Maurice Walker..public charts site: Not a lib or consv bias..but a straight thinker and talker:
"When we handcuff the hands of big oil, by limiting the amount that they can explore, extract and refine, you should expect higher energy prices. I think many of us are ill-informed when it comes to the issue of oil and have mis-placed anger for Exxon. Did you know that Exxon announced recently that it is selling every single one of its gas stations. They are tired of being demonized and the amount that the service stations make its dwarfed by the bad rap that they get to their good name. Remember they only make .08 cents a gallon.
What about a wind fall tax? Congress recently sought to usurp a wind fall profit tax on oil companies, which failed to pass. A wind fall tax won?t produce one barrel of oil, but it will produce less energy than before. This is outright antithesis towards capitalism. Because do you know what the profit margin is in the oil business, its about 8%. But the myth in regards to Exxon is that they make larger profits than anyone else. That couldn?t be further from the truth, the corporation that makes the biggest revenue doesn?t make the biggest profits. I hope your sitting down, because what I'm going to say is going to shock you. Coca-Cola has a higher profit margin than Exxon does. In recent years, Yahoo has had 45 % profit margin, Intel has at 24 % and Apple was 22 %. So as Sargent Friday use to say on Dragnet 'just the facts ma'am.'
You see if you don't have the facts, anybody can be made to believe that they ought to hate oil corporations. When will we learn that corporations don't pay taxes, because they pass them on to the consumer. The last wind fall tax that was imposed was a nightmare, it lowered domestic production, because corporations went elsewhere to get their oil. Thus the revenue projections from the wind fall that government expected to be at $393 billion, only brought $80 billion in extra revenue."
