Today, President Bush rolled out his brave plan to roll back billions in tax breaks for energy companies. But you wouldn’t know from the coverage so far that what he’s really talking about is rolling back some of the more disastrous measures of the energy bill he himself signed into law last year.
Here’s the key snippet from his speech today:
Record oil prices and large cash flows also mean that Congress has got to understand that these energy companies don’t need unnecessary tax breaks like the write-offs of certain geological and geophysical expenditures, or the use of taxpayers’ money to subsidize energy companies’ research into deep water drilling. I’m looking forward to Congress to take about $2 billion of these tax breaks out of the budget over a 10-year period of time. Cash flows are up. Taxpayers don’t need to be paying for certain of these expenses on behalf of the energy companies.
The 2005 energy bill included $14.5 billion in tax breaks. It’s not clear just which “unnecessary tax breaks” in particular he’s talking about repealing, but he’ll be hard pressed to find any that he himself didn’t sign into law.
The only measure that he mentions specifically here, the “use of taxpayer money to subsidize energy research into deep water drilling,” refers to former Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s pet project, a $1.55 billion boondoggle to benefit the Texas Energy Center in Sugar Land that DeLay inserted into the energy bill. It was part of the bill that Bush signed, but now that DeLay’s out of the picture, Bush can safely cut it out.
So what other “unnecessary” measures will Bush find in his own one-year old bill? Stay tuned.
