Total cost of the crude oil plus the taxes gives a base price before I can even use it of $3.398. The difference from the retail price is $.391/gallon.

For 39 cents a gallon that crude oil was transported from the pump site and trucked, piped, sailed to a refinery in the United States, some of it was transported by all three modes. Then it was refined into plastics, fertilizer, diesel fuel, gasoline, and other products. Approximately 18 gallons of gasoline is recoverable from a 42 gallon barrel of crude oil. After all this, the retail distribution of the fuel was accomplished and it was available to me for less than 40 cents above the cost and and taxes. I just wish to hell every other business I must patronize were half as efficient.

Yeah, they have huge profits. They also have trillions (yeah, with a T) in investment. The per cent of profit is far below the average American business return. The trillions invested by the pension funds and blue collar guy and day trader are returning a profit,but taxing a “windfall profit” is simply screwing those people out of their just return on investment.

I have no oil stock, I have no pension plan invested in oil, I am on a fixed income as I am terminally ill, and I sure as Hell don’t like the high price of gasoline. But I put the blame for those prices where it belongs. On the people who halted oil exploration off our coasts and in ANWR, who stopped oil shale recovery, who killed the nuclear power industry which would have relieved some of the need for oil, on the people who have not allowed a new refinery to be built in this country since 1976, on the people who have shortstopped the oil from coal industry. Yeah, those people, our Congress, our presidents back to Nixon, excepting Reagan, and the environmentally idiotic activists who bought them.

It’s a little damn late and far to transparent for them to try to blame the industry that has unsuccessfully tried like Hell to keep them doing this for more than 30 years.

In spite of all the obstacles Big Oil has kept us going in the face of terrible opposition and did it so well they made a small percentage profit. Now the dumb bastards who put us here want to blame all those who didn’t do it and punish them for being far more effective than we had any right to expect.

How damn dumb are we, that we keep sending these same damn dumb bastards back to seats of power?