Our own Sam Kazman takes on the economic whiners who claim that ExxonMobil’s recently announced profit are “obscene.”
If you’d like to cite the script, here you go:
Two weeks ago Exxon reported a quarterly profit of nearly $12 billion. That’s a lot of money, and Exxon is taking a lot of heat for it. But on the other hand, Exxon pumps a lot of oil and makes a lot of gasoline. Suppose you break that profit down into how much Exxon makes from every gallon of gas. Depending on your accounting, Exxon’s profit ranges from about 5 cents to 30 cents per gallon.
That’s not very much. By comparison, government taxes on gasoline are a lot more—nearly 50 cents per gallon.
Still, Exxon does make a lot of money. But what’s wrong with that? If the oil business is profitable, that indicates we might have more oil, and maybe lower-priced oil, in the future. On the other hand, if Exxon were losing money, that would suggest that gas isn’t priced high enough and ought to cost even more.
I hope that’s not the case. I’d like to see gas prices drop.
And by the way, we’re not defending Exxon because it’s a CEI donor. It isn’t. Exxon doesn’t give us money, because it doesn’t agree with our skepticism about global warming. But hey, it’s a free country, isn’t it?
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