This is going to be hard to believe for most Iron Mouth readers, but it appears the billions and billions in forgiven royalty payments for drilling on public land the U.S government has been using as tax incentives for the oil industry are costing you, the American taxpayer, a boatload while barely increasing domestic oil production.  Much of this was revealed in an Interior Department study that was completed a year ago but was judged "incomplete" by senior officials, which is short for "politically damaging" but not enough to cause anyone to make any changes in the program in the mean time.  Yep, you were better off taking that money and buying oil on the open market but instead you're making sure guys like this keep raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in salary and other benefits. 

Now I know the oil industry goes through its ups and downs historically, and it wasn't too many years ago that oil was at $20 a barrel, but I was also under the impression that in a free-market economy consistently high oil prices ($60-$70 per barrel) as we've seen in the last couple years should have been enough incentive to increase drilling even on federal lands?  Evidently I am wrong and the laws of supply and demand only work when you have to justify $3-$4 gasoline at the pump.  Oh, how many woeful stories of decreased refinery capacity, tricky gasoline formulations and environmental regulations have we heard over the past couple years?  Then again if you're talking about an industry dominated by a handful of very large conglomerate corporations atop an industry with little future, why would you jeopardize continued record profits by increasing refining capacity and most of those small independent refiners got knocked off in the 80's and 90's so its pretty easy to sit out all the bitching from the public at large. 

 Okay, calm down.  For now, I'll let Congressman Dingell take it from here...