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Personal And Economic Recovery
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McCain Freaks Out
The Price of Delay
Wright's Tune Has a Familiar Ring
Race Cards And Speech Codes
A White Girl for Obama
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The Real Meaning of Mother's Day
It's Over
Recession, Recession, Where's The Recession?
End The Mistreatment of Race Horses
Playing Nice
Playing Performance Politics
An Indictment of Our Army’s Competence
Take That, Big Oil!
Presidential Pariah
Harper's Index
Obamicans Pile On Clinton At Own Peril
What John McCain Told Me, And What It Says About How Far He’s Fallen
‘The Change You Deserve’
Should We Impoverish The Persian Gulf?
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In Visit To Israel, Bush Can Prevent A War With Iran
Too Late To The Duck Hunt
Sore Dems Want Out of Proportion Primaries
Vote For Justice
Breeding Sorrow
U.S. Must Stay In Iraq Till Day Is Done And Victory Won
Barack Obama's Bitter Half
Hillary And The Golden Handshake
Why Won't Hillary Adopt The Huckabee Option?
New Orleans Advances -- Slowly
McCainiac
Petronomics 101
McCain, Huckabee And The Evangelicals
Pursuing The Elusive White Voter
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If On The Wrong Track, Why Go Left?
The Caniddate And The Pastor
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The Other Obama
Congressional Districts Deny Democracy
Hillary’s Role: Exit Stage Left
Hazy Thinking On Medical Marijuana
Battle of The Hawks
Students Take Flight Through Readers' Generosity
The Losing Candidate's Public Pain
Taking Out The Junk -- Interview With Steven Milloy
In Defense of ‘Big Oil’
It's Islamic Jihad, Not Extremism, Uncle Sam
Letter To African-Americans
Mississippi Harbinger
West Virginia: Then And Now



Take That, Big Oil!
Jonah Goldberg 5/9/2008
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Imagine this. You’ve built the better mousetrap. (Because lasers and pneumatic tubes are cool, let’s imagine it uses them.) You’ve persevered through years of trial and error in your garage, enduring sleepless nights, the mockery of friends, the eye-rolling of family and the non-lethal laser wounds to the family cat. But it was all worth it. You take your invention and, with your last few pennies, manage to bring it to market. It’s a smash hit. It starts flying off shelves. You earn back the investment in raw materials and maybe something close to compensation for your time. Now you’re ready for the big payoff. There’s just one thing left to do: make an appointment with the regional Reasonable Profits Board to find out how much of your windfall is reasonable for you to keep.

Picked by Congress nominally for their expertise in analyzing the mousetrap industry but actually for their vampiric lust for entrepreneurial blood, members of the Reasonable Profits Board will determine how much of your already-taxed profits cross the “rational threshold.”

Now that’s the American dream!

What this would mean for Mousetrap 2.0 may not be a big concern for members of the board, but odds are you’ll start to feel like you’re working for them.

Replace “Mousetrap” with “oil,” and you have a good idea of how some in Congress want
to bring the oil industry to heel. Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa, is offering his “Consumer Reasonable Energy Price Protection Act,” which would make oil companies supplicants of a Reasonable Profits Board. Senate Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid, proposed their 25 percent windfall profits tax this week, while Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Alpha Centauri, has been calling for a 100 percent windfall profits tax rate for some time. Hillary Clinton is barnstorming the country talking about a windfall profits tax that will not only stick it to the corporate fat cats but will “pay” for a gas tax holiday.

“Windfall,” of course, is just another word for “undeserved,” which is why windfall profits are defined as the profits earned by someone other than you. If we were honest with the people having their profits yanked away, we’d call it the “well-earned and richly deserved profits tax.”

Now hold on a second, cry the unreasonable-profit confiscators. That analogy is bogus. ExxonMobil isn’t some garage-workshop Horatio Alger. ExxonMobil is a cold and impersonal multinational corporation!

To which I say: Exactly!

So why are Democrats keen on treating oil companies like they’re comic-book villains and the windfall profits tax is just a well-deserved enema that will teach Big Oil to pay its fair share.

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Obscene Oil Profits
By Mike Lane  - Cagle Cartoons  * Posted 04/09/2008
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Obscene Oil Profits
© Copyright 2008   Mike Lane  - All Rights Reserved.

Posted By: KUUIPO  on Tuesday, May 13, 2008

HOW MUCH HAS GOLDBERG INVESTED IN OIL COMPANIES?  HE MUST BE WORRIED ABOUT HIS PROFITS.

Posted By: Dauric  on Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Mr. Goldberg has a number of valid points, namely if you change the rules of production, or how to profit from that production, the oil companies will change how they operate to optimize their profits. Introduce a sharp point of diminishing returns and any company, whatever they produce, will produce right up to that line and no more.

What needs to happen is a detailed accounting of current energy industry companies (Oil, Coal, Etc.) and how they are reacting to Alternate Energy Source investments. Are their investments honest investments in to new en