Americans, more than most other people in the world hate being taxed. The rallying cry of “no taxation without representation!” was at the birth of our revolution of course and so the very idea of a carbon tax was doomed to be reviled by most citizens. Americans do, however, have the concept of fairness at heart, embodied by the image of the Lady Justice that depicts a blindfolded lady holding a balance scale. Paying a fair price for a commodity, based upon the true costs to produce it and allowing for a fair profit are in fact, the American way.
Today, America finds itself bankrupted for too many reasons to address in the space of this column, so I”ll focus on just two today. The military/industrial complex that Ike warned us about 50 years ago, clearly more out-of-control today and oil. Back then, most military spending dealt with the threat of communism. Today, a much higher percentage of this spending goes to protect cheap oil, more precisely the corporations making more profit from it than any other enterprise in human history.
Our bases in Saudi Arabia serve to protect the oil, not the Saudi royal family and their extreme sect of Islam. These bases enraged bin Laden and were his stated reason for attacking us, so we can add the extra money we now spend so wastefully on national security to the expenses. We also have bases in Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq and even Afghanistan to name just a few, all having their roots in either directly protecting that cheap oil or pursuing Al Qaeda, obviously related.
Most Americans believe we pay about $3 for a gallon of gas without realizing the real cost of that gallon, which is several times that when the military costs are included, which we pay for via taxation and mounting debt to subsidize the oil industry. Massive human cost in lives lost, pain and suffering of military families destroyed by multiple deployments can”t be calculated in monetary terms but must be added to that total.
Why not withdraw our military from those bases, sell them to either the local governments or the oil companies reaping the profits, and allow those countries/companies to either staff the bases themselves or hire Xe (Blackwater) mercenaries to protect their oil fields? Security costs would then be added to the other costs of producing the oil and the price at the pump would actually reflect the true cost of the oil for the first time. We could also recoup for the taxpayers some fraction of the hundreds of billions spent on construction of those bases. Should a base not be purchased, we could use it”s destruction as a valuable training exercise before leaving.
The petroleum industry, again the most profitable enterprise in human history, will receive about $35 billion in direct subsidies from the taxpayer this year and most of them will pay little or nothing back in the way of income tax, given all the loopholes created by their lobbyists. BP, which the Republicans famously defended against being forced to pledge a $20 billion fund to clean up their mess, will get a $10 billion tax cut as a result! Obviously, this is obscene and can”t be continued by a country suffering from massive debt.
Lowell Grant is a weekly columnist for the Record-Bee. E-mail him at c21vintage@aol.com.
