Affordable

If there’s an industry that can afford to pay a tax to clean up its mess, it’s the oil industry.

Yet the screaming has begun over the proposed cleanup tax inspired by the recent disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Whether the industry is considered in the macro or the micro, the facts speak for themselves.

First the micro.

Transocean, the company that owns the oil drilling platform where the Gulf leak occurred, moved its headquarters from Houston to Switzerland to avoid paying U.S. taxes. It still has 1,300 people in Houston, and about 12 in Switzerland. It saved $1.8 billion in taxes, according to a study by Martin A. Sullivan, an economist for the trade publication Tax Analysts.

BP leases the platform from Transocean to take advantage of a tax break that permits it to write off most of the rental cost, a tax deduction of $82 million a year on that transaction alone.

Then the macro.

The oil industry pays far less than American business in general on capital investments — less than half, in fact.

The U.S. Treasury Department found that oil industry profits were high enough to cause almost no impact on oil output if tax subsidies were eliminated. Some of the subsidies, like the nation’s mining laws, date to when the oil industry began operations and when the risk of failure was far greater than it is today.

— Loveland (Colo.) Daily Reporter-Herald