Posted on 04/04/2008 7:41:41 AM PDT by rightwingintelligentsia
NEW YORK (CNN) -- We all want to live in a world that's clean, healthy and prosperous.
We all want to hand that world off to our children in slightly better shape than we received it. No one, even the supposedly evil oil executive, has any reason to want anything different. But, for some reason, we find ourselves searching for villains. Surely they exist, but the endless quest to create them sometimes overwhelms our better judgment, whether intentional or not.
Congress has picked "Big Oil" as their enemy of the week. These companies inexplicably put profits above people, ravaging the environment and financially assaulting the poor to put another couple of dollars on their balance sheet. That's the storyline we've all been taught.
Yes, times are tough for many. Sure, oil companies make a lot of cash. But, for that money, they get us to work, get ambulances to the hospital, keep our homes warm, and employ thousands of our friends and neighbors while financing their retirement, paying their health care, and providing energy to millions. Because of capitalism, they have the incentive to do that. I've yet to see what our government does for us with their rather large chunk of each gallon of gas we buy, and I've yet to see them offer to return it or suggest a gas-tax-windfall-tax-tax.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
I’ll be thankful when I’m paying less than $2 a gallon again.
While the numbers sound big on “Big Oil’s” profits, the taxes US states and the federal government get from oil production and sales are even bigger. Without any effort and risk, government sticks out its hand and says, “Gimme !”
Yes people!! Be grateful for big oil for doing all these great things! Oh, and be willing to pay an arm and a leg for it, and be damn grateful to pay it! Even if it sinks your country, be grateful they are even ALLOWING you to buy their stuff.
I’m so grateful I could puke. I usually agree with Beck alot, but not this time. I don’t think government intervention is the answer, but something is. It will be $4 a gallon by the time summer prices hit and that will only increase the already high price of food.
I have to hit the mute button when Obambi and his ilk rail against “special interests.”
Where the hell does he think the money comes from to fund the retirement plans of the NEA activists who toil to elect woolly-headed liberals like him? Apparently, he thinks that when Exxon Mobil earns 100 billion in profits, it goes into the pockets of a handful of bigwigs. He doesn’t understand that Exxon is owned by the shareholders, who get dividends from those profits, and that many of the shareholders are pension funds, including the pension funds of the liberal kook faction.
If a plague wiped out the Obamas of the world, we’d be fine. If it wiped out the Exxon Mobils, we’d be in bad shape. I rest my case.
Until people understand that Big Oil does not set prices, comments like yours will be commonplace.
I’m not holding my breath.
You want to talk about paying an arm and a leg...
Exxon-Mobil paid $105 billion in all kinds of taxes worldwide, from income, excise, sales, duties, and other taxes, in 2007 alone. That’s about the amount of the total GDP of the bottom 67 nations put together, and about the same as the GDPs of Peru, Kuwait, Pakistan, or Kazakhstan.
Just in taxes.
I would like to see some “government intervention” such as lowering taxes.
A "Baptist/bootlegger" agreement is what both the Baptists and bootleggers agreed to during Prohibition. The Baptists 'cause it was kept Demon Rum and John Barleycorn illegal, and the bootleggers because they kept the whiskey prices high.
We had 6 years of a GOP President and GOP congress, yet we never came close to drilling on ANWR, nor new drilling either on the California or Gulf Coasts. Why? The modern-day Baptists, aka, Environmentalists like it because they can maintain their eco-Nazi fantasies that wind, sun, and tofu can supply America's energy needs (nevermind the economic disaster from all the corn being turned into ethanol). The oil companies, aka, the bootleggers, don't have to fork out any new money on new Refineries, new drilling rigs, new personnel, etc.
Even now it's more cost-effective for oil companies to import foreign oil than it is to develop new domestic sources.
And that total tax amounted to about 25% of their 2007 gross revenues.
Utter nonsense.
Left-wingers reject the idea that we need corporate America, and they need us.
I wrote a letter to the editor to that effect, published in the Tennessean, and received hate mail in response. Very telling.
The complaining choir meets after work on Friday.
I am grateful -- and you should be, too. "Big Oil" has a lower profit margin than Coca-Cola or Home Depot or The Varsity or many other well-respected businesses right in your own backyard, and you don't seem to have a problem with them. It's just that the volumes are so large that they distort the percentages of return. The price results purely from supply and demand, and "Big Oil" has to pay for the crude it then ships, refines, distributes and sells to us. And the price it pays for crude has skyrocketed because of the huge new demand from the booming economies in China and throughout Asia. That's why we're paying so much more.
And who truly profits from higher gas prices? The Federal Government does! Uncle Sam doesn't contribute one red cent toward toward drilling, shipping, refining or distributing "Big Oil's" products -- but Uncle Sam makes many times more more profits from each gallon than "Big Oil" does. And Government keeps supply down and prices high by preventing "Big Oil" from drilling new fields in Alaska and Florida. Your problem is Washington, DC.
$3.50 a gallon is a bargain compared to waiting a couple of hours in line to get those 10 gallons.
When you import foreign oil you don’t have to deal with dozens of different bureaucracies all bent on preventing you from developing that new domestic source, not to mention the activists that will chain themselves to your drilling rig.
I don’t think big oil DOES set up the prices, but I do think that they have more control over OPEC. Just my opinion.
The complaining choir meets after work on Friday.
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Would that be at the Applebees or Olive Garden?
I remember Jimmah Cahtah’s “government intervention.”
Better get in line for your 10 gallons, sweetie.
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Hi darlin’, maybe you didn’t read the part of my post that said that isn’t the answer.
Oh that argument is so lame it’s not even funny. Coca Cola or Home Depot? Do we require Home Depot or Coca Cola to deliver food? Or medicine? OR PEOPLE?
Whatever. What happened to everyone’s argument that at least gas isn’t as much as the price of milk? Well, you are still correct in that, milk is nearly $5 a gallon. Yeah, what a bargain!
I’ll bet that we’ll see a national average of $2.00 a gallon (again), before we see a national average of $4.00 a gallon.
Markey would freeze his Commie Butt of in the People's Socialist Republic of Taxachuetts, after he changed his shorts....
As a student in the business/finance arena with a technical background and one who converses with auto engineers on technical matters, I am convinced the average House and Senate member does not understand economics, psychics, or chemistry.
G_d help us.....
If gas is so expensive, stay and eat at home and save money.
So what’s a “fair” profit margin for an oil company in your view? What’s a “fair” amount of taxes they should pay?
Since a profit margin of 11.4% is obviously unacceptable, how about 5%? 2%? 1%?
Or are you saying that the oil business should be nationalized and operated in the public interest? If so, where do you think the hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes that the state and federal governments collected from oil companies will come from instead?
Gross revenues mean absolutely nothing.
Profit margin is what matters and their collective profit is about 11%. If they sold $400 billion then I guess $360 of it when to people who work for them or with whom they do business.
Not a very informed one....
Would that be at the Applebees or Olive Garden?
If gas is so expensive, stay and eat at home and save money.
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But who would I complain with?
Nope, I’m saying the tex breaks that big oil gets seems a little odd given the profit margin. Or are you saying I should get some welfare even though I make a good salary? Same thing.
Yes, the prices would increase slightly from the initial increase, but maybe it would encourage them to get on the ball to find a way to make it lower. I mean what is the incentive to get off welfare when there is no limit to what you can earn?
Well, gross revenues mean something for certain comparisons - like the fact that XOM had to operate for four full months of the year just to cover the cost of the taxes they paid worldwide.
You want the price of oil products to decline? OK, either increase the supply or reduce the demand. Increasing the supply is trivial -- the US has untold billions of bbls of crude and equivalent under its own territory, as well as hundreds of trillion cu. ft. of natgas.
However, we can't touch most of it for two reasons: 1) the anti-American, anticapitalist Marxist enviromorons, and 2) the politicians who allow themselves to be bought, lock, stock, and barrel, by these turds. Well, three reasons actually, counting the judges who allow and even promote these clearly unconstitutional restrictions.
In 3 years' time or possibly less, the US could put at minimum another 1.5 MMbbl/day of crude and equivalent production online. In 5-7 years, we could add another 2 MMbbl/day at least. The first increase in production would decrease the price of crude, and by extension probably also the price of product, by not less than 30% at retail. The second would put crude somewhere around $40/bbl.
Now, as to reducing demand, the Left simply want to control peoples' lives, by telling them what sort of car to drive, what sort of light bulbs to use, and so forth. This is a pointless exercise and will not work in even the middle run, never mind the long run, unless Americans are willing to become slaves. There's an easier (not to mention more effective) way to reduce demand.
Double -- even treble -- the exchange-required margins required for non-commercial traders to deal in crude and its products. This will chase out some large fraction of the long-side speculators, who will go elsewhere and trade something where they can get more 'bang' for their trading buck. Fewer buyers, what happens to price? It drops, and right quickly, too.
You want answers? Drill, build nukes, and shoot the enviromoron assholes and their enablers.
Now, as to inflation in the price of food: stop the corn-based ethanol scam immediately. This idiocy, if left unstopped, will permanently increase the price of every food that uses corn as an input at any point in its production. Worse, it's all completely driven by goobermint subsidy, aka your tax dollars. These dollars are provided by -- who else? -- the Regress, bought and paid for by the subsidy hogs and the corn and sugar lobbies, and a president who is too bloody stupid to veto the corn-based ethanol nonsense.
Politicians again. Are you starting to see a pattern yet?
There's your answer, plain as day. Either find a way to get goobermint as far as possible OUT OF energy production, and you'll have all the energy you can use at market prices (not, however, ''the good old days'' of sub-$1.00 gasoline; that's gone forever), or get used to being gouged for the rest of your life.
Since, as everyone is fully aware, goobermint 1) doesn't practice sound economics, 2) doesn't listen, 3) would rather create a 'crisis' so it can spend money and acquire power by 'solving' it, and 4) has no intention of changing spontaneously, it will require quite literally a revolution to accomplish getting the goobermint to adopt an energy policy that if focused on encouraging production, not inhibiting it.
FReegards!
Those tax breaks are spread out over a number of years and are an incentive to develop new sources, drilling etc.
They are overtaxed as it is and the money goes to the government instead of the shareholders.
But ARE they developing new sources?
My compliments, sir!
Then set up an escrow account where people could donate money(no more than a $10 donation) and say by Labor Day give that money to the campaign that signs a pledge to make those goals happen. Of course obabma and hillary would never go for it, McCain might.
I know it is kind of a pipe dream, but it would be a grass roots way of saying to the politicians that Americans want this problem solved.
All true, but Big Oil does it anyway, to the tunes of billions of dollars spent on domestic drilling. If it wasn't cost effective, they wouldn't do it. They're not idiots.
Look at the active domestic rig count. It's nearly doubled in the past five years. They wouldn't have done that if it made more sense to simply import oil.
My 457 loves Big Oil. The more money they make, the better my retirement will be.
Conservative defense of “big oil” is schizophrenic. First, they acknowledge that money influences politics. Then, on the other hand, they naively believe that the price of oil is set by the market. It is the epitome of gullibility to believe that an industry that has seen profits of 120 billion dollars this year alone, has never used it’s tremendous profits to promote it’s own self interests to the detriment of the so called “free market.”
An objective observer would have to acknowledge several points when trying to determine if “the market” is genuine, or not:
-No new refineries in 30 years.
-Foreign dependance on foreign oil has risen from 35% to 65% since our last oil price crisis in the early ‘70’s.
-Corporate mergers*
-Boutique fuels creating 40+ different gasoline recipes to further bottleneck our already burdened refinery capacity.
-Oil production in the hands of socialist/fascist/communist national ownership benefits the “capitalist” big oil companies.
The enviromental movement, and now, global warming is the “briar patch” for big oil and for all we know it has been financed by benevolent big oil.
*In petroleum, oil titans Exxon and Mobil merged, compelling a new category of “super-majors” for classifying firms in the field. British Petroleum acquired Sohio in the 1980s, and bought Amoco and Atlantic Richfield in the 1990s. Chevron acquired Gulf Oil in the 1980s, merged with Texaco in 2001, and is now negotiating to absorb Unocal. Phillips Petroleum acquired Conoco along with Tosco, one of the nation’s leading (and last) independent refiners. The result, according to no less an authority than Lord Browne, chief executive of British Petroleum, was that “[m]any of the components of old Standard Oil Company had been brought together” — a substantial step, in other words, in resurrecting the Standard Oil Trust of a century ago!
good post.
This was a good article by Glenn Beck - but it’s not just the villian of the week, Big Oil is always reflected as “bad” by the media and liberals.
I say drill ANWR and build new refineries and go nuclear!!
Washington politicians should get their hand out of the cookie jar.
One more pet peeve, why the heck is Teddy “no windmills where I sail” Kennedy against drilling in ALASKA??? Why doesn’t anyone press him for solutions to energy independence? does he really think that energy can come from fairy dust?
The “government” makes more “profits,” (i.e. taxes) off of oil than the oil companies make in profits.....
I would contribute to that.
Energy independence is critical for the US. It will also help our economy.
Is it “more cost-effective” to import foreign oil, or to grind through the bureaucratic obstacles to developing *new* domestic sources? (Note: not reopening marginal production that was mothballed during the low-price days.)
There’s no arguing that it is still cost-effective to grind through the bureaucracy, since otherwise the oil companies wouldn’t do it, but the question is whether it’s more or less cost effective than import.
Importing oil only goes to the downstream part of the business, i.e., refining. That traditionally has been the worst part of the oil business, with many years of refiners operating at a loss.
It’s still not a good business, even at these prices. The real money is made by bringing oil and gas to the surface, and the oil companies will drill anywhere they are allowed to drill in order to accomplish that, even America.
The drilling opportunities here, even with all their regulatory obstacles, are weighed against international oppotunities, and the budget allocated accordingly. The fact is, billions are being spent domestically.
The devalued dollar has as much to do with that as the price of oil.
Government intervention is the reason its as bad as it is. Stop blocking drilling in ANWR. Stop blocking drilling in the Gulf. Stop blocking the construction of new refineries. Stop subsidizing corn ethanol.
As usual, Government is not the solution, it is the problem!
I’ll say it again - Where is it written that fuel has to be affordable???
BTW - it is over $4/gallon here in the middle of the Pacific and has been for months.
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