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The House, in its continuing effort to get some good bills/legislation passed in its first one hundred hours on the job, cut back on some of the oil industry subsidies on Thursday! This amounts to billions of dollars that the federal government may be able to add to the treasury.
Critics of the bill claim that it will diminish oil production in the U.S. and increase reliance on imports.
Of course, the Democrats only hold a slight majority in the senate so it remains to be seen if this bill will get put into action.
From Yahoo News
The legislation would impose a "conservation fee" on oil and gas taken from deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico; scrap nearly $6 billion worth of oil industry tax breaks enacted by Congress in recent years; and seek to recoup royalties lost to the government because of an Interior Department error in leases issued in the late 1990s.
Democrats said the legislation could produce as much as $15 billion in revenue. Most of that money would pay to promote renewable fuels such as solar and wind power, alternative fuels including ethanol and biodiesel and incentives for conservation.
"The oil industry doesn't need the taxpayers' help. ... There is not an American that goes to a gas pump that doesn't know that," said Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (news, bio, voting record), D-Md. Pump prices topped $3 per gallon last year as the oil industry earned record profits.
The bill, Hoyer said, "starts to move our nation in a new direction" on energy policy.
To read the GOP's reasoning for opposing this legislation, go here.
