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| Big oil bashing reaches peak |
| Wednesday, April 26, 2006 |
| I don't have a huge problem with President Bush deciding to investigate whether oil companies have illegally manipulated prices, but when they don't find any criminal pricing activity (again), can we please put a moratorium on investigating oil company profits?
The President is trying to protect his Republican friends' political flanks by bowing to Bill O'Reilly's pitchfork brigade and distancing his party from greedy oil companies.
Thankfully, he and his team are rejecting the demand by a bunch of Michigan politicians to cap oil company profits. I'm not sure those pols know that their state pension fund includes 13-million shares of ExxonMobile stock. Normally, major shareholders don't try to put artificial caps on the profits they are earning, but politicians are anything but normal.
According to Democrats, populists and other liberals, a 10 percent profit for oil companies is "obscene." If that's true, either there's a whole lot of obscenity in business or oil companies are held to a different standard. Apparently that different standard is because gasoline is something that everyone has to have (they have us over a barrel so to speak), so people who sell gasoline should accept lower profits than other businesses.
I don't know about you, but I feel like I have to have a car too. Otherwise, I would have very little use for the gasoline that I have to have. Well, one of the world's leading car companies, Honda, just reported record profits for the first quarter of 2006 - more than double what they were a year ago. That's obscene! We need to cap car company profits immediately.
Sharp, a company that makes liquid crystal TV sets and cell phones, reported a big increase in profits in the last quarter and is forecasting a record year. That's obscene. It's time to put a cap on TV and cell phone profits.
I have to have a car, a TV and a cell phone. I can't get along without any of those things. They are obviously gouging me, and I demand a government investigation!
In fact, 70 percent of all of the publicly owned companies that have reported earnings for the first quarter have beaten analysts' expectation, creating a lot of confidence in the stock market again. It seems that obscene profits are saturating the entire market place and making stockholders giddy about the future of their 401k accounts.
But wait - how can that be? If we are spending all of the cash in our pockets on gasoline, how do we have any left over to buy cars, LCD TV sets and cell phones - in large enough quantities to create record sales and profits for the companies that sell them - and a whole lot of other things too?
This darned greedy capitalist market place is a very strange fellow. It just ignores people's griping, accepts the money they spend and goes about its business making profits, creating jobs and providing stuff we all want. I wonder how that might change if we let politicians decide how much profit companies should make
The Ralph Bristol Show |
posted by Jack Mercer @ 4/26/2006 09:27:00 AM   |
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Name: Jack Mercer
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