A subsidy is tax money delivered to a company (or anyone else) that they did not have before. A real payment. It is not a subsidy to allow a company (or anyone else) to keep money they have earned.

Make sure you apply that division to your examples. There are fuzzy areas. For example, I would call allowing the use of public resources for far less money than the private sector would charge under normal conditions, to be a subsidy.

Note that it is not "sucking the life" from taxpayers to fail to sufficiently loot other taxpayers. If you want to give really taxpayers some relief, maybe we should do something about a government that has doubled in size since 1988.

And not to drive a point home with a sledgehammer (however often it becomes necessary), Exxon - a single oil company - is paying an amount in taxes equal to half what the entire lower 50 percent of this country pays. All by itself. If there is any "suckage" going on here, I really don't think it's in the direction you say it is.

At this moment, advanced recovery techniques and other technological jumps are the only thing keeping the damn lights on in this country (not all of us run on waterwheels). Domestic oil production has gone up 14 percent in the past few years. Imports have dropped from nearly two-thirds of our consumption to less than half. Despite the virulent hostility toward the industry of the current administration. Even now the Left is trying to figure out how to murder the burgeoning oil shale industry in its crib.