Who is really gouging the price of gas?
George Will says the government is making the most off of the high gas prices...
As Will points out, gasoline itself carries about a 3% profit margin for oil companies. That's about 13 cents a gallon at today's prices. (Their overall profit margin is less than 10%, which puts it slightly behind most other consumer-product industries.) Will demonstrates where the rest of the money goes. In the example given, state and federal governments take 58 cents from every gallon, or four times what Big Oil gets in profit. San Francisco takes an additional 8.5% in city/county sales tax, which on $3 per gallon would be another 25 cents.
Since the government bite is based on the sales price as a percentage, the government gets more as the price goes up. Not only that, but now the government wants to impose a "windfall profits" tax on an industry that doesn't have windfall profits, making the government an even larger beneficiary of higher prices, and guaranteeing that prices will continue to rise as the money for further investment gets siphoned off to Washington DC.
Powered by ScribeFire.
Comments
Post a Comment