As usual, when Congress talks about evil oil companies you can bet that everything Congress will say is either highly misleading or flat out wrong.
3 months agoRegarding the “big profits” side of the ledger, what people might have learned at the hearing is that oil and gas companies earned an average of 8.3 cents per dollar of sales, compared with 7.8 cents per dollar for the Dow Jones average; that the price of a barrel of oil has risen about $40 or 60 percent, while a gallon of regular gasoline has risen about 8 percent; and that price increases are not controlled by oil companies but rather result from relentlessly rising demand, obstructions to accessing domestic oil, shortened capacity, and other external factors. For that matter, Exxon paid $105 billion in taxes in 2007 — more than two-and-a-half times as much as it made in profit.
And those “billions in federal subsidies” the oil companies are defending? Most news accounts fail to note that the amount in question is $18 billion in tax breaks over ten years, a minuscule amount compared to the size of the federal budget. Worse, all but $2.8 billion of these subsidies were for nuclear power, energy-efficient cars and buildings, and renewable fuels research — exactly what Markey wants. And those tax breaks were less than the tax increases imposed on oil and gas companies in 2005.