by Bruce Josten

As Congress continues in its year-end scramble to finish work and head home for the holidays, we continue to see bills with laudable goals but with provisions that undermine those goals by levying punitive taxes on specific sectors or industries and creating obstacles to job creation.

The latest iteration comes in the form of the Collins-McCaskill jobs bill. The bill contains some important tax provisions, including extending certain expiring business provisions such as the R&D tax credit, the active financing exception, and the deduction for state and local taxes. However, it also unfortunately contains some targeted, punitive tax hikes on the oil and gas industry. 

The Chamber has consistently and forcefully supported extending the expiring tax provisions and, in many cases, has supported making many of these provisions permanent. At the same time, we believe with equal fervor that paying for the extenders with punitive taxes on a specific and vital industry is not only wrong but bad economic policy.

Energy is a vital component to our economic engine, it is quite literally the fuel we run on. Good public policy demands we avoid pairing the good, like extending the expiring provisions, with something bad, like punishing energy companies for no apparent reason other than they have profits. It is no wonder that we have slow growth, few new jobs, and exploding deficits.