Romney-Ryan tax plan gives an additional $2.3 billion in tax cuts to Big Oil

Government for the 1% by the 1%. This is government corporate welfare for those least in need and it needs to stop. If the Big Oil industry can't figure out how to make money on their own all of these years, it may be time for them to close shop and move on.

The world’s five biggest public oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell—would keep special tax breaks worth $2.4 billion each year. And by cutting corporate tax rates, the Romney plan could lower the companies’ annual tax bill by another $2.3 billion, based on an analysis of the companies’ tax expense for 2011. The special tax breaks, supplemented by Gov. Romney’s lower corporate rates, could benefit the oil companies by more than $4 billion annually.

As we will show, these five companies are hardly in need of a tax cut: They earned a combined record profit of $137 billion in 2011 due to high oil and gasoline prices.