tax on profits that result from a sudden windfall to a particular company or industry.
If that is not enough here is a rundown of the legislation from the liberal (/s) Tax Foundation...
Tax Foundation write up on Alaskan Windfall Profit Tax
Try to focus on this point.... The tax rate would increase by .1 percent for every dollar per barrel when the price of oil goes above $35 per barrel after the companies' costs. Since the cost of producing a barrel of oil is about $15 per barrel, that means the tax rate escalator would kick in at when oil is about $50 per barrel.
Keep digging like you did last year. Good Freepers can spot Palin spin better than anyone else.
DeMint 2012, so don't try to fling mud that I am a Myth supporter like all other Palinites do when someone doesn't drink the koolaid.
Proving my point: What you, CNN, Mother Jones, Seattle Times, and Huffington Post, to name a few, like to call an "oil windfall profits tax" isn't calculated on profits or on windfalls -- it's calculated on the going price of a barrel of oil. It is indexed to rise not at a set rate equal to rises in the price of oil, but at a higher relative rate the higher the price of oil gets, thus partaking of the "windfall" when oil prices rise.
Here's an interesting take I snipped from a discussion forum back in 2008:
There is a difference between a royalty rate and a windfall profits tax. Alaska OWNS the oil in its ground. By increasing the royalty rate as the market price of oil increases they are sharing in market gains.
Obama is proposing a windfall profits tax on aggregate levels of profit. Exxon has a profit rate of 10%. Google has a profit rate of 25%. Obama is suggesting that a special tax be placed on Exxon but not on Google.
Resource royalties and windfall profits are not the same kind of tax.
Another poster replies:
"I'm all for severance taxes on resources extracted from a jurisdiction, but it should be flat based on the value of the resource extracted (and the cost to the environment). What she proposes here is most certainly a profit tax.”
The first poster responds:
If you're a farm owner and you sell your wheat crop, should you be content to receive a base price for the wheat and allow the refiners and other downstream processors to capture all of the value locked into rising prices?
The oil belongs to the people of Alaska. The oil companies deploy capital and expertise to extract that oil. If particular oil companies can earn a higher rate of return than their competitors based on their unique management practices, then they have a solid case for capturing all of the realized gain. What case do they make for capturing all of the gain in the commodity price of oil?
A windfall profits tax kicks in after the cost of materials is already extracted from the sale price. Royalty payments are a cost of goods. Those goods, the oil, belong to the people of Alaska. They should benefit from the run-up in the price of oil to the same degree that the citizens of Norway, Britain, Canada, etc benefit from the increased price - that is, they should be capturing the value, instead of sending it to the oil company, which doesn't bring any value added contribution to the issue.
The above is food for thought for FReepers to graze on, and an example of the kinds of discussions you can find online.
catfish writes: DeMint 2012, so don't try to fling mud that I am a Myth supporter like all other Palinites do when someone doesn't drink the koolaid.
And there you go again! {^) You're lobbing gratuitous insults at folks who like Palin. Why is that? Could it be because your position is weak?