Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Entirely Legal

I am reading an article in The Nation by Allsion Kilkenny and this part of a sentence jumped out at me and caused me to go into spasms.
...the company’s $9.9 billion tax credit from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which nearly matches the EPA’s entire annual operating budget...
This illustrates something that is very wrong with our current tax code. BP placed corporate profits before safety and public health. When something went wrong, it was their financial responsibility to fix the problem. Yet here they are taking a tax credit for a portion of the expenditures that their irresponsibility caused! And it's legal!!

It would be like me deciding to get behind the wheel drunk. I plow into a gaggle of school children, severely injuring several. At tax time, I would get to deduct a significant portion of the money I expended paying for all the damage I caused.

Who in the world thinks this represents sound tax policy?

Don't answer that. We already know who helped to write our inane tax laws!

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