Recently, Citizens for Tax Justice wrote a report commending House Speaker John Boehner for suggesting that Congress repeal large subsidies for oil corporations.  Their argument is pretty sound, especially because a general conclusion is that the people who need tax breaks right now are not large multi-billion dollar a year corporations, but middle class Americans.  Yes, it is true that subsidizing much needed resources allows average Americans to afford those resources.  But controlling how much things cost in our economy does not mean shelling out free dollars to companies that simply do not need them.  ExxonMobil can be regulated by Congress in a way that is not detrimental to the daily costs of average Americans.  At the same time, if they want access to the American market, they can regulate their prices so that subsidies by taxpayer dollars are not longer necessary either.

President Obama’s plan, as taken from the CTJ report, proposes that we bar large oil and gas companies from using the standard deductions for domestic manufacturing, repeal the deduction for “intangible” costs of exploring and developing oil and gas sources, and repeal “percentage depletion” for oil and gas properties etc.

Read the full report here