by the way, could go to the same companies, if they wished to alter their business model to a sustainable one). Governments should incentivize what they want more of and tax what they want less of. We do the opposite, and it ought to stop. And I'm not talking about energy independence, which I agree is a stupid poll-tested phrase that doesn't reflect reality. I'm talking about severely reducing greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate the inevitable impact of global warming, instead of just passing out checks to anyone who'll pull oil or coal out of our ground or water.