The NYT of July 4 points out that we are subsidizing big oil, and undertaxing it. “As Oil Industry Fights a Tax, It Reaps Billions From Subsidies,” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/04bptax.html?ref=global-home. Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon that caused all the trouble, is one of what John Kerry called those Benedict Arnold corporations that escaped the USA to avoid tax.
That brings to mind a controversy in the 1980s about whether a pamphlet describing some tax break for the oil industry that was to be issued by the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation would use the phrase “Drain America first.” Friends of the oil industry at the Member level didn’t like the phrase: I don’t think it got printed in the pamphlet.
The Center for New Revenue 