WASHINGTON, DC– U.S. Senator Pat Roberts today urged caution over a plan offered by Senate Democrats to raise taxes on U.S. oil companies, saying the proposal would harm job creation here in the U.S., and impact domestic oil and gas production and the retirement plans of millions of Americans, while doing nothing to lower prices at the pump.

Senator Roberts made the remarks at a Finance Committee hearing entitled, “Oil and Gas Tax Incentives and Rising Energy Prices.”

The following are Senator Roberts’ prepared remarks:

Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member Hatch, I first want to thank you for holding this hearing on rising energy prices and oil and gas tax incentives. I also want to thank our witnesses for agreeing to appear before our committee.

Few issues today are more critical to the American taxpayer than the price of energy. Whether it’s powering our homes, fueling farm equipment or filling up our cars at the pump, the price of energy directly impacts costs of goods and operating expenses for American producers.

While a multitude of variables impact the cost of gasoline, it’s important we don’t overlook the main factor impacting prices at the pump – which is global supply and demand of crude.

With roughly 70% of the price of gasoline and diesel contingent on the price of crude, it’s easy to understand that any fluctuations in global supply and demand of crude is the most important factor determining what consumers pay at the pump. As we can recall from 2008 and 2009, a weakened global economy drove down the demand of crude by almost 2 million barrels of oil per day, which helped bring down the high price of crude.

While both the U.S. and the world, particularly China, have seen economic improvement over the past year which has resulted in increased demand for all commodities, including oil, recent instability in the Middle East has again placed uncertainty on the global supply of crude.

This is in addition to the negative impact the second round of quantitative easing has had on the value of the U.S. dollar, thus driving up the price of all commodities.

For too long, our country has been overly reliant on unstable, foreign countries for our supply of petroleum. Understanding, again, that this commodity is traded on a global scale, increased domestic production can’t serve as an immediate magic bullet for solving rising gas prices; but it’s certainly a strong start. For one thing, by developing more of our own domestic sources of energy, we’ll be sending less U.S. dollars overseas to countries that often times don’t have our best interests in mind.

Also, by increasing domestic production, we can continue to fight against our almost 9% national unemployment rate and continue to help those millions of Americans investing in the stock market. In fact, the five companies appearing before us today are all publicly traded, and are about 98% owned by individuals or institutional investors who often tasked with managing pension funds, mutual funds and IRAs for millions of middle class Americans that rely on these holdings for their economic security and retirement

Sadly, some of my colleagues in Congress, and by our own President are pursuing policies directly counter to greater U.S. energy production.

In fact, this past March, President Obama spoke to a group of business leaders in Brazil, offering to help expand offshore drilling. Yet, a little over a week later President Obama called for reducing foreign imports by a third. There is a serious disconnect between these two statements.

President Obama has repeatedly stated that he supports two policy goals affecting energy: reducing dependence on foreign oil and promoting job growth. Repealing these tax expenditures, which both the Administration and Democrats prose, would have the opposite effect.

In Kansas alone, the oil and gas industry supports over 119,000 jobs and annually contributes $14 billion dollars to the Gross State Product. Why then would we pursue any policy that is counter to this type of job creation and domestic oil and gas production?

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