I generally agree. On a related note, on the "not a subsidy but still a hidden cost" side, I think there's a fair argument to be made that the cost of oil doesn't include the amount of money we spend on military efforts to bring "stability" to oil producing regions by bombing them, but that's less of a subsidy and more a question of policy costs not counting against a product when we evaluate the "cost of oil" versus the "cost of solar." Of course, once could legitimately ask whether all of the billions we spend bombing people is really doing much to stabilize our oil supply--I certainly think it's unlikely to be a net win at this point in history.

As for tax policy, I'd like to treat unincorporated businesses and corporations the same if possible. To the extent that money sits in a "business" account, it's still "inside" the business. It's certainly easier to see when that transition happens when you have a corporation paying out dividends, but I could certainly see tightening up the accounting rules for unincorporated businesses so they could declare a particular bank account as belonging to the business for tax purposes so it can easily retain earnings from year to year and use them to grow the business without being taxed as personal income.

The bottom line is we spend resources and create big distortions by trying to get businesses to pay taxes, and we have very little actual tax revenue to show for it. We do, however, have armies of accountants and financial engineers who get paid to engage in all sorts of wasteful hanky panky for tax avoidance. So we might as well just skip the whole thing and make up the revenue in a more sensible place. Businesses would run more efficiently, taxes would be easier to collect, it would get rid of asinine "double taxation" arguments and rhetoric over whether one industry is favored over another, and it would also likely put a lot of lobbyists out of business.

My fellow liberals don't seem to like the idea, but it seems like it would make the tax code more progressive. Right now, Bill Gates and Poor Old Granny pay the same corporate tax rate on any stock they own. If we taxed distributions, neither one would pay corporate income tax, but Gates would pay a higher rate on distributions while Poor Old Granny would get hers at the lower rates of a retired low-income senior.

Overblown as in, "not really happening to the extent we thought," or overblown as in, "Well, fuck the bees. We don't need 'em anyway"?

On a similar note, my coffee machine is not vulnerable to HeartBleed. Another point for the engineers over at Saeco over the morons at OpenSSL, right?

The bulk of what these companies get in "tax breaks" are really just business expenses or common things like depreciation and the like.

Sure, I imagine so. Oil companies have a lot of equipment and other capital investments that depreciate, so that's probably a giant portion of it.

So, you are saying my "Child Tax Credit" is a subsidy of children?

Yes! Absolutely! Just like the home mortgage interest deduction is a subsidy for taking out a mortgage. Which is really just a bank subsidy once the market has factored everything in. Congress has done a great job of creating subsidies that cost other taxpayers money and convincing the majority of taxpayers that they're just "cutting taxes." But if I cut Bob's taxes and raise yours to cover it, it's no different than if I raise your taxes and cut Bob a check. But one of them is out of control spending and pork while the other one is just "cutting taxes" which is good and holy.

I say there are no tax breaks that amount to subsidies for big oil of any significance. You say they exist. So you need to produce the evidence of subsidies you claim exist.

I didn't say anything about oil-specific tax credits--just that tax credits are subsidies. And you've hedged very carefully with "of any significance," so I'm going to guess that it's very unlikely that anything I post will help here. But a quick Google indicates that there are tax breaks that are specific to extractive industries (most of which are enjoyed by the oil industry) like the ability to deduct intangible drilling costs in one year rather than over time. Intrestingly, it looks like the oil industry's breaks come largely in the form of reshaping how they do depreciation and deduct costs, so everything still ends up being "just depreciation." Anyway, most big politically-connected industries have weird cut-outs in the tax code like this, so I don't think it should be surprising that spends millions on lobbying has a few.

My solution to this type of thing would be to dump the corporate income tax entirely and raise dividend, capital gains, and estate taxes in a revenue-neutral way to make up the difference. We'll never get a corporate tax code that isn't full of bizarre exceptions for powerful industries, and corporations have huge financial flexibility to move money around and work around the laws, so I say we just let corporations act in an economically sensible way and tax the money when it's transferred to human owners.

Show me a case of a cop doing jail time for wrongfully killing someone. I don't mean a month long sentence either, hard time like common folks get.

You basically summed it up. Cops straight up murder people and district attorneys refuse to press charges fearing they will lose the backing of the police. The head of the brotherhood of police is on record saying that police misconduct is so rare it doesn't even exist.

Guess you've never been in court with a cop. Cops lie to judges and persecutors all the time. If cops don't have enough evidence for a warrant they say an anonymous informant tipped them off and the judge rubber stamps it.

Indeed, this is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for. Thank you for the links !

How will they make it leak oil and break down like normal Harleys?

The point I was trying to make is that this sort of misappropriation of funding is the root cause.

My point is that you might have been able to say that in 1993 (we don't know for sure), but now we have two variables to contend with. In real terms, funding has been cut approximately in half. So even if the system was 30% waste in 1993 and they spent the past 21 years diligently eliminating 100% of that waste, funding has been cut enough for the operation to be considered underfunded. It would have to be more than 50% waste right now assuming it was "correctly" funded in 1993 and a lot more than 50% waste now assuming it was overfunded in 1993 (which seems to be your contention). Sure, we can cut bike paths out, but I'm very skeptical of the notion that bike paths and ferries are major percentage of the federal outlay given that we have almost 48,000 miles of interstate highways or that half of the budget is wasted.

It looks like about half of the budget goes to the "state of good repair" right off the bat, so even assuming that everything else they do is waste, it's a pretty close call to say that the current budget is right, and that's only if the 1993 budget was waste-free.

Let's assume it was "correctly" funded and managed in 1993. Even assuming no new waste in the system, the revenue is down substantially in the face of inflation. Adding to that is the fact that you can drive a lot more miles per gallon of gas now than you could 21 years ago, so revenue per mile driven should be way down. I'm sure there's plenty of waste in the system, but the past 21 years have been a pretty substantial revenue cut by any reasonable measure.

Wear and tear on the roads per unit gas consumed has also changed. A modern car of simialr weight to a 1993 car should be expected to consume substantially less gas than the 93 car, so keeping the tax constant with respect to gallons of gas consumed and the CPI will still underfund maintenance assuming it was set correctly in 1993.

A tax credit for a specific person, company or sector is pretty much a subsidy by definition. It's favored treatment of one entity with the loss in revenue being made up by everybody else. I'd be all for simplyfing the corporate income tax or eliminating it completely, but as long as it's there, any loopholes or giveaways in it are subsidies.

If anything, it looks like commodities investors alone drive the price independent of supply/demand.

How does this work? Given that at the end of every futures contract is a barrel of oil, there must be somebody on one end buying the oil to use (or store) and somebody on the other end pumping the oil out of the ground to sell it. There's clearly a price differential between those two endpoints, but how does the path that price travels on its way between those endpoints make a serious long run difference?

Doesn't matter which country we buy it from specifically. Oil is a global market and disruptions in part of the supply jack up prices everywhere. I'm open to the idea that our poking a stick in the Middle East may not be generating much net stability, but on the assumption that it does, the primary reason we care about what goes on there enough to spend mony on it is that they're a big chunk of the world's oil supply.