I’m the baby gotta’ love me.

I suspect that “oil industry subsidies” refer to the accelerated depreciation of exploration and drilling costs and the deductibility of depletion. I don’t know the specifics of depletion accounting/deductibility, and would appreciate any details that other readers can provide.

Accelerated depreciation is nothing more than a timing difference which allows the company to deduct the expenses at a more rapid rate (ie earlier) than would be true if the estimated useful life of the underlying asset were to be used to create the depreciation schedule. The effect is to reduce the company’s taxable income early in the life of the asset but to increase it later on, since over the life of the asset the total depreciation expense will be the same amount. Over the ten year budget cycle the tax benefit on any asset with an useful (accounting) life of ten years or less will be zero, except for the time value of money (and with current low interest rates the present value of such timing differences is likely to be very low). The same effect can be observed in the “subsidies for corporate jet owners” talking point, where over the life of the indivudual airplane the “subsidy” is likely to be zero. The only other fiscal/budgetary impact of such accelerated expensing would occur if the annual total expenditure (say the total number of jets purchased) is higher at the end of the ten year period than at the beginning – which would be a good thing at least for aircraft makers and their employees.

Obama may have been bored by debate prep, and seems to care more about what’s on ESPN than on C-SPAN, but he and his staff apparently do stop by MSNBC when they’re channel-surfing and do click onto the usual liberal websites. Which is also apparently where the president got his talking points from last night.

The lib sites simply demoinze business, focusing on key corporations, and throw in some numbers that — living in an echo chamber — are simply taken as secular gospel by the other liberal posters on those sites. Fine if you’re just spouting populist BS trying to fool others who don’t know the numbers; not a great idea if you’re in a presidential debate and the other guy can actual refute you because he does know the actual data.

Obama might have been able to get away with this is the debate had been on MSNBC and Rachel Maddow was the moderator with a button to cut off Mitt Romney’s mike as soon as he tried to reply. As it is, debate prep via surfing the netroots sites isn’t the best of strategies for this White House, since the results were so bad not even those same websites could spin it as a victory.