So this week Obama has been ranting about “windfall profits” of oil companies at a time when we are all complaining about high gas prices. In Lansing, MI, this week, he said that Exxon-Mobil made “$1,500 every second. That’s more than $300,000 in the time it takes you to fill up a tank with gas that’s costing you more than $4-a-gallon.”
Yeah, so what? Coca-Cola made $36,690 by the time I just drank a 20-oz bottle of soda. Good for them.
In reality, the earnings of “Big Oil” (which is 98.5% owned by the working class whose investments are in mutual funds) made only 7.4% profit last year. How exactly is that a “windfall profit”? Beverage and tobacco companies make 17.8%, computer companies made 13.7%, and manufacturing (not including the auto companies) made 8.6%. But why aren’t we hearing about their “windfall profits”?
It’s because Obama is playing on where we’re complaining the most in our economy today. And it’s easy to begin the class warfare rhetoric, where the wealthy are demonized and the working man is pitted as a victim to the so-called evil oil companies, Obama is happy to take that tactic and run with it (I thought he was against dirty politics).
What’s really happening is that Obama wants to provide tax cuts for the middle class and promise money (he calls it “relief”) to those who aren’t wealthy. But in order to fund it, he must find it elsewhere, and there’s no better place to look than to oil companies who make a lot of money. Some call that approach justice and equality. Others would say it’s a new form of envy. It’s pretty easy to label it Marxism because that’s what it is. It’s wrong. It’s unethical.
But Obama will win the election, not because he’s promising relief from the government, but because as a people, we believe that this is what is good for us. But Benjamin Franklin knew better when he said, “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”
But at least we’ll have had a black president that will heal us and solve all our problems.
