Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I have been monitoring the debate on my Repeal Big Oil Tax Subsidies Act and I keep hearing over and over from our friends on the other side of the aisle that if we keep giving the oil companies taxpayer money, they will do the right thing. The problem is we already know that is not true. First of all, the United States has only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, so we cannot drill our way out of this problem even if we wanted to. But, more importantly, we cannot trust the big five oil companies to simply do the right thing. Let's look at the record. Last year, the big five oil companies took $2 billion of your money and saw their profits shoot up to $137 billion--an impressive 75-percent increase in profits. Did they use that extra money we gave them in our subsidies to produce more oil? No, they didn't. They took your money and they didn't produce a drop more of oil. Despite the fact that overall U.S. oil production is higher now than it has been in the last 8 years, last year these five companies actually produced 4 percent less oil. So here is another way to look at it. As each of these companies pocketed our subsidies to pad those profits, they did not use this windfall to produce more oil. If we take the word of our friends on the other side of the aisle, we have a contract, in essence, with these five companies. We pay them $2 billion and they give us more oil. Last year, they broke that contract and produced less.…”