Oil Spill? Cut Taxes, Says Dan Burton
This week, U.S. Representative Dan Burton got up in front of Congress to make a speech he entitled The Oil Spill. In that speech, Burton blasted President Barack Obama for not having good enough solutions for dealing with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Actually, stopping and cleaning up the oil spill is the sole responsibility of BP, not the federal government. Accepting the full burden of dealing with oil spills is part of the legal bargain oil companies make in exchange for profiting from petroleum that belongs to the American people. Everything that President Obama has done to contain the damage from the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling disaster has been above and beyond his duties.
Congressman Burton ignored that fundamental fact, and went on to blame Obama anyway. He blasted Obama’s speech about the oil spill this week, saying, “There was no real solutions in dealing with the problem. Everybody’s concerned about it. Everybody feels empathy and sympathy for the people in the Gulf, the thousands of people who have lost their jobs and who are out of work, the environmental problem that’s been created. But what people want is they want a solution to the problem.”
Dan Burton had his own idea about how the government could deal with the oil spill. “What I’d love to see if I had my druthers right now, Madam Speaker, is somebody like Ronald Reagan who could come in and cut taxes,” he said.
There’s a huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, so the government should cut taxes? How would cutting taxes clean up the oil spill? Representative Burton didn’t bother to explain that part of his plan.
