Neither Of The Oil Spillers Pay U.S. Taxes

The oil continues to flow into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico from the site of the explosion on a BP oil rig. Tar balls are already showing up on the beaches of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and Florida and Texas are just waiting their turn. It is now believed that this site dumps the equivalent of two Exxon Valdez spills every week, and it still could be months before the leak can be plugged.

This is definitely going to hurt the United States in lost fishing, lost tourism and huge cleanup costs -- definitely not what this country needed as it tries to climb out of the current recession. It is already costing the American taxpayers huge amounts of money to try and control the leak's effects and start clean-up efforts, and it will take much much more in the future.

BP owned the destroyed off-shore well, and they have promised to pay for everything. If you believe that, then I've got some ocean-front property here in Amarillo that I'll sell you real cheap. Exxon wound up paying only $500 million of the $5 billion judgement in Alaska, and I expect BP and Transocean (who was drilling the well for BP) will wind up paying only a small portion of actual damages and clean-up costs.

It was just a few days ago that the oil lobbyists convinced their corporate-owned senator from Alaska, Lisa Murkowski, to kill a bill that would have made the oil companies pay for their oil disasters. Currently the oil companies must pay at least $75 million per disaster. The bill killed by Murkowski would have raised the oil company liability to $10 billion (less than 25% of BP's yearly profit). Even the $10 billion figure probably wouldn't have covered the damages caused by the current oil disaster.

It would make me feel a little better if these companies paid American income taxes, but they don't. While the tax money spent on the oil disaster comes out of the pockets of American taxpayers, none of these two companies pay any income taxes in this country. BP, who owned the Gulf well, is a British company and therefore not subject to United States income tax laws.

Transocean, who was drilling the well for BP, is an American company that claims it is not an American for income tax purposes. They got tired of paying their fair share in income taxes (an option not available to most of us), so they opened an office in Switzerland and called that office their world headquarters. This lets them pay Swiss taxes of 16%, instead of American taxes of 35%.

Of course, the Swiss "headquarters" has only a dozen employees, while the company has over 1,300 employees in Houston (home of the company's real operations). Transocean is the prime example of an American company that loves the riches they have made here, but abandons its country when it comes time to give back and pay its taxes. If they will turn their backs on their country to save some tax dollars, why should we believe they will step up and pay their fair share for the damage they have caused?

I think there's little doubt that the American people will pay for this disaster, with their income tax dollars and again at the gasoline pump -- and it's just wrong!