I seem to have lost my dog and pony, have you seen them?
Yahoo! headline: Congress demands oil companies justify record profits
Hmm, I would justify them by saying I’m not a commie and, to my knowledge, they are the only people who think profits are bad.
Continuing: Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., noting the hearing was being held on April Fool’s Day, said, “The biggest joke of all is being played on American families by Big Oil.” The national average cost of gasoline was hitting a record $3.29 cents a gallon.
No, the biggest jokes here are that congress is having a hearing that chastises successful industry and that congress thinks it can even come close to fixing the problem.
Update: Kinda related: I bought a gallon of milk today.
April 2nd, 2008 at 8:47 am
If congress really cared about the price WE PAY for gas, they’d first drop the gasoline tax to provide quick relief, then they’d allow oil companies to tap into some of America’s oil reserves for longer-term relief.
April 2nd, 2008 at 11:38 am
I don’t care if they are making record profits, but do I need to be giving them gas money AND tax money if they are so far in the black?
April 2nd, 2008 at 1:11 pm
I just love the way they keep talking about how the oil companies made a collective $140 Billion and yet they are still getting an $18 Billion subsidy. I don’t know how many times I heard that before I found out that the $140B was for one year and the $18B is spread out over the next 10 years.
Guess it wouldn’t sound so bad to say they made $140B and were getting a subsidy of $1.8B in addition to that.
April 2nd, 2008 at 2:10 pm
The biggest joke of all is that the springtime price spikes are directly the fault of Congress.
Thanks to the Clean Air Act, as soon as it warms up refiners have to start making special blends to help different cities meet their ozone emission mandates. That drives prices up, because that’s a special product that has a limited market.
In addition, they have relatively little extra refining capacity to make it with, because — you guessed it — the Clean Air Act makes it prohibitively expensive to build a new refinery.
If Congress really wanted to cause prices to drop, they’d suspend the Clean Air Act. You’d see prices tumble, much as they did post-Katrina when President Bush temporarily did the same thing in order to increase supply.
April 2nd, 2008 at 3:26 pm
The reason their profits have been increasing is because the price of crude oil has been going up. bringing gas prices up with them ; thus increasing the dollar amount of sales. Profit up. Profit margins ’bout the same ..~10%
Over the past three years Exxon Mobile has paid an average of $27 billion a year in taxes, 41% of Exxon’s taxable income.
In 2004 there were 130 million individual tax returns filed. If you take the bottom 50% of those tax returns 65 million of them and add up the total amount of taxes those households paid you come up with $27.4 billion. This means that one corporation, Exxon Mobile, pays as much in taxes to the federal government as do the bottom half of individual taxpayers.
The question is: do you honestly think Exxon dug into their pockets to pay those taxes, or did they pass it on to the consumer, like any other tax paid by a business? How many similar burdensome regulations and taxes end up screwing all Americans?