My preference is to have the wellhead tax receipts go to tax rebates. There are some alternatives that obviously will .be considered by the Congress … - Jimmy Carter

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My preference is to have the wellhead tax receipts go to tax rebates. There are some alternatives that obviously will .be considered by the Congress with or without my approval, and I can't say that my own position will prevail ultimately. But there are different ways to use wellhead taxes. My preference is, as we presented it to the Congress, the rebates. One reason for that preference is that it's fair. Another one is that it doesn't create a tremendous withdrawal from the national economy of substantial amounts of money. If you have increased wellhead taxes and immediately return that money to people in better paychecks on a 2-week basis, then there's not a shock to the country. If you withdraw that money and wait 3 months, 6 months, or a year before it gets back into the economy, you have a tremendous dampening effect on our national economy, which is bad. Now, if some of the wellhead tax should be shifted to enhance the effectiveness of the energy goals, then I can't see anything very bad about that. If you had better rapid transit systems, better insulation of homes, more research and development, for instance, for new energy sources, that would be one thing. But the constant threat is that because of political pressures, that money is going to be returned to the oil companies under the guise of enhancing production. I think the oil companies have enough cash flow right now-- certainly the majors do--to have an adequate degree of exploration. In fact, that exploration, in my opinion, is adequate at this point. And I'm just as afraid that there is a threat that the wellhead tax is going to be given to the oil companies to reward them financially. I think that our package has a gracious plenty of incentives for enhanced exploration and enhanced production of oil in this country. We have by far the highest price for newly discovered oil in this energy package of anywhere on Earth, and I don't think the oil companies deserve to get this money taken out of the consumers' pockets and put in the pockets of the oil companies.