As gas prices hover around $4/gallon, this is all anyone is talking about. News updates every 15 minutes on the radio, commercials on tv, news events, and the like. Everyone is railing on the oil companies and their "excessive" profits. And to be honest, I am tired of it. Tired of the bill I pay every time I fill up, and tired of the constant whining of everyone about the prices. The media feeds us that we can't get by like this, and that oil companies are the enemy here, so we should just put a new tax on them. Let's look at that option.
Oil companies on average gain about a 9% profit margin, which is average for any Fortune 500 company. They make more money, but they are spending more money to make it. And don't forget that many, many pension and 401k plans are heavily invested in these companies. These 401k's represent Middle America, guys like me and you that are not ultra-rich CEO's. So the company has a fiduciary duty to shareholders to earn a solid profit and keep the stock price stable and growing. So if we cause "Big Oil" ( I hate that term) to fail, then we are hurting not just the oil companies, but all of us with our funds invested across these companies. But Obama and Hillary keep pontificating about how bad they are.
Our biggest problems are not the oil companies, they lie in the fact that our entire economic delivery is based on a product that we have to import from other countries. We have to become energy independent, with both oil and new technologies. We need to drill for more domestically, and we have the technology to do this efficiently without destroying vast amounts of our environment. And for the record, I don't care if we cause the destruction of one species. Our planet is in a state of constant chaos, not equilibrium, and our impact on that is not measurable, but that is an argument for another post.
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