by Art Woolf
Senator Sanders has introduced the End Polluter Welfare Act. Who could be against a bill with that title? And that tells you part of what's wrong with Washington (as well as Senator Sanders' view of the world, and its problems).
At The Christian Science Monitor, guest columnist Robert Rapier, an engineer who actually knows something about energy, writes that the Senator
has made highly inflammatory comments on the Senate floor about Exxon Mobil which PolitiFact.com deemed false after fact-checking his statements. He promoted misinformation on the Senate floor, and that misinformation has been repeated endlessly...
Senator Sanders lists the “welfare” he proposes to eliminate on his website. I would be willing to make a bet that Senator Sanders knows neither the purpose of the tax incentives he proposes to eliminate, nor the projected impact from doing so. I am not going to go through them here; you can refer to some of my previous columns.
The biggest problem with the legislation is that it is not conducive to U.S. energy security. It is legislation that is politically driven, and if oil prices decline it is a prescription for a rapid decline in domestic drilling. In other words, it isn’t sensible long-term energy policy.
Incidentally, in the Senator's list of all the specific subsidies the oil industry receives, he includes
Eliminate oil and gas Arbitrage bonds exemption 26 USC 148(b)(4)(Sec 14) -$.086 billion...
I hope the Senator puts on his green eyeshades to look for other savings of $86 million in the $3.6 trillion dollar budget. It shouldn't take him too long to find enough small potatoes to eliminate this year's $1.3 trillion deficit.
I'll be the first to admit that I also don't know the purpose or the impact of the tax incentives he proposes to eliminate. But when the title of a bill substitutes for any kind of analysis of the bill's impacts, you have to wonder about the bill and of how the media reports on these issues.
