For those of you who don’t understand ‘oil depletion allowance’ after ‘googling’ it here is the bottom line. As one uses a resource there is less of the resource to use so therefore one should get a tax break because of depletion of the resource. However that logic applies to each individual. As you age there is less of you to produce in the future therefore you should get a tax break. All of you older people getting a tax break stand up and holler. Just as a check all people thinking the US Tax Code is fair stand up and holler. Don’t hear nothing.
While I don’t know if oil companies are price gouging I do know that they are getting a tax break. Unfair? You guage.
However it seems to me that in times of national distress all citizens should pull together to lessen the stress on the nation. Yes I am naive and idealistic. Good qualities in my opinion.
The US tax code is writen by the wealthy for the wealthy and enforced by the powers of government of the wealthy.
Price gouging is not the pertinent question.
Missed the part about how much tax they pay, didn’t ya? And how much their employees pay, and the services companies they use, etc.
Again, you must not understand the ‘International’ part of ‘International’ Oil Company’.
Companies are mostly loyal to their shareholders, or as loyal to the country in which they work as the people who work for them are as members of that particular country. Pretty much like every other type of international company, btw.
Here is some advice for those that want to get back at the big oil companies and half the price of the cost of gas:
Buy a car that gets twice the gas mileage of your current car. This will effectively drop the cost of gas you use per mile in half.
So, If you drive a car that gets 20 miles a gallon, buy a car that gets 40 miles a gallon. Instead of paying $3.40 you’d effectively be paying $1.70. Or split the difference and buy one that gets 30 miles a gallon. You’d pay $2.55/gallon based upon the same amount of travel that you do today. Simple. Too bad you didn’t think of that sooner, huh?
Venezuela just passed a windfall tax on oil company profits. They do not have the heavy political influence and propaganda machine that exists in America. I would expect Bush to issue what would appear to be unrelated threats . After all he works for them.
Alaska is discussing ways to get oil companies to pay taxes. Some people can actually see how far out of line things have become.
I suppose some of you think we should eliminate taxes completely. Then pump prices would drop like a rock wouldn’t they. Gas would be 2 bucks a gallon wouldn’t it. …or the profits and bonuses would just go up ,up and up. In these days of creative accounting ,so much revenue is already disguised that it is shameful.
You corp suckers do not know how easy it is to convince Americans of whatever they want. It is difficult to find the real truth of corporate evasion since you want another corporate evader to run or print the story. Not going to happen.
Here in the U.K., the majority of the price of gas (as you call it) is tax and duty. We pay over US$2 per litre. IMHO this is a major brake on economic growth and job mobility. People need to be able to earn money and significant upfront costs significantly prevent that.
Skipping much of the thread and admitting to it…
Airman is a fool. I don’t know if the oil companies gauge, but most of them are public corporations. You can look up their earnings. I have no idea why Airman engages in math wankery to support an argument he obviously was emotionally tied to before trying to support it. Fucking fool. Fucking tool.
Exxon: posts an Ebit of 20%, Ebitda of 19.5%.
Chevron: posts and Ebit of 15.9%, Ebitda of 16.8% (musta depreciated the hell out of something!)
Skipping through a lot of your post and admitting to it…
Yeah, that explains everything. You didn’t trouble yourself to read it. You just came in six-guns blazing on page three.
Thank you for your contribution. :rolleyes:
Next time we have a religious debate, I’m going to skip all of the thread to chime in that the OP is a FOOL for not REALIZING that JESUS IS LORD and the EARTH WAS CREATED IN SIX DAYS. Why bother reading, when I already have my opinion?
Nice ignorance fightin’ there, SDMB!
God, you are an idiot.
Encana urges new royalty regime
Pay particular attention to the paragraph that mentions $1Billion worth of capital investment has fled the province since the new royalty scheme framework was announced. That is $1B that goes directly into the pockets of workers and suppliers and the local economy. Does the province make more back on the royalties than it loses on the investment? Is it better that the money is in government’s hands rather than worker’s? I don’t know, but I’m not going to spend the time to research it in order to attempt educating a goofball like yourself who won’t listen anyway.
Actually how about we admit for the present that there is no way to leverage oil companies to lower the price of gasoline on the street at this point in time and go with what we can do.
Yeah your suggestion about getting double your mpg is doable, except that I am already getting 32 mpg as it is, so what else can we do.
1 rationalize speed limits.
I cant speak to other jurisdictions , but my daily comute goes from 30 to 80 down to 50 back up to 80 drop down briefly to 60 kph, so my provincial wag is going to hear about constant speed and I could give a shit about little towns setting special speed limits for what ever reason.
- Remove stop signs and rationalize traffic lights
As above with jurisdictions. There is absolutely no reason why the fuck an intersection should not have two advance greens going left in both directions. I could probably do a search in the pit about this , watching oncoming vehicles coming along in tidal wave, while a sizeable conga line is forming all waiting for the amber light to come so we can blast through.
Stop signs here were put in place to calm traffic, yeah keep richie off the street and allow traffic to flow, that keeps me from uselessly wasting gas going from dead stop to 40 kph , do that five stop signs in a row.
- Road construction/line painting.
Nothing torks me off more than finding out that three lanes of freeway traffic is stopped simply cause some guys are out there doing line repainting , guard rail replacement( special mention for this one next) or pot hole fixing , or what ever.
This stuff is mentioned in the news , but it is never planned for and every summer at least three thousand vehicles are burning gas sitting at idle with a/c on, at any given moment. Road repairs are budgetted and planned months or years in advance, so how come the bright fellows never seem to get it down to a science.
Once again , my provincial wag is gonna hear about this , as there are secondary routes one can take to get around this , but those county roads have 4 way stop signs instead of traffic lights,and the one route that does have traffic lights , has a ten to two minute ratio for light changes, but going the other way.
- Accidents
Shit happens, then ya gotta clean up after em. But with those guard rails that are fixed in place , traffic cant move while the clean up is in progress. Since we dont have those ditches that you see on interstates, just 6 lanes total with the gaurd rail between em , i never grok why at certain intervals , these are not remove able, letting opposite traffic have two lanes, while letting the other side bleed through on the one lane.
So it begs the question , how much are we actually inadvertantly wasting.
What we need to get from point a to point b weekly should be actually less that what we are using now, resulting in hopefully an over supplied province resulting in price drops.
Declan
You posted that OP, buddy. Are you saying that you have admitted to fucking it up? It didn’t look that way.
We’ve hashed and rehashed oil companies’ financials in detail already, twerp. Your end-of-thread driveby jerkoff adds nothing to this debate, and proclaiming your own ignorance (i.e., you have no idea of how the discussion has progressed up to now) marks YOU as the fool.
Funny, I read through post 122, and didn’t find single person cite an oil company’s true financial earnings. In fact, I searched the entire thread and the terms Ebit and Earnings appear first post 205. You are making a mistake if you are assuming I jumped right from OP to posting. After reading half the thread and searching the other half, I was fairly certain I was not covering old ground, but stated for fairness sake that there were posts that I searched and didn’t read.
Is there some gem of wisdom from Koxinga that I might have missed? I’d hate to think that that happened. If you made something perty, let’s put it up on the refrigerator so that everyone can enjoy it.
Why, yes, Waverly, I shared an observation earlier in this thread that seems applicable to your participation here.
I don’t disagree with you in principle, but you might want to search on the word “margin” instead.
You apparently missed post 120 in which XOM’s latest 10-k was cited. So if you read “half the thread”, “through post 122” you apparently didn’t do it very well.
If you want to use EBITDA or EBIT as your measurement, then post the numbers for the DJIA like was done at the beginning of the thread. We can talk profit margin, operating margin since they are easily grabbed from finance.yahoo.com or we can take another agreed upon measure instead.
Just posting one oil company’s numbers, however, does NOT show that they are getting away with murder UNLESS you use the SAME CRITERIA for other firms.
For example, we could complain that Archer Danield, the multi-national food company, has MUCH lower margins that an oil company.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=ADM
We could then kick off the debate that food and fuel suppliers should not profit too much from the base needs of the population. Numbers only work in context.
**WeirdDave ** put in margin numbers in post 12, showing the DJIA as a comparison. An excellent work in Dispelling Ignorance, and it helped set off the thread in a good direction.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=9690595&postcount=12
If Iraq’s oil hadn’t been removed from the world market, we’d be in better shape now.
They don’t wish to sell it now. They want to control it. They want to control supplies and set prices.
Except he’s comparing apples to oranges and suggesting that companies that are not capital intensive are better “performers” because of their profit margins. If anything I’d say it led to further ignorance since the margins that Microsoft achieves have nothing to do with the margins an oil company achieves.