Obama wants to tax oil companies $10 a barrel to pay for clean transportation
holy shit. that&#x27;s a 30% tax at current prices.<p>We have recently seen 110&#x2F;barrel so consumers could easily deal with it. But given the elasticity of demand for something like oil, this will negatively affect the oil glut recovery by slowing demand.<p>Speaking as an Alaskan where our entire economy is driven by oil, our government is running a HUGE multi billion dollar defecit due to revenue shortfalls stemming from oil prices. We would like to see increased demand for oil to burn through the supply glut quickly to get prices back to at least $70 per barrel. Regardless of Obama&#x27;s plan it&#x27;s going to take years and years to get back there if ever.<p>The real issue is our state government can&#x27;t afford to operate without levying any new taxes on the general population. The cost of living here is already astronomically high, plus we&#x27;ve been in a recession since 2012, and a tax like this is not going to help our situation at all.<p>give it a few years and alaska may look like a ghost town. The fact that I am a programmer who works on federal stuff, my position is not really in jeopardy but the majority of my friends are engineers who depend on oil and gas. Worst case scenario I can take a remote job and probably get a raise for doing so.  Maybe then I&#x27;ll be able to afford a house up here haha.<p>Bottom line is the USA now produces as much oil as Saudi Arabia (albeit with more than double the operating costs). We are much larger than they are and far more diversified, so as a nation we are able to withstand this sort of thing but if you examine places like Texas, Alaska, North Dakota, Oklahoma etc this oil price situation is going to financially destroy hundreds of thousands of people and dramatically affect millions of us. Gas prices also are somewhat less elastic when sliding left on the supply demand graph. so even though prices are 1&#x2F;4 what they were, we&#x27;re only seeing gas prices at 1&#x2F;2 the rate they were. This means there is not as much of a benefit to consumers as you would think from these prices.<p>Worth it? who knows. No matter what alaska is in a world of shit.