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Senate blocks bill repealing $2 billion in oil tax breaks

liblady

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Senate blocks bill repealing $2B in oil tax breaks - Politics - Capitol Hill - msnbc.com

The Senate blocked a bill Tuesday that would repeal about $2 billion a year in tax breaks for the five biggest oil companies, a Democratic response to $4-a-gallon gasoline that might fare better when Congress and the White House negotiate a deal later this year to increase the government's ability to borrow.

why? why? why do we give companies with record profits tax breaks, especially now?
how can the people who voted against this bill, in good conscience, suggest we cut, say, head start programs and food stamps?
 
Senate blocks bill repealing $2B in oil tax breaks - Politics - Capitol Hill - msnbc.com



why? why? why do we give companies with record profits tax breaks, especially now?
how can the people who voted against this bill, in good conscience, suggest we cut, say, head start programs and food stamps?

Have you read the thread? The "tax breaks" are on FOREIGN EARNED INCOME!!! If you pay taxes on income earned in another country IN THAT COUNTRY, why should you pay taxes AGAIN on that same income???
 
Have you read the thread? The "tax breaks" are on FOREIGN EARNED INCOME!!! If you pay taxes on income earned in another country IN THAT COUNTRY, why should you pay taxes AGAIN on that same income???

i read it.......and i didin't find that part. can you point it out please? and then read this:

Prices at the pump
Some GOP lawmakers argued that the bill would increase gas prices further. However, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concluded that eliminating the tax breaks would be unlikely to result in higher gasoline prices, which are influenced by a host of factors. The report said the bill would raise about $1.2 billion in 2012. By comparison, the five oil companies had combined revenues of $1.5 trillion last year.
 
Senate blocks bill repealing $2B in oil tax breaks - Politics - Capitol Hill - msnbc.com



why? why? why do we give companies with record profits tax breaks, especially now?
how can the people who voted against this bill, in good conscience, suggest we cut, say, head start programs and food stamps?

All tax hikes, and this would be a tax hike, aren't paid by the company. Economics 101. Raise taxes on "eeeeevvvvviiiiilllll" oil companies, and they pass that on to us. Not really a brilliant move to begin with, however... in this moment when gas prices are effecting EVERYONE, who gets hurt more when gas prices go up? Hmmm?

Head Start is crap, and Food Stamps are more often then not, waste and fraud affairs.
 
why? why? why do we give companies with record profits tax breaks, especially now?
how can the people who voted against this bill, in good conscience, suggest we cut, say, head start programs and food stamps?

Why do people choose to cut their grochery budget or stop going to the movies every other weekend instead of robbing a 7-11?

We don't raise taxes on people who are doing well because of the notion that there's no reason the government should be taking their money and penalizing them for being successful. The notion of cutting spending on food stamps, head start, the military, or anything else is the belief that the government needs to get its own failure of a budget under control before it starts trying to punish people or things that are successful to get around its own failures.
 
Prices at the pump
Some GOP lawmakers argued that the bill would increase gas prices further. However, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concluded that eliminating the tax breaks would be unlikely to result in higher gasoline prices, which are influenced by a host of factors. The report said the bill would raise about $1.2 billion in 2012. By comparison, the five oil companies had combined revenues of $1.5 trillion last year.

please show that head start is crap. as for food stamps, yes , i am sure there is fraud, but people are still FED.
 
please show that head start is crap.
I give you, THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION!! Drum Roll Please!
After some prodding, yesterday the Obama administration released the long-overdue first grade evaluation of the federal Head Start program. As expected, the results show that the $7 billion per year program provides little benefit to children – and great expense to taxpayers.

The evaluation, which was mandated by Congress during the 1998 reauthorization of the program, found little impact on student well-being. After collecting data on more than 5,000 three and four-year-old children randomly assigned to either a Head Start or a non Head Start control group, the Department of Health and Human Services found “few sustained benefits”. From the report:

In sum, this report finds that providing access to Head Start has benefits for both 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds in the cognitive, health, and parenting domains, and for 3-year-olds in the social-emotional domain. However, the benefits of access to Head Start at age four are largely absent by 1st grade for the program population as a whole. For 3-year-olds, there are few sustained benefits, although access to the program may lead to improved parent-child relationships through 1st grade…

While these results are uninspiring, they become even less impressive when more closely examined. Heritage’s David Muhlhausen calls into question the less-than-rigorous statistical methods employed by HHS:

In some cases, HHS reports statistically significant impacts based on a standard of statistical significance is p<0.10 which is not the norm for most social scientists. The 0.05 level is the norm. With a sample of 4,667 children, there is no reason to use the easier 0.10 level. The larger your sample size the easier it is to find statistically significant findings, so using 0.10 as the standard for statistical significance is unwarranted with such a large sample size… For example, if they used the standard level of significance for the 1st grade year language and literacy measures, then the study would report no statistically measurable impact on all eleven measures. Instead, the lower standard used by HHS allows for them to report that Head Start had at least one positive impact on raised language and literacy.

In essence, had HHS not used a less-rigorous method of evaluating Head Start, the report would have shown no impact on the language and literacy outcomes for the four-year-old cohort.

Taxpayers have been on the hook for more than $100 billion for the Head Start program since 1965. This federal evaluation, which effectively shows no lasting impact on children after first grade and no difference between those children who attended Head Start and those who did not, should call into question the merits of increasing funding for the program, which the Obama administration recently did as part of the so-called “stimulus” bill.
Obama Administration Report Shows Head Start Ineffective | The Foundry

Head Start study shows no lasting gains
Busting Myths About Head Start's Effectiveness | First Five Years Fund
Head Start Earns an F
Evidence Is Clear: Head Start Is Ineffective


as for food stamps, yes , i am sure there is fraud, but people are still FED.

Who cares about fraud and waste! People be getting foods! :roll:
 
please show that head start is crap. as for food stamps, yes , i am sure there is fraud, but people are still FED.

Liblady: Puts the FED back in FED eral government.
 
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i did not know about this study.....but find a little comfort in this:

In sum, this report finds that providing access to Head Start has benefits for both 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds in the cognitive, health, and parenting domains, and for 3-year-olds in the social-emotional domain.

thanks for pointing this out. perhaps this program needs to be reconsidered, although i can't imagine why it would not benefit kids. makes no sense to me.
 
now that i have the study up......i am changing my mind. seems your source didn't really mention ALL the benefits associated with head start. i am reading further.
 
Why do people choose to cut their grochery budget or stop going to the movies every other weekend instead of robbing a 7-11?

We don't raise taxes on people who are doing well because of the notion that there's no reason the government should be taking their money and penalizing them for being successful. The notion of cutting spending on food stamps, head start, the military, or anything else is the belief that the government needs to get its own failure of a budget under control before it starts trying to punish people or things that are successful to get around its own failures.

i do not believe we need to provide subsidies for industries that post record porfits, year after year after year after year. NOT when we can't balance our budget. EVERYTHING should be on the table.
 
With fewer tax Subsidies to oil companies, the price of oil would more close reflect it's real cost. Taxes could go toward innovative mass-transit and clean energy.
Our plan for energy, left in the hands of private profiteers will continue milk us for every tenth of a penny possible while making rich Saudi Princes and Major Wall Street shareholders to whom quality and safety standards are always secondary to the bottom line.

These same Wall Street shareholders are THE major influencers of our few political parties, news networks, banks, etc... Not just American corporations
they are a world wide conglomerate of big business executives, very successful at spreading their choice form of free enterprise capitalism from Luxembourg to China and Iraq. They are now cutting Education and Medicaid and Parks, Etc. Because it will immediately make them money.
 
Are we talking about subsidies or tax breaks? I agree, we shouldn't be providing financial assistance to oil companies, I agree with you there. But to me that's significantly different then charging them less in taxes or, as one poster stated and if its true, attempting to tax them on money on income that wasn't even earned in the United States and is already taxed elsewhere.
 
this is Not conspiracy theory, it's hegemony, it's class totalitarianism. Look at the numbers, how much of the wealth is increasingly more consolidated in the properties and off-shore accountants of the very few??
 
Are we talking about subsidies or tax breaks? I agree, we shouldn't be providing financial assistance to oil companies, I agree with you there. But to me that's significantly different then charging them less in taxes or, as one poster stated and if its true, attempting to tax them on money on income that wasn't even earned in the United States and is already taxed elsewhere.

well, that poster hasn't provided and link or proof to what he asserted, so i can't comment. as for subsidies or tax breaks, in this case i think they are one and the same. aren't a lot of subsidies provided through tax breaks? isn't that how we subsidize most everything, through tax breaks?

as i said, everything should be on the table. especially breaks to oil companies who slow down production to raise prices.
 
tax-breaks are subsidies. That Poster had no basis for his claim that this income is already taxed in the other country, he went for that fallacy because it is the size of a watermelon and makes a for a simple deterrent. In these other countries our nationals often have very nice deals set up with the local monarchies/dictators, or in more established "democracies" we break down local tariffs with Free-Trade agreements. They get the oil out of sand leaving Rolls Royces and indoor ski hills. The Executives take huge profits, the speculators and day traders do too. We complain about 4 dollars a gallon while in Europe they've been paying over twice that for long time.
 
liblady, for the 100billion we've spent, you have to ask yourself "Has it been worth it?"

A small benefit that has no lasting impact? The answer is, not just no, but hell no.
 
If we are going to reduce the budget, then not only the poor must feel the pinch. Big oil and the rich must as well. Gas prices are spiking regardless of the tax breaks, to say the subsidies are keeping prices low is ridiculous, simply corporate welfare, which is still welfare.
 
If we are going to reduce the budget, then not only the poor must feel the pinch. Big oil and the rich must as well. Gas prices are spiking regardless of the tax breaks, to say the subsidies are keeping prices low is ridiculous, simply corporate welfare, which is still welfare.


Silly man, companies don't pay taxes, the consumers of their products do with higher costs. Unless you believe in price controls too...
 
i did not know about this study.....but find a little comfort in this:

In sum, this report finds that providing access to Head Start has benefits for both 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds in the cognitive, health, and parenting domains, and for 3-year-olds in the social-emotional domain.

thanks for pointing this out. perhaps this program needs to be reconsidered, although i can't imagine why it would not benefit kids. makes no sense to me.
Because it's symbolism over substance; it's the notion that throwing money at a problem will solve it. Head Start as a solution, is obviously not working nor well conceived. Setting aside the argument that the fed govt shouldn't be doing this anyway, if a program doesn't work it should be eliminated.
 
If we are going to reduce the budget, then not only the poor must feel the pinch. Big oil and the rich must as well. Gas prices are spiking regardless of the tax breaks, to say the subsidies are keeping prices low is ridiculous, simply corporate welfare, which is still welfare.

Then I suppose my home mortgage tax deduction is also welfare.
 
ludahai said:
Have you read the thread? The "tax breaks" are on FOREIGN EARNED INCOME!!! If you pay taxes on income earned in another country IN THAT COUNTRY, why should you pay taxes AGAIN on that same income???
ludahai said:
It was in a link I posted earlier today...


Your link was to a bill being discussed about dual-capacity taxpayer rules. Totally different and separate from this particular bill repealing tax breaks.

The part in this bill that pertained to foreign taxes would have been to end their deductions for taxes paid to foreign governments, not double tax their foreign income.
 
I don't believe in subsidizing an industry that's profitable. If the claim is the free market system will adjust to consumer demands, then let the markets do what they do and stop giving tax breaks to companies within certain industries that don't need them.

Big oil received their tax breaks to spur job growth when oil was a cottage industry. Now that they've proven they can be self-sustaining, it's time to cut the damned umbilical cord.

You want your tax dollars to be used the right way to bring down the national debt? Well, here's one way to do it. More to the point, some folks have complained about the government providing tax dollars for private companies to conduct research and development. Well, if you really feel that way then you shouldn't have a problem with eliminating the tax cuts to big oil because all they're really doing with the money (besides paying big bonuses to their shareholders or corporate execs which is fine if they're doing so from their corperate earnings) is conducting research to fine new oil reserves or innovations in drilling techniques. Can't they do such on their own dime and not using taxpayer dollars? Let's not be two-faced about it.
 
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