President-elect Barack Obama has shelved a proposal to slap the oil and gas companies with a new windfall profits tax because oil prices have dropped so much in recent months, the transition team confirmed today.
“President-elect Obama announced the policy during the campaign because oil prices were above $80 per barrel,” a transition aide said. “They are currently below that now and expected to stay below that.”
Obama’s proposal had called for using the proceeds from the tax to give American consumers an energy rebate worth up to $500 per individual or $1,000 per married couple.
Hey, I'm very glad he is abandoning all the silly, hard-core left wing ideas he threw out during the campaign. Maybe he is smart enough to understand he can not be a successful President pushing through all these harmful ideas. Well, throw another idea under the bus.
The only problem is that he is not who he says he was. It is good for the country, but bad for people who believed him.
We will have to see how far away from the tin-foil hat wearing crowd he can get.
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Neeeever mind (again!): Obama abandons windfall profits tax
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
3 comments:
Yeah, we really got screwed by getting a president that adapts to changing realities. Heaven forbid that we should have a president who doesn't stick to his failed policies when the conditions have changed. I know that's the last thing that Republicans want.
Snark aside, as your quote clearly pointed out, Obama was for a windfall profits tax when oil was at $80bbl. Now that it has fallen by 40%, we can expect that those profits won't be so windfallish or windfally or whatever.
If they go back up to those levels again, you can probably expect that he will move toward such a policy again, if only to help control inflation.
Kudos for Obama for adopting rational, conservative policies. Change!
Realism-- there is no price gouging in the oil sector. There is a difference between a profit and a profit margin.
For example, suppose a retailer buys a widget for $100, and then sells it for $110. That's a 10% markup. If the cost of the widget doubled to $200, would it be price gouging to sell at $220? We still have a 10% markup.
You can easily get the facts by going to a website like yahoo finance and see the margins various companies are making. This price gouging stuff is absolute baloney -- just a bunch of slick politicians pandering to the envy of the uneducated mob.
The mob in this case *is* uneducated. Suppose for my $200 widget above, the government decides to add a punitive windfall profits tax that amounts to $20 per unit sold. In the progressive fantasy world, the company still sells the widget for 220 and says, "oh well, we didn't make any profit. We sold for the common good!" In reality, a company will build the taxes into the price-- thanks to the progressives, consumers will be buying the widget for around $240. After all, businesses don't ultimately pay the windfall profits tax. You do.
Progressive morons always think they are screwing The Man, but they are only screwing the common man with their stupidity. I'm glad Obama has people who are at least semi-literate in economics advising him.
Post a Comment