Oil Subsidies

Mr. COONS. Madam President, I rise this morning to commemorate National Police Week and to speak to the service of the brave men and women in local law enforcement. But, first, I feel compelled to make a comment in response to the exchange between the majority leader and the Republican leader, to simply speak, if I could, briefly about the ongoing pain each and every working American family feels when they go to the gas station.

With the price of gasoline at an alltime high, with the price of gasoline flirting with $4 a gallon, with the price of oil retreating from an alltime high, and with, most importantly, oil company profits gushing through the roof and hitting an alltime high, Members of our party, Members of this body came forward yesterday with a bill which got more than 50 votes but failed to hit the 60 needed in this body to make for cloture, which would have made significant progress on dealing with our deficit.

We just heard a comment on the floor that we need to stop picking winners and losers and need to move forward in helping America end its dependence on foreign energy. I could not agree more because the expenditures through our Tax Code--the billions and billions of dollars in needless expenditures through our Tax Code--that continue to subsidize some of the most wildly profitable corporations in American history is exactly that, picking winners, and the losers are the American people.

When I go home to my State--I know, Madam President, when you go home to your State--I hear people day in and day out say: Why can't you do more to help create decent jobs, to deal with the deficit and, more than anything, to stop the oil companies, which are despoiling our natural resources and picking our pockets at the pump.

This is not picking on one particular industry. This is rationally looking at our immense tax expenditures through the code and saying: There is a time here for us to stop. We would save literally $21 billion by fiscal year 2021; that is, over the next decade, $21 billion in deficit reduction. That does not solve the problem we need to come together and address as a body--both parties, both Chambers of this great Congress--but it is a significant downpayment.

I am from a State where we produce very little in the way of oil or coal or gas but where we consume a lot of energy and where we have lots of opportunities to invest in alternative energy--investments that would create new jobs, a competitive platform for the United States as we enter this new century and that could, frankly, help sustain our economy going forward.

The votes cast yesterday to sustain these senseless tax breaks and credits, to help keep afloat the most profitable companies in American history, strike me as doing exactly what we were just urged not to do--picking winners, where the average American is, in fact, the loser.

It is my hope we will continue to look, with a sharp and clear eye, at the billions of dollars, the more than $35 billion in first-quarter profits made by the five largest American oil firms. I have nothing against corporations making profits. In fact, that is what helps propel our economy. As we try to recover from this terrible recession, having a profitable private sector is the best way forward to help create jobs and to help grow our economy and to help deal with Federal revenues.

But the spending through our Tax Code--something that has accumulated on the underside of the American economy over the last decade--has to be stopped. We have to find ways to plug the holes through which billions in potential Federal revenue are leaking. I frankly think it is time for us to have a sensible national energy policy. And continuing to defend decades-old, needless tax breaks for major oil companies so that they can engage in manufacturing by extracting oil from the ground, for example--one of the five that would have been ended by this bill--is just senseless.

So it is my hope that we will reconsider; that as we move forward and try to find a way together to create jobs, to reduce spending and deal with our deficits, we will look hard at some of these outdated tax breaks that make it possible for bloated oil companies to make billions of dollars of profit off working Americans who pay too much at the pump.

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