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First off, it's not my sacred cow. Second, it's not a "fraction". The most common number I hear about oil and gas subsidies runs about $4B/year. So not only are the subsidies being handed out to these green energy companies greater than the total oil/gas subsidies but when we account for the relative industry impact (subsidies as a percentage of the total industry), they're massively greater in size.



That's funny, because that's what I see you doing. Obsessing over relatively tiny subsidies to one industry as a means of ignoring/distracting from the relatively massive subsidies in another.

That's some impressive projection you've got going on there Joph.




And? Get back to me when we're talking about labor, which over the same time period handed out more money with over a 10:1 ratio Dems to GOP. Do you really want to play this game? There's plenty of blame to go around Joph. And absent some clear assumption that all campaign donations are corrupt, it's a somewhat meaningless one.

The issue isn't about campaign donations, but whether a specific connection can be tied between one set of donations and subsidies handed directly back to those who donated. There's nothing wrong or illegal for a company engaged in an industry to donate to campaigns of politicians they hope will pass legislation that benefits their industry (or doesn't hurt it). Where it becomes illegal is when you do so with an assumption of direct monetary reward handed back as a condition of the donation.

In that context, there's a huge difference between subsidies that every single company engaged in a given aspect of an industry gets and subsidies that take the form of direct loan guarantees to specific companies within that industry. If CEO of companyA lobbies to get legislation passed that benefits all companies engaged in his industry (even his competitors), he's exercising his free speech. If the CEO of companyA lobbies to get a subsidy that goes directly to his company, that's a criminal act. Trying to equate these subsidies with the oil/gas subsidies is frankly absurd.


But that hasn't stopped you yet!



It's not about the amount of money Joph. It's about how the subsidies are designed. I'm far less concerned about subsidies which apply to any business in an industry which meets the criteria than I am with ones that directly target individual companies. And the same applies to NPR btw. It's a targeted expense at a single venture which for some reason Dems seem to want to keep funding even though the need for it has long since past.

While I wouldn't mind those oil/gas subsidies going away (the real ones), I'm not losing sleep over the fact that they're there, nor do I care if anyone fights hard to eliminate them. And they certainly are not high on my list of things to fight for. IMO, the kinds of subsidies that the Dems favor are far more harmful and far more likely to create corruption than the ones the GOP tends to favor (kinda by design).


Your problem is that you seem to want to demand that I use your criteria for deciding which things to support or oppose. But I don't use that criteria, and I've explained this to you many times. It's not about the dollars. It's about why you're spending them and what you're spending them on. There are lots of things the government does that I'd rather it not, but that doesn't give you the right to cherry pick which ones you think *I* should be fighting against the hardest. I get to pick that. Not you.

And for me, directed funds to specific financial entities or ventures is far more of a problem than funds made broadly available to any activity within an industry (or many industries even). When presented with funding that says: "We will give $X to company A to do action B", and funding that says: "We'll give a X% deduction to any company which engages in action C", I'm going to fight against the former first. To me, that's the far worse of the two.


And yeah. After we've eliminated all the direct funding for the operation of the NEA, and NPR, and PBS, and directed loan guarantees for green energy production, and a zillion other things that violate the criteria that *I* use, then I'll worry about subsidies like the ones that the oil and gas companies get. Because they are not even remotely in the same ballpark.

Edited, Oct 13th 2011 5:31pm by gbaji

It's the GOP's sacred cow and while your $4B number is hysterically wrong, that would still be Solyndra costing an eighth of the subsidy amount.


Well, now you know better


Absolutely. You're the one frantically avoiding it. I'll happily admit that the Democrats support labor in part because labor supports Democrats. Now let's get back to the oil thing you're working so hard to avoid talking about.


Well, no, but we've been on that carousel before. You're still desperate to stop talking about them though, I see.


Hahahahaha...

Whatever you need to tell yourself to keep going, man. Whatever you need to tell yourself.

Ready to explain yet why the GOP is completely disinterested in stopping these subsidies that conservatives are soooo willing to end?


Did you not read either of our links? Go get in the Willful Ignorance corner with Rdmcandie.

For the entire oil/gas industry Joph. One subsidy to one company is 1/8th the entire subsidy amount for an entire industry that is easily several orders of magnitude larger in terms of total economic production, jobs created, etc. You honestly don't see that as a problem?

When we add up all the green energy subsidies just in this one program it is several times larger than that which the entire oil/gas industry receives. Just in the last couple weeks, the Dems scrambled to hand out another $5B or so because that was the deadline to give those subsidies out. Think they're applying them well, or just handing out as much money as they can to make sure they spend it all?


And you still think those are the same kinds of subsidies, with the same problems, and the same potential for corruption and waste? I don't think so.




Why? You clearly accept the principle that the amount an industry donates to political campaigns isn't the issue here, so why do you care? Why single out oil? It does not receive as much money as labor *and* it's more evenly distributed between the parties. So you really don't have a point to make about the campaign donations at all, do you?


Find examples of the CEO of an oil company donating money to a party's candidates and then having that party create a program that hands money directly to individual oil companies, including his. Where's that form of subsidy Joph? When you find that, I'll join you in condemning it just as I condemn the same thing being done with these green energy companies.

But you wont do that, will you? And that's what makes you a hypocrite. You're not even unwilling to decry these sorts of subsidies when they are similarly likely to be corrupt, you will ignore one type while attacking one that isn't as likely to lead to corruption. That's a strange set of criteria you're using, isn't it? But keep on calling me the blind partisan. That's always good for a laugh!



You channeling Alma now? Whatever. Um... So you're looking at your link which says: "The total government savings from eliminating these subsidies is projected to be $45 billion over 10 years."

"over 10 years". Strange that you read that, parroted the number, and then seemed confused when I said that subsidies were about $4B/year. Imagine that! And if we take away the deductions which aren't really subsidies, we get what? Let's go through the list and remove the ones that are actual subsidies to the oil industry and not just deductions that everyone else gets as well:

1. Claims $7.839 billion over 10 years, but that's not really true. "other companies" get that same amount back, just not in the first year. The only benefit the oil companies get is that they get the tax break for new expenditures right up front instead of spread out over time/depreciation/whatever. I's voodoo math. It's not a real subsidy and it's something Heritage argues should be standard practice.

2. 67 million over 10 years. Hrm.

3. 10 billion over 10 years. But it's unclear if this means that's the savings making the oil companies deduct only the amount that was depreciated (like all other companies), or the whole amount (putting them at a disadvantage). So there's a question mark on this one.

4. 180 million over 10 years. Again a question as to whether this is the total deduction, or just bringing them to the same standards as other companies.

5. $17.3 billion over 10 years. Except that this is the same deduction that all manufacturing companies get (see Heritage link) *and* oil companies are actually at a disadvantage already (Heritage link is newer than your link btw, so that may reflect a changed in policy). Everyone else gets 9%. Oil companies are singled out and only get 6% today. Assuming conservatively that your link doesn't take this into account, then what this really means is that the oil companies are *losing* 1/3rd of the money they should be able to deduct if they were in any other industry. So they're really losing about $6 billion over 10 years right now. So we put that in the negative column.

6. $1.1 billion over 10 years. But this is another one of those "don't let them deduct expenses" things. Why? Every other business can deduct expenses. It seems strange to me that oil companies *weren't* allowed to deduct the cost of oil exploration. I put a huge question mark on this one.

7. 8.5 billion in taxes over a 10-year period. Again, a deduction which applies to all companies, not just oil companies. Singling them out is singling them out to pay more. Can't count this as a subsidy.

8 and 9 only apply when oil prices are low. While they are basically "safety net" subsidies for oil companies, and presumably work to keep domestic oil wells pumping even when the price of oil is low enough that it makes more sense to import and also presumably is an attempt to maintain our oil infrastructure against times when oil prices are high. It's arguable in terms of whether they should exist, but also irrelevant because oil prices are high right now (and have been for some time).


So... What does that add up to? Including the two question mark subsidies, we have 67M, 10B, 180M, -6B, and 1.1B. That's a grand total of... wait for it... $5.347 Billion over 10 years. So... that's $534 Million a year. Holy Hell! That's almost exactly what Solyndra got all by itself.


None of those directly target single companies for money Joph, and they apply to an entire industry that is many times larger, and the two biggest "subsidies" on that list were also ones with question marks on them. You ask why I'm not up in arms about oil subsidies? That's why.

Edited, Oct 13th 2011 6:41pm by gbaji

I believe the correct way to handle this is to assign valuations to different forms of pollution, based on the cost to remove that pollution. In this way we would let the market create both cleaner technologies and or better ways of removing that pollution in a more incremental fashion rather than have large judgements awarded via courts every so often.

I agree with having some kind of evaluation, but I have to quibble a bit with the methodology you propose. Cost to remove isn't the best way to do it. Cost of actual damage is a better way IMO. How harmful is something, actually? It's certainly at risk of some subjective evaluation, but everything is. The problem with your methodology is that you would assign a high cost to things that are relatively harmless but which cost a lot to remove/eliminate, while assigning a lower value to things that are highly toxic, but cheap easy to prevent.

This could cause the absurd result of governments discouraging industries which eject harmful toxins into the air (because it would be cheap and easy to put filters on which would reduce the emissions) from actually bothering to put those filters on, while providing massive incentive for other industries which generate relatively harmless materials (like say CO2) to spend billions on expensive processes to prevent said pollutant from entering the air.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this is actually an area where the market does do a decent job (as long as we do allow for reasonable lawsuits and whatnot). We can place a dollar valuation on the cost of damage caused by any given pollutant. We can compare that to the dollar cost of preventing said pollutant. We can compare that to the dollar cost of whatever we're doing that generates the pollutant. And we can compare that to the dollar value generated by that activity. This gives us a reasonable start to assess the relative "green" value of say a coal plant versus a hydroelectric plant, versus a solar power plant. All of those factors have to be taken into account IMO.


And there are organizations which do just that btw. Which is where I got my statement that solar panels are less "green" than coal plants. Electric cars are also generally speaking less green than normal IC powered cars. Go figure!

The point is that "green" is really just a political label for energy sources that one political faction likes. It has nothing to do with whether those sources are actually better for the environment. And that's where the whole thing falls off the rails IMO.

This really depends on the quality of the burrito.

I punched one of 'em. What have you done, Liberace?

So you're a pussy hiding behind your computer. Got'cha.

Edited, Oct 14th 2011 4:20pm by lolgaxe

My browser is slower than yours, I guess