ThinkProgress filed this report from Wisconsin.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) agreed to end subsidies to oil companies during a town hall in Waterford, Wisconsin, this morning, eliciting great applause from an overflow crowd in a very conservative section of his district. “We also want to get rid of corporate welfare,” Ryan insisted. “So we propose to repeal all that”:
Q: The subsidy for the oil companies that the federal government gives. They’ve gotta stop.
RYAN: Sure.
Q: End the oil company subsidies”¦
RYAN: I agree.
Q: “¦and you will gain a lot of that money in the red back.
Watch it:
But Ryan voted twice this year to actually extend subsidies to oil companies, once on a motion to recommit on a shorter-term continuing resolution and again when he supported an amendment to the initial House CR. The Ryan budget, meanwhile, doesn’t specifically target oil subsidies, but only generally promises to end “corporate welfare.”
Earlier this week, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) also indirectly endorsed ending subsidies to the oil industry, before walking back his support.
Ryan spokesperson Conor Sweeney told The Hill yesterday that Ryan’s budget “obviously” ends tax breaks for big oil companies, yet mysteriously also said Ryan has “made clear we are not for raising taxes” — the talking point House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has used to defend oil subsidies.
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The right hand giveth, but the right hand also taketh away.
Tea bag stained man speaks with forked tongue. No surprise here.
I’ll believe it when I see it. Not too hard to make happen if the GOP Speaker, the GOP budget architect, and the opposing party (Dems) all support it … yet I suspect we’ll still be talking oil subsidies when the discussion turns back to the 2012 budget.
I looked up ‘pandering’ in the dictionary — I found a picture of Paul Ryan.
The votes aren’t there.
The Dems would be smart to let this go, record Ryan and Boehner’s votes, and then make it into a major campaign issue in 2012. Problem is, the Democrats are not too smart.
So if we end the subsidies I would assume that the oil companies will just raise the price at the pump by an equivalent amount per gallon. Pay for it on one end or the other.
Paul #7: oil prices are set by world markets, so the oil companies won’t be able to raise prices if subsidies are removed. That means that removing the subsidies would reduce their profits and not affect consumers.
J. Koomey- Thank you for a concise rebuttal of one of the GOP myths that most Americans take at face value and allows the plutocracy to keep on truckin’. Right up there with you have to tax capital gains at a much lower rate (or not at all) or there will be no jobs.
More to Jeff Koomey #8–the subsidies almost certainly are buried in the federal deficit (someone please correct me if the subsidies come directly from current federal gas tax revenues), rather like the cost of the Iraq War. As such, taxpayers don’t feel them directly and it’s an ‘out of touch, out of mind’ sort of thing, eventually diffused into a general ‘Washington is bad’ sentiment. If eliminating those subsidies impacted pump pricing demonstrably, then I suppose a federal gas tax adjustment might be in play. Regardless, I think it’s important now that consumers feel prices close to the true cost of the gasoline the U.S. uses.
If the camera had panned lower we could have found out how rapidly his pants caught fire…
I hope his constituents remember how to fact check, and file recall petitions. (or tar and feathering, running out of town on a rail, in a kinder conservative way, of course)
Kate has a good column related to this topic: Where Activism Fails
http://climatesight.org/2011/04/20/where-activism-fails/
There’s a beautiful circularity to this. Plutocrats pay politicians billions in ‘donations’, out of the kindness of their hearts, and to support that ‘democratic process’ that is the envy of the world. The politicians, and they are almost invariably those that spend the most on informative, polite and meticulously truthful public informational advertising, then ensure that the public purse is wide opened in the general direction of Big Business, but only out of a selfless dedication to full employment and rewarding and pleasurable employment for the rabble. Surely there has not been a more beneficent form of social organisation developed, anywhere, nor will there ever be.