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How do you think "we subsidize" oil?

Andarko Petroleum had an effective tax rate last year of 37.5 percent. Conocophillips' effective tax rate was 35.55 percent. Exxon Mobile? 29 percent. Chevron? 28.75 percent.

I can't find one instance of any integrated oil company receiving a government subsidy at all of our expense.

Europeans pay more for gas because it is taxed at a ridiculously high rate there. It has nothing to do with subsidization or lack of it.

 

1) A lack of being taxed isn't a subsidy (not that that remotely applies to the integrated oil business). Unless you start out with the belief that when you earn a dollar it isn't yours, because everyone else has a claim on it first. A subsidy is being handed money you didn't earn. Integrated oil companies profit by selling a product, not from handouts, the way Tesla does. Tesla doesn't pay income tax. It has never had a yearly profit to be taxed on. It has, however, received lots of money it hasn't actually earned, at the expense of others -- i.e. a subsidy.
2) The whole "tax break / subsidy" thing is nonsense anyhow, when it comes to integrated oil companies. These are companies that have very high effective tax rates. They don't receive tax treatment that is preferable. They pay effective tax rates that are 25 to 50 percent higher than the average effective corporate tax rate in this country.

The subsidy trope, which somehow proliferates, is populist nonsense. The fact that people mindlessly repeat it is typical of the stupidity in this country. Those stories follow a similar dishonesty. They first redefine the word subsidy. Then they somehow turn subsidies paid to others into subsidies for oil companies, using tortured logic -- they'll take some expenditure our government gave to others, and then using some six degrees of Kevin Bacon logic, make it into a dollar-for-dollar subsidy for the oil industry, because of some benefit they have assigned it. They never look at other industries, just the industry they want to demonize (banks get this treatment too). Then, they'll take some obscure Federal tax code thing that affects everyone equally, such as a depreciation allowance, and make it like it only applies to the oil industry. It's dishonest. Our tax code is a jumbled mess. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how you navigated that mess. What matters is how much you actually handed over of what you earned. And this is an industry that hands over close to 30 percent of what it earns in the US in taxes. That is way more than most industries. It not only isn't subsidized, it is paying a lot to subsidize others.