Heh. What the oil companies would tell congress if they had a pair (and a death wish).
The lesson of the congressional hearings about Big Oil’s “windfall profits”, so far as I can tell, is this: if you’re going to make a lot of money, do it on the sly and without drawing attention to yourself. In the words of Senator Daniel Inouye: In the midst of pain, in the midst of suffering, the public sees headlines about record profits
. It’s not about fairness, it’s not about reality, it’s about the perception of gain while others suffer hardship. So keep your shameful profits to yourself, and you’ll be left alone.
How this message benefits the American people is something I haven’t quite figured out.
This whole thing kind of pisses me off. So oil companies are greedy and good at making money, so what? Makes it a better investment for you or me or anybody else smart enough to figure these things out themselves. I dislike this tendency in Americans? I guess to see what someoen else has and decide it should be yours because you don’t have it. The rich should pay more taxes because they have more money the same with business. There’s lot of stuff like that but I can’t think of more examples at the moment. People are aren’t smart, lucky of hardworking enough to do well for themselves think that things should be taken away from those who are just to make ti the same. It really hurts everybody in the long run….
not what you might expect…
Although I personally know, through tons of research, that the oil companies are not all that ethical–i.e. they are willing to speak out of both sides of their mouth on many subjects.. (i.e. You–the government–cannot help to subsidize a coal-based synthetic fuels industry because that would be impinging on the free market, never mind that you are doing this for national security reasons because you don’t want your main source of fuel to be located 6000 miles from your shores but only 600 miles from your deathly enemies–but, by the way, you need to impose import quotas–generating higher domestic prices for consumers in the US, because we are afraid that we might go bankrupt if we have to compete on the free market against lower priced middle-east oil…)
Despite this fact, I think all this talk about a windfall tax is fucking ridiculous.. The high prices in the oil market these days have everything to do with supply and demand.. oil costs more because demand is sky-rocketing and supply is increasing relatively slowly.. (and if many analysts like Dan Simmons–who is an investment Banker and geologist from Houston who deals with energy concerns–supply may actually start to decline in places like Saudi Arabia or barely be able to maintain itself..)
Back to the point.. Oil company profits overall last quarter were, as the article points out.. only about 10% of sales… this is not an extremely high margin.. if they were something like 50%–and it was due to market manipulation, then there might be grounds–but it isn’t.. and many of the proponents of this windfall tax (too many democrats, but also strangely, a number of republicans) also talk about taking the winfall tax money and shipping it back to the consumers in the form of tax rebates…
All this would do would be to stimulate consumption more–because it would be keeping the price artificially low.. thus exacerbating the problem…
So, here you have it.. at least one Self-proclaimed political Liberal is coming out against the Windfall tax…
Personally, I think these high prices are necessary to stimulate real measures towards fuel economy…
Re: not what you might expect…
Seriously. One of the more mind-bogglingly braindead outcomes of the whole Katrina fiasco has been seeing all the people who want us to get away from oil dependence freaking out about high gas prices and demanding the government do something about it. Hello… we aren’t going to achieve oil-independence by keeping the price of gas artificially low…
I hate the bite it takes out of my pocket as much as the next guy, but these price increases are necessary. Nothing else is going to kick people into taking meaningful action towards alternative fuels.