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We’ll Make *You* Pay For What *We* Own That We Have *No* Clue About Solving

By: Dave Poff (haystack) (Diary)  |  May 24th, 2010 at 06:14 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

So suggests the morons running our Country right now, at least:

Responding to the massive BP oil spill, Congress is getting ready to quadruple—to 32 cents a barrel—a tax on oil used to help finance cleanups. The increase would raise nearly $11 billion over the next decade.

The tax is levied on oil produced in the U.S. or imported from foreign countries. The revenue goes to a fund managed by the Coast Guard to help pay to clean up spills in waterways, such as the Gulf of Mexico.

It would be really cool if someone in Washington could help us understand what good it will do to take even MORE of the money we don’t have enough of already to put in their pockets so they can have it available to them the next time a problem THEY don’t know how to solve comes along so it can be…solved… by them:

“I don’t think anyone else could do better than we are,” Doug Suttles, the BP chief operating officer, said Monday. “I know that that’s frustrating to hear and our performance, to this point, I wish was better. I wish this was done. But we’re doing everything we can. And I don’t actually believe anyone could do any better, unfortunately.”

Administration officials also have said they lack the technology — such as unmanned submarines that can work at such ocean depths — that has been deployed by BP.
[snip]
Fadel Gheit, managing director for oil and gas research at the Oppenheimer & Co. investment bank and firm, said the government has the authority, “but we don’t have the technology or ability to do it.”

“The government is not in the oil business,” Gheit said, adding that BP is the industry leader, and “if they cannot do it, nobody else can. Period.”

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar made clear Sunday that the federal role in stopping the leak is overseeing BP’s efforts rather than taking over.

How cute and cuddly of the Administration to proclaim the right and jurisdiction for oversight on a thing they have no clue about what to do to resolve…while assuring us that if we give them money they’ll put it aside for the very NEXT crisis that comes along that they’ll have no clue about what to do to resolve.

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  • penguin2

    Picture them rubbing their hands together, and thinking how those monies are going to be used to pay off some other special interest group who comes knocking on the door.

    • 1ofmany

      Will be just like social security. They will keep that trust in name only but the money will go into the general fund under pork funds, spend freely. Then they will have to keep raising the tax to satisfy the buying of votes through all those special projects that the big party donors demand.

  • nessa

    That sounds so much better than “The increase will steal nearly $11 billion from American consumers over the next decade.”

    • http://www.hickpolitics.com Dave Poff (haystack)

      the spill right now is starting to see estimates in the 20 and 30 bn range…so, what the hell good will 11 be…that far out? Ad campaigns to tell the locals the Fed is on the way with dawn and dishtowels for the spotted owl?

  • JadedByPolitics

    I guess Rahm has been down on the Congressional floor!

    • http://erickbrockway.wordpress.com/ Erick Brockway

      I was JUST sitting down to say tht, and you slammed it home!

      Wonder what happened to “We’ll make sure BP pays ALL the cost of the cleanup”? Oh! An excuse to raise taxes!
      “We’ll just put this in the Treasury in case BP can’t cover”.

      Great minds, eh Jaded?

      • JadedByPolitics

        that WE immediately think that they are manipulating everything around them. BTW its “crisis” ……..heh! but you NEVER know what the hell it is…LOL!

      • SilverhairedSurfer

        This Gulf oil spill problem is VERY simple to control. All that needs to be done is to dump a few hundred tons of hay, (yes, regular old hay) all over the spill area. The oil will cling to the hay and wash up wherever it will. However, it will be very simple to pick up the hay after it washes ashore because the oil-saturated-hay will stop at the high-tide mark on all the beaches, just like regular old seaweed does now. Come on, we’ve ALL seen a band of high-tide seaweed along any beach in the World. Now the oil will be simple to clean up because all that needs to be done is to pick up the hay along the beaches. The hay will hold the oil and prevent the oil from penetrating the sandy beaches. Hay on oil; oil clings to hay; hay washes ashore; hay and oil are easily picked up by using normal beach cleaning equipment that every beach-town has to clean its sandy beaches. Simple. Problem solved. OR
        you’all can continue to whine and cry about your lost livelihood and become just another part of the problem instead of working smart to affect its resolution. As more oil is spilt into the water, just keep adding more hay until the leak is plugged, and soon the water will become crystal clear. Because it WILL become crystal clear again if this suggestion is applied and followed.
        Not a TOTAL fix however. The leak still has to be capped, and the birds will still have to be washed, etc. to save them. But at least the oil will be contained and the beaches will be saved. Git?er DONE !!

        • 1ofmany

          Come on now , you know that high tech has pushed proven common sense methods into the past. Besides only the farmer will get any money from that, Wouldn’t be enough cost for BP to raise their prices to pay for it and other companies to use is to increase their profits.
          Then on top of that you want to deny our congress from implementing a new tax. Shame on you :)

  • http://www.thehayride.com MacAoidh

    …I had a similar take in the latest Hayride spill update…

    We’re coming to the conclusion that this nightmare isn’t so much a factor of the company being dishonest or incompetent or lazy or whatever but rather that the logistical and technological difficulties of drilling a mile below sea level are so great that if you’re going to drill out there and there’s a problem there simply isn’t any way of quickly mitigating it, and that’s a little more unnerving than the idea of one company who doesn’t care about safety.

    In any event, it looks like Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen has had another opportunity to play adult and tamp down a stupid statement from a left-winger in a position of power. Last week Allen poured water on Rep. Ed Markey’s efforts to sensationalize some wild claims of spill volume by noting that the spill response efforts are calibrated to as big a volume as anyone could imagine, and regardless of whether 5,000 barrels a day or the insane estimates of 100,000 barrels a day are the accurate numbers they’d be doing the same things. Today, in response to the increasingly Brownie-ish Ken Salazar’s statements that if the feds decide they don’t like what BP is doing about the spill they’ll toss the company aside, Allen had an eminently reasonable quote…

    “To push BP out of the way, it would raise the question, to replace them with what?”

    He’s right. Salazar, Janet Napolitano, Lisa Jackson and Carol Browner – or for that matter Markey, Henry Waxman, Bob Menendez, Dick Durbin, Joe Biden or Barack Obama – have absolutely zero expertise or knowledge of how to end this spill. In some cases it’s not totally unreasonable to wonder whether some of these people even have a particular interest in ending it, seeing as though what they’re really after is an end to offshore drilling and this spill is a big PR boon to the drilling ban gang.

    And BP’s operations chief Doug Suttles gave a statement today which backed up Allen, and will no doubt kick the antpile even harder:

    ?I don?t think anyone else could do better than we are,? Doug Suttles, the BP chief operating officer, said Monday. ?I know that that?s frustrating to hear and our performance, to this point, I wish was better. I wish this was done. But we?re doing everything we can. And I don?t actually believe anyone could do any better, unfortunately.?

    So they’re stuck with BP. They’re stuck with BP a month in, and they’ve been hacking BP to pieces for an entire month. They’ve demonized these people, held hearings ad nauseam, made statements about keeping “a boot on their necks” – which Rand Paul correctly called un-American last week and Salazar went out and made another statement to that effect, which should tell you how obsessive these guys are with scoring points and trying to win elections rather than actually governing the country – and preened to the public about how angry they are with BP’s failure to meet government-imposed deadlines for ending the spill. It would be laughable if this wasn’t so serious a disaster.

    • http://www.hickpolitics.com Dave Poff (haystack)

      .

    • LeaveMeAlone

      We have, by anyone’s measurement, a disaster in the Gulf of Mexico resulting from the Deepwater Horizon’s blowout/collapse/explosion. In response, BP’s engineers are attempting numerous fixes. One may ask why the most drastic measures aren’t used first. Like attempting to solve most problems, working from the simplest, least destructive methods along a progression to the most drastic is the usual and logical progression of efforts. A splinter in one’s finger does not immediately call for amputation of the arm at the elbow.

      Compounding the problem is the extreme difficulty of operating at the depths where the oil is discharging. There has truly never been a problem that presents such difficulties in the history of the industry. BP may not have been successful yet, but there is good reason to believe that they will ultimately seal the gusher.

      So BP has spent millions so far to stop the flow, and will forseeably spend many millions, if not billions more, both on sealing the well and mitigating/compensating for damages from the spill.

      What then, is the US government doing? The Coast Guard, to its credit is supporting BP’s efforts, as well as lending its efforts toward mitigation of the spill. Kudos to them.

      The administration and Congress? Not so much. Their answer so far has been to criticize BP’s efforts, form a committee to “look into” what happened, and propose a new tax on the production of oil, none of which will do anything to solve the current problem of capping the well. As usual, they sit on the sidelines, analyzing, criticizing, and opportunistically using the disaster as a reason to grab more money and power for the government.

      Since 1994, the emergency response plan regarding events such as this has dictated that fire booms be readily available. Authorization to use them as soon as possible is a standing policy. Where were the booms? Not in the government’s inventory. We had to emergency-requisition the only one available from the manufacturer, and beg or borrow any others from countries that had followed through on their own plans and kept them available.

      As in most situations, those who can, the engineers, technicians, sailors, and seamen, are working around the clock to find and implement a solution. Those who govern are busy blaming, studying, taxing, and navel-gazing.

      Tell me again why we have these people in charge.

      • http://www.thehayride.com MacAoidh

        …spill being resolved.

        Obama ought to be kissing BP’s collective rear end right now – because if the top kill works on Wednesday, it will save him from the worst of the effects of this thing.

    • trutexan

      who won’t allow drilling closer to shore. If it were closer to shore, the well wouldn’t be a mile down but in safer, shallower waters with a better chance of fixing this disaster.

      Everything was going alone fine until Dear Leader ordered the Coast Guard down there to put out the fire. So they sunk the rig and broke off the pipeline in the process. Nobody is talking about how the oil wasn’t leaking until after that happened. Why didn’t they let BP handle that part of the process too? They could have mitigated this below surface before the rig was sunk.

  • cump

    At least, run up the idea of placing another tax in an area that the public really doesn’t see, then stand back and see how this new ‘tax’ is accepted by the public.

    Am I wrong in this thinking?

  • travelguy

    Those funds will disappear the day after they are collected, replaced with an IOU backed by the full faith of the U.S. Government.

  • bk

    then why is this tax needed to begin with? Quadrupling a tax is bad enough, but quadrupling one that’s not needed for the stated purpose anyway is even worse.

    All we’ve heard for 5 weeks is that the government can’t do anything.

  • http://www.ArchitecturalShots.com mdyou

    These morons think they sound tough when the talk about taxing these companies in order to punish them.

    Is there anyone in America that doesn’t know who pays the tax?

    Okay members of the media, I’ll make it real simple or you. Taxes of all kinds come right off the top line. They are a cost of doing business. Everyone who buys gasoline pays the taxes, NOT THE EVIL OIL COMPANY. The increased cost may cause the consumer to limit his purchases, but so what? If there’s no sale, there’s no tax.

    Here’s another aspect…these companies are not monolithic. They employ untold numbers of sub-contractors who PASS ALONG THEIR EXPENSES PLUS A MARK-UP. Higher priced gasoline contributing to mileage expenses? No problem. The companies don’t pay it, the subs don’t pay it, YOU DO, RUBES.

    Oh yea, one more thing – all of BP’s costs of this oil spill will be – are you ready – TAX DEDUCTIBLE!!! Demotards, you gotta love ‘em.

  • dajeeps

    Not just No Way, but put the F-bomb in the middle and make it three words.

    I’m not paying for it for three reasons:

    1) If not for Libs and enviro-extremists, drilling wouldn’t be shoved so far out in the ocean that the bounds of technology and engineering are pushed beyond their limits.

    2) Don’t we have govt oversight for a reason? I think it was meant to prevent things like this and I have seen not one item from Uncle Sam telling BP or any of the other deep water drillers that the risks of drilling way out there outweigh the benefits. In fact, I’ve seen just the opposite of them being given an award not long before the blowout.

    3) And where are the fire booms that the government was supposed to have?? It is too busy building turtle tunnels, bridges to nowhere, putting skylights in liquor warehouses and building airports for the sole use of members of congress to bother with it and now it comes back to us and says everyone has to pay?? Um, no. We?ve paid enough already and it?s time to put money already appropriated to better use.

    I am no expert on deepwater drilling, my background is in technology strategy, but it doesn’t appear the folks at BP are either. With my background in strategy, however, I cannot understand how they could be confident about drilling so deep without knowing what to do and what will work if they end up with a busted well gushing oil in 5k ft of water. When Murphy?s Law kicks in is not the appropriate time to try to figure it out. They are derelict in my eyes, and they should be paying for everything at the very least.