They are really cheap whores, our leaders. I was reading this and wondering, “where’s the real money?” Then I hit this passage:

Public Citizen’s Congress Watch The Bankrollers 37

In recent years, Kies has used his remarkable skill and motivation to lobby Congress and the IRS to retain a tax credit that costs the Treasury an estimated $1 billion to $4 billion a year and appears to serve no public policy purpose other than enriching the businesses that exploit it.56 It’s called the synfuel tax credit, and it stems from a 1980 law created by Congress as an incentive to use coal and other fossil fuels to create synthetic natural gas and oil as alternatives to foreign sources of energy.57 But tax sleuths eventually figured out that the law’s loose definition of synthetic fuels could be exploited to claim massive tax credits for producing products that barely differed from conventional fuels.58

By 2006, opportunistic companies – including the hotel chain Marriott and retail electronics chain Rex Stores Corp. – had created 55 plants that were fashioning synfuel by such means as spraying regular coal with diesel fuel, pine-tar resin, limestone or various other substances. Industry critics call the practice “spray and pray,” the prayer being that the IRS doesn’t conduct an audit that results in an unfavorable ruling. Time, which has published a pair of exposés on synfuel, estimated that the tax credit cost the Treasury $9 billion from 2003 to 2005.

In 2005, a bill was introduced in the House that would have virtually eliminated the tax credit, but it never made it out of the Ways and Means Committee. The chief lobbying entity on this issue has been the Council for Energy Independence (CEI), which has paid Clark Consulting and another lobbying firm for which Kies previously worked nearly $2.4 million since 2002. Kies serves as the director of the CEI.60 Meanwhile, CEI member General Electric Co. has paid Kies’ firms nearly $5.4 million in lobbying fees since 1998.61

The rise in fuel prices in 2005 threatened to undermine the synfuel boondoggle. The law creating the tax credit called for it to be phased out as the price of crude oil rose, on the theory that the subsidy would not be necessary if conventional fuels lost their cost advantage.62

Congress tried to come to the rescue. The Tax Relief Act of 2005, which provided aid to Hurricane Katrina victims, included a clause that pegged the synfuel tax credit to oil prices as they stood in 2004, guaranteeing that synfuel producers would be able to claim the maximum credit, regardless of how high the price of crude oil rose.63 A Senate Finance Committee staffer said in an e-mail to a reporter that the clause had been authored by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) and was accepted by Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley without a committee vote because it was not controversial. Santorum’s political committees have received more than $200,000 since 2000 from companies involved in synfuel productio64

Ricky Dogfucker has to be getting more than a paltry $200K. But you see how our “leaders” aren’t really in charge, or are hiding huge quantities of money from public view if they are. The report is a fascinating read.