To hear the president and Democrats talk, you’d think that Big Oil was sucking the Treasury dry with huge subsidies. Almost a year ago I wrote about the federal government’s “subsidies” to Big Oil. I said then, “They are all tax ‘breaks’… about $4.3 billion per year — about 0.2% of this year’s deficit and enough to fund about 10 hours of current US government spending.”
Well look at that: tax subsidies for all fossil fuels were only 15% of all federal subsidies for energy. The Green alternatives of renewables and “efficiency” took 78% of all tax subsidies for energy. Big Oil has so much influence on Capitol Hill that our government subsidizes its competitors five times more. Fossil fuels provide 77% of our nation’s energy yet receive just 15% of the federal government’s tax subsidies.
“Alcohol fuels,” which include ethanol, took $6.1B of tax subsidies, or more than twice as much as oil, gas, and coal combined.