It was said that the customer/consmer pays all the corporation'S taxes.

Okay then, so have all business companiesd alltogether pay no taxes at all anymore. I'm sure share holders and profiteers and the top staff in the leadership of said companies will immediately stop to fetch up the cream they take, and prices will drop immediately.

Things are seriously off balance in our economic system. Loans, profits, taxes, subsidies, legal tax write offs. It is about balancing things in a fairer, more reasonable and understandable way. What we have now, is casino madness and Wild West gun-ho, bureaucratic overregulation and lack of vision for the whole, exploitation in multiple different meanings of the term, and "catch what you can and then try to get away with it".

Our excesses destroy our civilisation. First culture-wise, then biological survival-wise. Has happened before in history, with many regional civilisations - but we refuse to learn from their mistakes, instead reviving them to new extremes.

Yeah right, that's it gimpy. The evil Republicans. The source of all your troubles. :roll:

Ironic. Because just a page ago some of the other republicans were saying that killing the oil subsidies was "political grandstanding". Things do go both ways you know.

but i'd pretty much say, when a desperate party runs on "drill baby Drill" for a presidential bid, and even goes to the trouble to make up a catch phrase, it's political grandstanding

Regardless of what political party promises it, increasing domestic drilling in the United States will have at best a microscopic effect on gas prices.

And people are not understanding the strategy.

If you have a resource as valuable/critical as oil and you have two ways of getting it

1. Buy someone elses supply
2. Use your own supply

Which do you choose? Smart money is on using the other guy's supply first and keep our supply until later. Imagine what will happen when the ME's supply of oil dwindles and our (US) supply is still there. Is that not a whole lot better than using up our supply first and then having to buy oil when it is in shorter supply?

I say we cap all domestic oil wells and buy the other guy's oil first. Then when his oil supply gets low, we will not only have our own supply, but we will be in a position to set the prices.

Not a bad plan if you don't go bankrupt trying to wait them out.
5 to 6 dollar a gallon for gas is in the not too distant future.

Magic

Gimpy all you ever post here is political grandstanding. When are you going to start seeing yourself as an American first and party attack dog second?

Yeah. Not only wait them out but still have the scratch to build the pipelines and other infrastructure to exploit it once the waiting is over. Not to mention the ability to defend it from the now hungry and desperate world.

That's the theory, of course, but the reality? It also needs fixing.
http://financecommission.dot.gov/Doc...0Gas%20Tax.pdf

As far as CEO trust funds go, if they haven't broken any laws then it's their choice. If they have broken laws then they need to be punished. It is the government's job to regulate and prevent wrongdoing, and I agree that many on the right are in the pockets of the people they're supposed to be controlling. But so are many on the left, a fact you seem to forget. I'm open to honest discussion, but not one-sided arguments of the "I'm right" variety.

"You guys"? You are about as one-sided as anyone you claim to stand against. I specifically praised Mookie's comments as being fair and reasonable because yours rarely are. I have to agree with August on his last "grandstanding" comment. A lot of the guys on the Right here do the same, but the ones on the Left seem to think they're immune to this.

yes, I know, you don't agree with me so obviously I'm unreasonable. Im not going to pretend to be some kind of middle ground lets all be friends democrat just so i can get a pat on the back from time to time. I have my beliefs and thats how i see it.

Gimpy you are unreasonable, in a manner of speaking, in the fact you started this thread to get a discussion on a proposed bill. Many here have pointed out the pros and cons of the bill and related topics, namely oil production and prices. Things that the bill would affect

You have not once given any facts or sound reasoning to rebut what has been discussed. All we see from you is the stuff we see everyday from politicians on TV. Not a very good source of information.

I pointed out why I think the bill sucks and is political grandstanding.
What say you? Why is this bill a good thing? Did you research the bill or even read the article that was linked? Have you any experience or real knowledge in business or petroleum production. Well I do and that wall of text is my option of the bill. It's a smoke screen.

The oil companies will not pay much in the way of the extra tax, we will. The bill hurts domestic oil exploration and production and gas price will rise and our balance of trade will suffer.

Oil speculation will remain rampant unless we do something like Mookie suggest and reinstate some regulations on traders.

Why don't those idiots in Washington do something about this? No tax "Big Oil" and say "we did something" A pile of horse manure.

You state that oil profits are HUGE. Mookie also pointed out a graph that shows that they are in line with many other big business. Why should they be singled out for extra taxes? and what would be the effect?

If you have some sound reason for your position I would like to hear it but not just TV sound bites the same old platitudes.

This is your thread and you invited debate, yet you don't debate.
How will passing this bill be a benefit? Will the government get more money? I say very little. Will it improve our energy position? I say no and in fact it will hurt it.

Give us some reasons and than you position will not be considered unreasonable.

Nothing personal here I just would like to here a reasonable position.

Magic

I've given a reasons, I just didn't write a book about it so it got written off. heres the even shorter version

-Oil companies are making a lot of money
-prices still aren't low even with subsidies
-we have a large deficit

so, why are we letting them off with these tax breaks and subsidies when they aren't necessary? I really don't think I need to over-complicate things and reinvent the wheel here. It's pretty obvious Oil companies aren't struggling so I don't believe all these subsidies are necessary anymore.

oh and government getting money? I think it's more principle of the matter. It could also open more discussion to eliminating other handouts to the corporate world. Besides...every little bit helps...right?

I agree the tax rate is set too low, it should effect 1 million and over. Why it take a lot of money to set up a franchise, much of that you can deduct from your taxes...although many do set high franchise buy in fees.

When I ran my business in a big way, I made good money, 2-300K a year, We lived maybe a lil upper middle class, but not rich. I paid a lot of damn taxes.

Again, it's not so much about taxes as it is regulation, the more money you make the more shelters and loopholes apply.

We know something it terribly wrong, that 1% hold over 40% of all wealth, 10% hold somewhere between 50-80% of all wealth depending how how the numbers are worked...in the 60-about 80, 60% of us held 80% of all wealth...This is not because people are lazy...government has created a two class system and every study, every big business brain says it's coming like it or not.

If trickle down worked we would be a thriving nation. It could be fixed over time, but we have this two party system that can't work together, they would rather seek political power fully.

Get rid of all loopholes and shelters.
Cut the corporate rate down to 10% of less
Pass massive laws for US small busiensses that create jobs, incentives, less regulation, etc.
Change the tax code to a flat tax.
Americans won't save for retirement, it has to be law, change from a 401 system to a system of retirement that works and force all workers into it, slowly kill SS.
Strong regulation against big pharma and insurance, medical....sorry, I think a system of mass profit over health is one area of business that has to be regulated and non profit.
Use all our natural resources
Stop being the world police, we have several hundred bases leftover from WW2 that need to be shut down...place them on our border.
Get out of useless trillion dollar wars..Let the Seals do the killing, reverse terror, whatever..

All that must be said here (and that proves my point) is this: when you see an increase in futures demand (speculation), what causes it?

Answer: perceived threats to the stability of availability of the commodity itself. In other words, when the middle east is blowing up, so goes oil prices.

Now, concentrate more supply from less volatile regions and voila! Mopre stability in pricing.

Furthermore, concentrate more supply from the UNITED STATES who owns the world's reserve currency and - wait for it - dollar value INCREASES and prices decrease.

Can you give an example?

I am not sure I understand how passing laws (massive or not) can create jobs. Demand for products/services creates jobs.

I would also be interested in reading your opinions on how passing more laws can result in less regulation. I can understand laws resulting in a different type of regulation, but I stub my brain on how more laws can result in less regulation.

Sorry for my rant, but it was triggered by you lumping me with "you guys". I agree with you in part, but the opposite of what you say is also true. You only see one side, and there is no room for any chance that you might be wrong. This is true of most arguers, and it's what I oppose more than anything else.

no i understand, we are all human, but sadly there is a lot of polarization on here. I'm one of the many im sure.

Well then try not to be so one-sided! :know:

At the end of the day, it is my strictest belief that ANYONE who agrees across the board with one of the TWO political parties in the US has completely relegated their thought-process to someone else. As far as sins go, I cannot think of one greater.

Well paying off the debt didn't last long, they are already proposing to use the "extra" money to fund "green energy" technologies.

Great idea take money away form companies that are already developing green technologies and give a percentage to who knows who to do the same thing. Big oil sees a profit in this area and are using some of that HUGE profit to get their share. Capitalism at work.

Obama announced today that HE is going to develop more domestic oil production, don't see how he personalty is going to do this but that isn't important. The bill they are purposing will remove the vary tax incentives to do just that. It's all a political smoke screen.

Gimpy says that;
-Oil companies are making a lot of money

Oil companies are making a lot of money is very true.
That's why they are in business. HUGE profits for the company but just who is the company. Shareholders. Hundreds of thousands of them, every day Americans that have a pension plan, 401K IRA, etc. If you have any of these you ARE the big oil company. If you aren't put out your 80.00 or so dollars and get your 47 cents per quarter profit. Buy some EOM stock. Look at how many pensions etc that were hard hit by the Enron collapse if yo don't think this is true.

Some of those profits go to new energy development and technologies.
Why is it the government needs to put money into new technologies? The oil companies are already doing this. Make it profitable for them and it will happen. Capitalism at work.

"-prices still aren't low even with subsidies"
Prices are not low because of supply and demand and to a big part comedies traders. This bill and the policies in Washington do nothing to address this and in fact discourage this.

"-we have a large deficit"
Nothing here will do anything at all about the deficit. May even make it worse. The more they mess with the market the worse it gets.

It's all smoke and mirrors. They can all stand up and say that they are doing something about the problem but in fact nothing will be better and in fact may get worse. Both parties have had 20+ years to work on this and they have done nothing and it looks like that policy will continue.

I certainly don't have any love for big oil, in fact just the opposite but I have more faith in a free market than I do the government. A free market with good intelligent regulations. Neither party seems to be able to come up with any sort of intelligent regulations. Either too little or too much.

Magic

I think the point is that a company that is making that much profit does not need to be subsidized by the taxpayers.

On the matter of deductions, I feel that all of the deductions across all the industries needs to be looked at. I also believe that not all of the deductions needs to be removed.

But on the matter of subsidy, I would like to read a justification that a company that is making billions in profit needs to be subsidized by the government/taxpayers.

If there is a good justification so be it, but I would sure like to read that one.