National Debt Side Show – Big Oil Tax Breaks

The politicians in Washington still are not serious about the national debt. One just has to look at the fight over big oil tax breaks.

Oil prices go up and Congress immediately goes into its dog and pony show of dragging oil executives up to the Hill for meetings. The basic idea is oil companies are gorging on high gasoline prices and we are all getting ripped off.

There is a new twist to the hearings this year. Congress and President Obama are pointing out that Big Oil is getting tax breaks that it should not. These breaks are supposedly contributing to the national debt and, so the theory goes, must be eliminated to allow us to deal with our debt problem.

Once again, the politicians show they do not have the backbone to deal with the national debt in a serious manner. The tax breaks we are talking about here total 21 billion over 10 years. That equates to 2.1 billion a year. Now compare this to our annual deficit this year of $1.6 trillion. If the tax breaks are eliminated, it will make next to no difference in our debt problem.

Look, there are plenty of reasons to evaluate whether Big Oil should get these tax breaks. Maybe they should. Maybe they should not. That is a subject for another article and we each have our own opinions. Placing the argument in the national debt debate, however, completely misses the point of the scale of the problem we have. Arguing about big oil is like arguing over whether you’ll pay 99 cents or 49 cents on a car purchase.

Let’s get back to the basics here. The simple fact is the amount of money we spend on Medicare, Social Security and the military alone totals more than we are taking in as tax revenues. Until these three issues are dealt with, we are essentially spitting in the wind. As a general rule, you should roll your eyes at any national debt debate that discusses billions of dollars in savings instead of trillions. Saving 20 or 90 billion dollars sounds nice, but it just doesn’t make a big enough dent in our problem.

Can we deal with the national debt? Yes. It will only happen, however, when our representatives develop the intestinal fortitude to take on the problem in a serious manner.

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