[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 5]
[Senate]
[Page 7408]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             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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