Hat Tip: Crossing Wall Street
Look at how much the price of oil has risen versus the price of gasoline. Oil’s gain is far outpacing the gain in gasoline. Doesn’t this raise a few questions for Barack Obama, who loves to vilify “Big Oil” and has been talking about a windfall profit tax.
Obama proposes oil companies be taxed on windfall profits from oil sold at or above 80 dollars a barrel, and the revenue be used to help relieve the burden of rising prices on working people, according to his campaign.
The price of the commodity that “Big Oil” relies on has risen nearly 7X since 2002, yet the price of the product they deliver to the consumer is only up 3X. Seems to me they must be very well run businesses to pull that off. After all, it is not as though “Big Oil” is making consumers pay so they can have massive profit margins,
CNNMoney.com’s editor Paul Lamonica,
The average net profit margin for the S&P Energy sector, according to figures from Thomson Baseline, is 9.7%. The average for the S&P 500 is 8.5%. So yes, energy companies are more profitable than many others…but not by an inordinate amount.
Google, for example, reported a net profit margin of 25% in its most recent quarter. Should we have an online advertising windfall profit tax?
As it is, without Obama’s windfall profit tax, “Big Oil” profits and taxes are already in a photo finish.
This notion that “Big Oil” is gauging consumers unfairly is ignorance at best. Deceitful and shameless pandering is more like it.
What is obscene is not Big Oil profits, it’s that they are forced by environmentalists and liberal politicians to do business in places like Nigeria instead of places like Alaska, North Dakota and the Gulf coast. Next time you hear Obama talking about Big Oil, remember who is truly making an obscene amount of money every time you fill up your tank,
