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I don't care how much the oil companies make. More power to 'em. I also don't care if they lose their shirt.
What I want is for our government to stop catering to these companies; stop rolling back environmental regulations; stop giving polluters immunity from legal action. Stop whining and crying about how our oil corporations are being unfairly treated when that is obviously not the case. Every company in this country has to deal with government regulation; how much taxes you'll have to pay, where you can build your offices, how they have to be built, how you handle the sewage, how you handle your refuse. Oil companies are no different, yet we cater to them. Small businesses handle these challenges successfully, or they fail. Let the oil companies start grumbling and Congress lines up for their check. |
Gas is still cheaper here than in Europe. As for myself, I'm now paying much less for gas by taking public transportation.
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Well, wholesale gas costs just as much in Europe as here (for the most part) it is just taxed much more heavily in Europe. Interestingly this give European nations a bit of a safety valve as gas prices rise. Though it would cut revenues, they can provide significant price relief by reducing the gas taxes. In the U.S. that is much less effective (where only 20% of the price is taxes, in most places).
In the Netherlands, for example, taxes make up about 80% of the retail price of gasoline (which is now around $7/gallon). The government could instantly drop the price of gasoline by $2/gallon and still be taxing the gas at more than four times the rate of the United States. In Poland, for example, when people complained about a six cent increase in gas prices following Hurricane Katrina, the government simply reduced the tax by six cents on a temporary basis. There is a small group of economists who advocate high gas taxes in the United States not for revenue or ecological reasons but so that the government could take the uncertainty out of the energy markets by controlling the taxes to smooth out price spikes (much as the Fed uses interest rates to control inflation/deflation spikes). In Venezuala, however, the government essentially gives gas away at $0.12/gallon. That is a country set up for a fall if anything should ever disrupt their domestic supply of oil forcing them to import. |
Well, today, the congressional hearings start on these evil money grubbing pirating profiteering oil companies.
Interestingly, does anyone know what Microsoft made in the 3rd quarter of 2005? $3.1 billion in profit. This is just about the profit posted by Conoco Phillips. There is one major difference, however. Who sets the prices of Microsoft products? Well, that would be Microsoft. No one else. There is no software commodity market. Microsoft says "here's the product, here's the price, take it or leave it.". I would offer that with the tremendous amount of computer technology that is integrated throughout every ounce of our existance, from the internet to operating systems to software to whatever, that it is just as important to our economy and daily life of citizens as is oil. However, the commodities market sets the price for oil. Speculation. Fears of natural disaster. Etc. I wonder how long it will be until Bill Gates is called before Senate committees to justify the gouging going on. I wonder how long it will be until Microsoft is subjected to a "windfall profits tax". |
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I almost feel sorry for those poor oil company executives! Nearly as sorry as I feel for the Enron guys, and the Worldcom people, and all the others that have been found guilty of market manipulation, stock fraud, insider trading, etc. I'm sure the oil industry wouldn't do such things! |
I have no idea whether the oil companies have manipulated the markets. If they have, then they should be punished.
That said, the market explanations for the profits doesn't seem that out of line. Not that the executives are sympathetic figures, but as one of them said this morning, the profit margin is the same as the average of all U.S. industry, it is just that they are such a bloody huge industry. The oil business is historically a low margin one and as another said, where were all the people in the mid-80s when the industry was losing money hand over fist? Oil production (and these are numbers I'm looking up so the math I do may be wrong) is around 85 million barrels a day. Or 7.82 billion barrels a quarter. The top five oil companies reported a combined quarterly profit of $32.8 billion for the 92-day third quarter (per the San Jose Mercury-News article I just looked at. I don't know what the oil production market share for teh top five companies is but I feel somewhat confident in guessing that it is more than 80% and less than 100%, which means that at this range the profit per barrel would be somewhere between $4.19 and $5.24 per $60+ barrel. That's just back-of-the-enevelope but doesn't seem horribly unreasonable to me, especially when both ends of the political spectrum have long espoused ideas that would argue that both prices and profits should surge in the short term. But if they have been manipulating then nail them to the wall. |
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Lol- be serious, Scaeagles. Those electric cars are about as dependable as Windows- they stall and simply shut down constantly, and are not a practical mode of transportation, let alone the cost factor.:rolleyes:
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That said, people do have alternatives to gasoline consumption. Also, I've had this windows box on now for almost two months without crash or failure. Lani's Powerbook crashed last night.
And I drive a hybrid (one of the ones geared towards fuel efficiency not power). And I don't have a problem with gas prices going up to $10/gallon if the people who have the gas want to charge that much for it and the people who want the gas keep buying it. And the sky is purple in my world. |
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I am personally a *nix fan myself, and run a FreeBSD server to hold important files.... been running since the last power failure in my area.... my windows machine on the other hand has had to be upgraded, rebooted, or crashed many times since then...... Price differences: FreeBSD.............Free Windows............well over $50(don't remember exact price anymore) Sure FreeBSD is not prefered as a workstation machine to replace Windows, but there are other flavors of *nix that are geared to windows replacement, and their cost is "free" too(only cost is a bit of a learning curve which with every passing day becomes more and more negligable) |
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