Monday, August 08, 2005

With oil prices skyrocketing, and the cost of production not going up, you'd think that the oil companies must be doing well. But maybe they aren't. The Republicans somehow got a provision into the energy bill after the conference committee had closed up shop, allowing a "consortium" based of its own members to distribute over $1 billion of tax dollars to deserving oil and gas companies, with the consortium allowed to keep 10% of the funds itself for "administrative expenses".

So business must be really bad. Because the people who voted for this are the same ones who feel that most single mothers have the resources to raise their children on their own, and should not be looking for public handouts. They surely wouldn't vote an outright grant of tax funds to fat-cat businessmen unless they really needed the money...

1 Comments:

Blogger charles said...

If you want a nasty, conspiracist view of the economic motives of Dubya & co., this may do a bit better. As to Newberry's piece, I have a hard time making sense of it, for reasons that the paragraph you quoted will illustrate as well as anything else. The only way I'm aware of in which our current monetary system is "based on oil", as opposed to any other commodity, is that international oil prices are regularly quoted in dollars. And while we do derive some benefit from this, it's an arrangement that predates pretty much the entire "conservative" movement. IIRC, some of the key moves in arranging for it were made by Democratic administrations in the aftermath of World War II.

(I could go on about other things Newberry might mean by his somewhat odd statement. Does he mean that the economy is moving away from domestic production and consumption of tangible goods? But we're also importing more oil. Or that our economy can't run without oil? As true in 1945, or '55, or '65, or '75 as it is right now. I really can't figure out what he might be trying to say).

3:53 PM  

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