Elmer Smith: The Oil Game : Do not pass GOO, do not collect billions

THOSE jack-in-the-box ovations he got Tuesday may have been the only acts of Congress that President Obama's State of the Union address would prompt.

Until he called on Congress to take the one step that made sense to anyone smart enough to lace up his boots. He was urging the lawmakers to help break our dependence on fossil fuels by investing in new energy technologies.

"And to help pay for it," he said, "I'm asking Congress to eliminate the billions in taxpayer dollars we currently give to oil companies."

That did it! Somewhere deep in the recesses of the capital complex, the gang from GOO swung into action.

GOO is the Government Office of Obfuscation. It is also exactly what it sounds like, a sticky mess where good ideas go to die. It is to ideas what the La Brea Tar Pits were to sabre-toothed tigers.

It functions to make us think that simple solutions can't fix complex problems. Any time someone proposes a simple solution, GOO dispatches a leaning tower of babble with a Ph.D. in condescension to bury the idea in a blizzard of technical terms.

They say stuff like: "What you don't understand is that there's a multiplicity of factors to be weighed, a broad array of constituencies to accommodate and a host of complicated contingencies to consider before . . ."

Before the poor schlub who came up with the idea slinks off confused and crestfallen, and the gang from GOO returns to its pinochle game.

They were on the case in 2009, when the president sent over a budget proposal that would have eliminated $36.5 billion in oil subsidies and tax breaks over a 10-year period. Congress said no.

He proposed a $31.5 billion cut in the subsidies this time last year. That didn't fly either.

So this year, President Obama tried to lighten the mood with a little levity.

"I don't know if you've noticed," he said of the oil industry, "but they're doing just fine on their own."

Well, not exactly. They haven't been on their own since oil barons were squeezing lamp fuel from whale carcasses. We've always been there for them.

Some of the smaller oil companies still claim deductions based on the Tariff Act of 1913, according to a New York Times study last year.

The president cited that study. It details an intricate web of tax breaks, write-offs and subsidies that average about $4 billion a year.

New Jersey U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez told the Times that tax dollars flow to oil companies from the U.S. Treasury "like the gusher at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico - heavy and constant."

As heavy and constant as the loud whines emitted by oil-industry execs every time someone asks why they can't get by on the few billions in profits they reap every quarter.

Exxon Mobil posted a 55-cents- a-share jump in third-quarter earnings, for $7.4 billion. Its profit picture was a snapshot of the industry. Crude-oil prices were up 12 percent even as production soared.

So, wouldn't oil subsidies be a great place to start slashing the budget deficit?

This is where we step in the GOO.

By the time they finish explaining the vagaries of an interconnected global market and the inestimable value of subsidized energy development and what a job-generating juggernaut oil companies and related firms are, you forget the question.

Their partners in this obfuscation are industry spokesmen.

"It's unfortunate that the administration seems poised to stifle what remains one of America's strongest job-creating industries," Jack Gerard, of the American Petroleum Institute, said in the industry's rebuttal of the president's speech.

Funny how these guys will fly the flag if their place at the public trough is threatened. Meanwhile, U.S. oil companies have escaped almost $4 billion in U.S. taxes by moving their assets offshore, according to the Times study.

But Democrats and Republicans alike are united in opposition to deep cuts in oil subsidies.

Don't even try to understand. There is a multiplicity of factors to be weighed, a broad array of constituencies to accommodate and a host of complicated contingencies to consider.

Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith