Direct Your Anger At Government, Not the Oil Companies
With all of the regurgitated populism stinking up the Internet, it is good to finally read some common sense, like this post written by SayUncle.
- Oil company profits — 643 billion
- Tax revenue collected by the Government on gasoline — 1.34 trillion.
The oil companies making that much is supposedly bad, says congress. But the .gov making more than twice that is fine and dandy.
He goes on to point out that government makes 18.4 cents for every gallon of gas sold. That is 18.4 cents of pure profit. After all, they didn’t drill, extract, and refine that stuff all of us need to survive. No the folks that did that, the villains, only make 8.8 cents a gallon.
Let’s pretend though that the evil oil companies lost money, as is hoped for by the populist demagogues. How much would government make then? How much money would those criminals in Washington have to hand out in their pork laden highway bills? By the way, only 60% of gas tax revenues are actually spent on highways.
If you are feeling upset about gas prices, don’t blame the oil companies. First off, the price of crude is not set by any company. Like any commodity, it is traded and set by the futures market. Factors that affect the price of oil are not only supply and demand, and worldwide demand has certainly increased over the last several years, but also geopolitical factors. One other factor that affects the price of crude is the weak dollar. Can you say “Thank you Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke?”
But running an oil company has not always been profitable. These companies lost money for several years, which also means that the government lost a lot of money in tax revenue.
If you really want to bitch at somebody, direct your anger toward the government and the agricorps that spend millions lobbying for corn ethanol. Yeah, the price of food is a much bigger problem than the price of gas. Is it not?