Who's getting rich at the gas pump.........

... on the companies you own. It's all out there in the open. What more do you need to know? Minutes from board meetings? Sorry, you don't get those. Want a ''Reader's Digest'' version? Try here

The bottom line is that the company is under no obligation to you as CONSUMER, to justify how much it profits. Nobody was crying when so many were struggling when oil was low.

As to the ''corporate welfare'' to the oil companies, there's a lot of misrepresentation about what this all involves. Back when the oil companies were struggling -- because the price their commodity would get was down -- they had reason not to invest as much in getting more out of the ground. So it behooves a country to provide incentives in the way of tax breaks which just means the government is stealing less of their money.

Hybrid car owners don't mind getting their tax break. The Accord Hybrid uses more gas than my Accord 4-cyl 5-sp regular car. Where's mine? See where that goes when you play the game? And about those taxes:
http://www.taxfoundation.org/UserFiles/Image/Figure1.gif

Actually the oil companies don't sorely need the facilities. WE do. But in times like this where large profits would make investment more likely, the companies are stymied at every turn in the US. Chevron just had a big find in Angola so they'll be investing profits there!

is a meaningless phrase, but very revealing about the liberal knee-jerk mind. You do NOT receive tax breaks. A tax break is the government refraining from stealing a little bit of what you EARN.

Spin it however you want, the price off gas has nothing to do with so-called TAX BREAKS, unless you want to raise the price by taxing the companies more (they are already paying HUGE taxes.)

If you want more exploration (which Liberals have fanatically OPPOSED) does it make sense to take money AWAY from the people who do the exploring? Who do you expect to do it, PETA?

Similarly "Durban's statistics" is a meaningless phrase. Should read, "Durbin's LIES".

I believe you are the one with a knee-jerk problem. Gets in the way of logical thought.

is an argument that you seem to rely on more and more Ed.

I asked a question about capital investment in new oil refineries and how a free market economy should address this issue. I really was sincerely interested in what you had to say... before you resorted to hyperbole and willful obtuseness. It wasn't some trap I was trying to lay for you. It is a real shame you chose to respond all day the way you did.

grim

Sorry if you don't like that.

What capital investments oil companies ,make is again,no=t your business. I am not an oil company analyst, but apparently they are doing well by their shareholders, and that's what counts, not what you think they should or should not be doing.

BTW it's "I'm rubber, you're glue", but no, it's not an "argument" I have employed at all. I post my honest opinion honestly and that's that. If you don't like the way I express myself, don't respond. Means less than nothing to me.

... by letting the market work. You don't seize profits (windfall profits tax) and force a company to invest them in certain things. Absent government takeover of a business, the best you can do is provide a business-friendly environmnet in which the company wants to do business and invest. All of those that cry about outsourcing and loss of manufacturing jobs refuse to understand that corporate taxes, regulations up the wazoo and union wages have priced the cost of doing good business here out of the market. Look at the auto industry. It's not all bad -- with some tax breaks and no unions, foreign companies are opening new plants left and right and people are flocking for the good jobs. If/when these plants are profitable should government step in to limit that? Claim they didn't need the promised tax break anymore so let's recind it? Yeah ... wait and see if the company opens another plant somewhere if it gets screwed.

In searching this topic I found all kinds of figures, stats, etc. Like I said, I am not an oil analyst. Industry publications ndicate the amount oil companies spent on exploration in the last 5 years went up by more than 10 Billion. Spending on refineries, infrastructure and so forth also up.

It is becoming obsolete to refer to the nationality of a big company. Like it or not, corporations are now multinational entities and tend to exist where laws and regulations are friendly. Also, much work is now subcontracted to other companies or other companies do the work (exploration, say) and put their results up for bid.

The market is a way better mechanism for determining how this stuff runs than ham-fisted politicos and their crack-brained schemes.

heard on the news this morning that families are now spending about 3% of their income on fuel, as opposed to 5% back in the "Energy Crisis" of the 80s.

Not just a car's gasoline, but heating and cooling, plastics, etc., all the stuff that starts from oil? In that event, 1K doesn't seem like much for it all.

Cindi

as I've said on many of my posts... it's plastic and medicine and computers and on and on...

it aint just gasoline we will be running out of!

I don't recall the details and I'm not going to look them up now, but some environmentalist/economist famously predicted that by a certain date the Earth's supply of copper would be depleted. I think the date was 1970, but it might have been 1980. A public wager was made on this prediction. Of course when the day came there were more copper supplies than ever and he had to pay up.

If plastics manufacturers find themselves strapped for petroleum they will find anither material that they can use, which in turn wil lessen theh pressure on oil. This will be multiplied thoughout society. My prediction is that someday oil will be what it was in olden times, that horrible black stuff you get sometimes when you are drilling for water.

... we'll get more plastics recycling. Isn't that what they want??

Evie

But Dave, dividing their total profits by the number of families in the U.S. to get that figure assumes that 100% of Exon Mobil's sales and (therefore profit) comes from sales to U.S. customers.