BY ROY NERSESIAN

STRAIGHT TALK

Let’s start from the lowest and work to the highest. The low end is marked by the big, nasty, greedy oil companies who earn all of 10 cents per gallon net of taxes. Yes, the greedy oil companies do pay many billions in taxes, but also receive a relatively few billion in subsidies. How can we justify paying subsidies to oil companies who are among the richest companies in the world? We can’t; no more than we can justify paying farm subsidies when crop prices are at their highest levels in history and where most of the money goes to large corporate holders of farm land. It’s time to make a clean sweep of taxpayer subsidies to corporate entities. But subsidies will never go away – as mentioned in previous articles, the largesse of tens of billions of taxpayer money to corporate and private entities is the quid pro quo for the tens of millions of campaign funds that must be collected by Congressmen to get themselves reelected.