What a stupid headline...

Subsidies?  What subsidies?  Here, from the article, is exactly what the Democrats did:

The legislation would impose a “conservation fee” on oil and gas taken from deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico; scrap nearly $6 billion worth of oil industry tax breaks enacted by Congress in recent years; and seek to recoup royalties lost to the government because of an Interior Department error in leases issued in the late 1990s.

So they’re hiking taxes on the oil companies and applying more fees for oil exploitation on government land.  To me a subsidy is when the government gives money to a company, industry or group of people.  The tax breaks the oil companies got weren’t subsidies because all they did was allow those companies to keep more of the money they earned.  Giving an oil company a tax cut is no more a subsidy than allowing you or I to keep more of our income by giving us a tax break on our income taxes.

But apparently the Democrats view tax cuts for oil companies as subsidies.  Which is typical for liberals.  They would think allowing private citizens or private companies to keep more of their own money is equivalent to the government giving them money.  Which is pretty insulting, isn’t it?  It’s almost like they think that money is there’s.  As though we didn’t really earn it.

I suspect, though, that the Democrats (and their allies in the media) are using the term “subsidy” as in “rolling back subsidies given to the oil industry” so that they can avoid calling this what it really is.  A tax and regulation hike on the oil industry that will do nothing but make our fill-ups at the gas pumps more expensive.