Cornyn: Tax Hikes on Domestic Energy Producers Raise Prices on American Consumer

WASHINGTON—As the Senate continues debate on an energy bill Thursday U.S. Sen. John Cornyn said raising taxes on domestic energy producers would increase gas prices and energy costs for American consumers.

In remarks on the Senate floor Sen. Cornyn added that both parties should work together to develop an energy policy that diversifies our energy sources and reduces costs without punishing domestic producers and rewarding foreign companies like those in Iran Venezuela and elsewhere. Earlier today the Senate rejected an effort by Senate Democrats to pass an energy bill that contained billions of dollars in tax increases on domestic energy companies.

“Why would we want to raise the price of gasoline for the American consumer by raising taxes and the cost of doing business on the people that produce oil and gasoline for the American consumer?

“We think prices are too high and should not be any higher and we don’t believe that we ought to depend more and more and more on imported sources of oil and gas. We believe we ought to produce more domestically here in the United States.

“One of the things we need to do is to take reasonable steps to open up areas that are now out of bounds to domestic exploration for these precious natural resources in an environmentally responsible way. It doesn’t do any good to rail against big oil or to try to use any sector of the economy as a political football when it hurts the American consumer and the American people.

“It was important that we defeat this tax increase that would raise the price of gasoline at the pump for the American consumer and now we can come together and work on another important element of our national energy policy and that’s conservation. We need to conserve our natural resources and explore and put money into research and development of renewable fuels to try to find new and more efficient ways to limit our reliance on oil and gasoline. We need to explore clean nuclear energy as a source of electricity.

“I would just point out that the competitors for most of the people that the majority wants to add taxes on are competing with people like Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran state-owned oil companies that would not be subject to this increase in taxes. So they’re literally targeting the domestic producer in a way that will further harm our ability to become less dependent on imported oil and gas.

“I hope we’ll go forward and come up with a commonsense bipartisan resolution on the CAFE and renewable standards portion of this bill we’ll pass the bill and send it to the President for a quick signature.”