Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer called President Barack Obama‘s plea to end oil tax breaks “staggering cynicism,” explaining how Obama’s rhetoric contradicted his past actions on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report” Thursday.
Earlier in the day, Obama spoke from the Rose Garden outside the White House, calling on Congress to end tax credits to the five major oil companies. Soon after the president’s remarks, the Senate voted to end debate on a Democratic bill that would have redirected $21 billion in “big oil” tax breaks to “green energy” companies and deficit reduction. Some Democrats joined Republicans to kill the bill by a 51-47 vote, short of the 60-vote requirement to bring it up for a vote.
“I think any objective observer would look at what the president said today in the Rose Garden on this and conclude as I did: it is truly staggering cynicism,” Krauthammer said on Thursday’s broadcast. “Number one, when he was in the Senate, Obama supported the subsidies he’s denouncing today. And when our own Ed Henry asked Jay Carney about that, Carney had no answer. He was looking for a hole to hide in.”
“Second, the Congressional Research Office in March of 2011 showed that if you remove the subsidies, if it has any effect whatsoever on the gas prices, it will be to increase them, and the president is pretending he is trying to lower the gas prices,” he continued.
Ending the tax breaks would do little to solve the deficit spending problems plaguing the federal government, Krauthammer claimed. The Senate bill that Obama supported would have put about $10 billion in “big oil” tax cuts toward deficit reduction.
“Lastly, it is a trivial effect,” Krauthammer explained. “If you collected this subsidy, this tax from the oil companies for the next 100 years, it wouldn’t cover four months of deficit spending under this administration. And here he is in the Rose Garden standing up and saying again and again as he has before, ‘I am for all of the above — all kinds of sources of energy.’”
“This is three days after the EPA issued a regulation — which was overlooked in all the Supreme Court stuff about Obamacare — issued a regulation which means the end of any new coal-fired plant in America, ever. It’s the end of the coal industry in time as the old plants age — millions out of work, the coal industry shutdown and in time, raising electricity rates and really destroying a great natural resource America has,” he said.
“But of course, if you are Obama, who needs coal when you know what we have: algae.”
Earlier when Obama spoke about the stupid algae:
“You’ve got a bunch of algae out here, right? If we can figure out how to make energy out of that, we’ll be doing all right,” Obama said at the University of Miami.
“Believe it or not, we could replace up to 17 percent of the oil we import for transportation with this fuel that we can grow right here in the United States,” he said.
Wild Thing’s comment………
Good for Chales, he is right. Obama is way off on this and wrong in so many ways.
Obama doesn’t have the common sense God gave a brass door knob. Raise taxes on the oil companies and they’ll only pass it on to the America people. That’s what corporations do.
This is a guy who never even ran a lemonade stand or mowed lawns to make money and now he’s trying to run the economy of the most powerful nation on earth. We’re we freaking nuts to allow this fool to become president?
obama is purposely pushing us away from energy independence. More and more fossil fuel reserves are being discovered in our own back yard. Oil and natural gas deposits are being discovered on an almost daily basis. We already have the largest known coal deposits in the world. All this would normally lead to increased energy independence, increased jobs and decreased energy costs. So obama and the Democrats are prohibiting further fuel gathering and instead pushing for alternative unproven, unreliable and costly solar, wind and algae resources as energy producers. I would imagine that they plan for these alternative fuels to be 110% govt. controlled. They love big all imposing govt. with themselves in charge.
Bob, that sure is the truth.
Tom,your right, he sure wants to get rid of all of that. And somehow we are supposed to drive and all the other products we get from oil….amazing.