Who Is Trying To Buy the Senate to Get a "Special Break?" - Granite Grok

Who Is Trying To Buy the Senate to Get a “Special Break?”

Democrats are the ones giving special breaks for campaing donationsI can’t help thinking that the  Democrat “big oil is trying to buy the senate thing” is an opportunity for us to make a very important point about the fundamental flaws in Democrat thinking about energy and special breaks.

First, we ought to be able to agree that any business or individual that is taxed or regulated might have an interest in why, how much, and for what purpose.  Taxes take away a portion of your legitimate earnings and regulations create costs that affect your ability to do business.  There is room for debate about the need for both taxes and regulations, and to what degree, but that debate has to include the idea that government, left to its own devices, will inevitably over tax and over regulate unless those paying its freight (or their political surrogates) argue effectively against it.

We also have to accept that there is a difference between a business that is just trying to get the government off their back and a business that is looking to get on the government’s back.  The former is what big oil is (for the most part) asking for,while the latter is what keeps a majority of so-called green energy projects treading water until they (for the most part) go under.

The left’s argument, that oil and gas is buying up politicians, hinges on a false premise.  That they (oil companies) are somehow getting special favors in return for donations. Democrats on the other hand, who are advocating for alternative green energy taxpayer-funded bailouts, want you to believe that they can still wear white to their lobbyist-wedding because they are fighting against big oil and the Republican politicians who support it. This is exactly the opposite of the truth.

Oil and gas is one of the most heavily taxed and regulated industries in the world.  They pay for permission to operate, pay the cost of dealing with the regulations, while paying a 40% or more tax rate on their productivity.  On top of that, the government limits their ability to produce and develop new reserves or to open more refineries to process the raw material needed to run the economy.  That adds costs to every sector, which consumers pay in almost every transaction they make for any and all products and services in their daily lives.

Anyone who defends their objections or promotes the idea that these companies might be able to do their job more effectively–lowering the costs of oil and gas for everyone and by extension for any and all products and services that must absorb higher costs–is a shill for big oil.

Let’s put that another way.  If the state was milking you for almost half your earnings, you’d be interested in doing whatever you could to limit the plundering of your companies resources by the government.  You wouldn’t be asking for favors, you’d simply be trying to convince people to take a few concrete slabs off your chest so it would be easier to breathe.  But if you suggest that about oil and gas, your suggestion that we take less from them is sold by most Democrats as giving special breaks to big oil.

This is no different than your mugger leaving you a $20 for cab fare being spun as a special break for you.  Hey, he could of took more, right?

On the other side of the energy rhetoric, is green energy, which the left proposes as a suitable alternative to coal, oil, or gas–even though (at present) it is not.

Green energy is a great idea, but it is very expensive and at this point ill-suited to our needs.   Most of the manufacturing processes, and for solar panels in particular, are as or more hostile to the environment than current oil and gas extraction, production, and consumption–at least in the US.   Green generally delivers inferior energy at higher costs and if it needs to travel at all (ethanol for example), do so poorly.  And for this, and many other reasons, they do not attract venture capital or private investment, which is a huge red flag.  Green energy projects are dogs that wont hunt, money losers with no potential for return on investment unless….

Let me finish that thought with a story about born-again green-energy Barron Tom Steyer..

Steyer used to use private capital he managed to make people wealthy (including himself) by sharing that capital with industries looking to expand and develop.  So he would use his banking hedge-fund super powers to leverage private money into wealth creation.   The industry would expand, grow, use new profits to pay off loans or investors or would share that success in a rising stock price, dividends, or interest payments.

If it did not grow Steyer and his investors would lose money so we can assume that if Steyer did not break the law, that he was an above average hedge-fund manager because he is a billionaire.

One of the industries Tom Steyer helped, and got wealthy from, was the coal industry.  As a result of his using private wealth to invest in coal, he made himself and others richer, including the coal industry, which created jobs in the countries where invested, generated taxable commerce, while helping to provide cheap, affordable energy for everyone else–which also allowed them to save money in the process through lower electric rates.

This is how capitalism and the willingness to risk private money on a business model that meets an actual need can benefit the self-interest of those willing to take the risk as well as the interests of those who want or need the product in which private persons invested.  If your electric bill is $20 or $50 dollars less per month (or hundreds or thousands less for a business), you use that money for other things.  If gas is $2.00 per gallon instead of $4.00, those savings are available for other activity; reducing price pressures, adding employees or improving wages, having more money in your own wallet that can lead to more private saving and investment or increased commerce that can add to or lift the wealth in other sectors of the economy.  That influx leads to increased demand for labor which drives up wages, and standards of living (no extra-constitutional interference from government regulators required).

Nowadays, Tom Steyer has sworn off coal to such a degree (publicly at least) that he is promising to withhold money from other businesses he might have invested in or donated to, that still invest private money in the coal industry that helped make him wealthy. Why?  Because the current political will is to use the force of law to crush the coal industry.  The Democrats want to tax and regulate it out of business.  (They have a similar opinion about oil and gas as well, if you had not noticed)  In place of coal, the Democrats want to erect green energy farms to provide electricity and Tom Steyer is no moron.  If he wants to keep getting wealthy, having wealthy friends, and so on, he needs to change his approach from risking his own private money, to milking taxpayers through the free money he can get from the government.

Tom has probably not seen the true light of green energy as much as he has seen the backroom advantages of crony corporatism.

If the government–at least in the US–has its mind-set on making coal (or gas or oil) too risky to invest in (or makes them so over regulated as to not be worth investing in–and no evil-Republican has done much if anything to slow this process in any meaningful way in my life-time), he is happy to invest in politicians instead.   That is why he has been gathering every rich bastard he can find to help him invest 100 million dollars in buying up Senate Democrats instead of investing it in oil, or gas, or coal, or something useful to ordinary citizens.  He is putting his butt in the front row seat on the green energy gravy train because he sees this as the key to his new wealth creation model.  To optimize that shift in thinking Steyer can’t let coal, or oil, or gas, slow this train down.

So now he opposes investing in coal.  He opposes new infrastructure that would increases access to oil, which would make his green energy gambit less lucrative.  And if he can keep the US Senate majority Democrat, it improves the odds that Tom Steyer can benefit from free money for green energy projects that will favor his pockets whether they ever come on-line or produce one honest dimes worth of profit.

Steyer is just another rent seeker committed to investing in Democrat politicians who will interfere with his competition, favor his sector, cut red tape to help him out, and give him (or his interests) free or low-interest loans for wind and solar projects that will make our energy cost more, while still failing to meet even a fraction of our actual energy needs.

And I think Steyer knows that.  I think he has an even longer range strategy to capitalise on the failure of green energy, but I’ll get into that another time.

So, back to the disingenuous left and its war on oil.

Those special breaks Democrats claim Republicans are giving to big oil are not that special.   And the money those energy companies are spending on political campaigns are nothing like the money Tom Steyer wants to spend on Democrat Senators.

Oil companies are investing in campaigns on the hope that the government might take less of their legitimate earnings from them in taxes.

Democrat Tom Steyer is investing in Liberal Campaigns in the hope that the government will take more in taxes from others for his projects via grants or low-interest loans so he can milk the ongoing price supports and subsidies (paid for in perpetuity with taxpayer dollars) knowing that when it collapses it wont cost him a dime.

Steyer invested private money in coal and used that to get rich.  Now he wants to invest taxpayer money in green energy to continue getting rich, and he is prepared to spend 50 million of his own money (plus another 50 million he has promised to raise) on Senate Democrats who will all but guarantee he gets that green energy money with no strings attached.

Republicans need to grasp onto this simple reality and rub it in the faces of their democrat opponents.

Ask the question.  Who is buying politicians to get a special break?  Oil companies who are looking to either pay less taxes, or billionaire Democrats like Tom Steyer who want high taxes for free loans to fund his risk-free boondoggles?

Democrat Jeanne Shaheen’s campaign still has some explaining to do about those special breaks, and who is actually getting them.

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