Thanks for your response. I have a better understanding of the situation now.
What does that even mean? 
They can write the cost of cleanup as a business loss. How do you dispute the costs that BP will dream up?
It means that once one is angry about something, it is possibly to stay angry if a person keeps a sufficiently malleable view of what it was that lead to the anger in the first place.
And? I don’t dispute that BP will claim costs (duh), and I also assume that some of them may very well push the bounds of decorum. What does that have to do with taxpayer money?
More to the point of the post to which I responded, please draw a direct connection from the money placed into escrow by BP to “US taxpayer paying”.
Well, based on past performance, I assume that ralph124c is just being a douche…but I have to admit that it’s possible that I’m just being dense. But at this point, I can’t make head nor tail of his post…it just seems like a string of semi-related words summing to nonsense.
Just so you know, there is a significant difference between a tax write-off and a tax credit.
Otherwise, I’m struggling to wrap my brain around the idea of making them pay taxes on the cost of the clean-up. They will have to justify the cost just like they justify the cost of everything else they write off. This is not some new thing that BP just now invented.
If you parse it right, it means that Barton apologized to BP because Obama forced them to take a twenty billion dollar tax write-off.
See what I mean about being malleable in your anger?