High Gas Prices

COMMENTARY Environment

High Gas Prices

Jun 6, 2011 2 min read
COMMENTARY BY

Senior Research Fellow

Mackenzie Eaglen specializes in defense strategy, military readiness and the defense budget.

Lately, high gas prices and high profits for oil companies have tempted some lawmakers to propose removing “tax subsidies” for oil and gas companies.  The problem is, the tax provisions they target are not special interest subsidies at all.

Take the domestic manufacturer’s tax credit that is now the subject of heated debate in Congress. This provision was enacted as part of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 to provide companies a tax incentive to manufacture their products in the U.S.—including to produce gas and oil from domestic sources.  It applies to any number of U.S. producers—clothing manufacturers, road builders, electricity generators, water companies and more. The bill now being considered in Congress would make oil and gas production companies (and only oil and gas companies) ineligible for this credit.  It neither removes a subsidy nor closes a tax loophole.  It merely imposes a targeted tax hike on oil and gas producers.

This is not to say, however, that there aren’t plenty of wasteful subsidies that Congress should eliminate and that are better targets for reforming energy tax policy.

When the government decides to favor a technology with subsidies, it’s a good bet that the subsidy “winner” is a loser in the marketplace.  Political decisions to provide subsidies distort the marketplace at the expense of economic growth and prosperity. That’s exactly what has happened—and what continues to happen—with America’s energy tax policy. Reversing this practice will benefit American consumers and taxpayers.

First, special tax credits for cherry-picked technologies artificially reduce the price for consumers. For example, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provide tax rebates for hybrid and electric vehicles. Policymakers are also pushing to expand and extend tax credits that subsidize the production vehicles powered by natural gas as well as other credits that support refueling infrastructure.

These credits and rebates make these technologies seem far more competitive than they actually are. Rather than increase competition, the artificial market distortion gives these technologies an unfair price advantage over other technologies. The more concentrated the subsidy or preferential treatment, the worse the policy is because the crowding-out effect for other technologies is larger.

Moreover, if subsidized technologies are market viable, then the tax break merely offsets private-sector costs for investments that would have been made either way. This creates industry complacency and perpetuates economic inefficiency by disconnecting market success from production costs.

Furthermore, when the government becomes involved in the decision-making process, it increases the business incentive to send lobbyists to Capitol Hill to make their pitch why their industry needs those tax credits. Industries will plead that they need five years of tax credits then they’ll be good to go on their own. Five years later, they’re asking for five more years. These specific carve outs reduce the incentive for producers to be cost competitive with technologies that do not rely on help from the government.

The reality is, if electric vehicles, natural gas vehicles or any technology is profitable, it won’t need preferential tax treatment. The market is much better than bureaucrats at sorting out the good ideas from the bad. Subsidies only centralize power in Washington and allow lobbyists and politicians to decide which companies will produce.

The other argument industries employ when demanding tax breaks is the old “other industries get them, so we should too.” This is not a good reason to apply more industry-specific tax cuts; it’s a good reason to remove those already in place.

Peeling back the industry-specific tax credits and evenly applying lower taxation to all energy sources will allow the best technologies to reach the marketplace, which will ultimately benefit the consumer.  It sounds easy enough.  But given the cycle of politicians picking winners and then those winners donating to the same politicians come election time, it’s a difficult end to achieve.

Nicolas Loris is a policy analyst in The Heritage Foundation’s Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies. 

First appeared in Blue Dog Research Forum