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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (373817)	3/11/2008 9:57:03 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573599

List the total of actual payments from the government to the oil companies (for things other than purchases of oil or oil related products), then add the probably larger amount for any special targeted tax breaks that oil companies get but others do not. The total will be dwarfed by the oil market as a whole, or even the amount of tax revenue that government in the US gets from taxes on oil and oil products (which isn't even including the income tax that oil companies pay, because other companies pay income taxes as well). The net "subsidy" is to the government not from the government. But there are specific government subsidies, fairly tiny on this scale but still real. Fine get rid of them. Or if your imagination was real and there where massive meaningful subsidies, that made the oil price much lower, than fine get rid of them. No need for subsidies for other products or additional taxes on oil right, just get rid of those enormous subsidies and suddenly oil is a lot more expensive and other products compete much better. However, we have an entire infrastructure and auto industry based on oil and gas consumption. We need an infrastructure based on electricity consumption and that takes government investment. Infrastructure has been built before without a large government involvement. And it could have been built with even less government involvement (but governments like sticking their nose in to things)