Why would they do that? They have been producing heavily to DROP the price of oil to $40 a barrel so the US will stop producing from shale so we will buy from them. Shale is not economical below about $60 a BBL. So now that the current administration is unfriendly to domestic oil production, they, and other OPEC producers see the opportunity to recoup profits they missed for a few years. Those Ferraris won’t pay for themselves, you know!
It will take some time to re-start the shale oil so the S-A and the UAE can cash in while the US producers file mounds of paperwork and wait for the red tape to spool out so they can resume production.
Actually the Smaller shale oil producers have been doing exactly that …Increasing Production
It’s the Big Boys who’ve been doing nothing. Easier to reap profits w/o risk.
And saying “The Government” is unfriendly to Oil Interests is like saying that my Local County is unfriendly to ME because they won’t allow me to drill my home water well or run my line sewer through the County Park.
Nothing against Oil companies and they have the right to earn as much profit as they can but they already get a lot of benefits including generous tax breaks and the ability to extract oil from public lands.
We don’t owe them “the opportunity to recoup profits they missed for a few years” especially when they’re doing it through “Windfall Profits / Price Gouging” at the consumer’s expense and blaming it on “The Government”.
If the Big Boys want to make more more money, do it the honest way like the Small Producers. Drill more wells on existing leases and pump more oil.
+1
I hold… let’s just say… a significant number of shares in Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, and Marathon, and I get very nice dividends from them. However, I would prefer to receive smaller dividends if it meant that they actually paid taxes to the US Govt.
Here is some salient information on those three companies:
Exxon paid the most taxes last year of any U.S. company, by far – but not a cent went to the IRS for income taxes . That’s because the oil giant does business in some of the mostly highly taxed countries in the world. Want to extract petroleum in Nigeria? Be prepared to fork over up to 85% of your profit in tax payments.
Exxon doled out more than $15 billion in income tax payments to foreign countries last year . U.S. tax codes allow companies to take massive deductions in light of those international charges, which knocked Exxon’s federal income-tax bill down into negative territory.
Then there was Chevron, which benefitted generously from the new tax code. Despite a US pretax income of $4.5 billion—which would mean a new corporate tax rate of $954 million (or a mere $162 million if taxed at the average rate of other oil and gas corporations)—Chevron paid about negative $181 million in taxes. That means the massive oil company enjoyed a tax rebate from the IRS.
Last year, Marathon laid off 1,920 workers across the US despite taking $2.1bn in federal tax benefits meant to cushion the pandemic’s blow to the economy. By the time Marathon completed its layoffs, it had already quietly announced that it would claim a $1.1bn tax refund , thanks to provisions which give companies tax benefits based on net operating losses.
We all know the tax code is a mess. We all use the provisions as stupid as they may be. It gets more complicated every time it is simplified. I’d rather just go to a straight percentage for every man, woman, and other, and forget the rest. I think the last thing we need to do is give the feds more money to put up their nose although I agree everyone should pay.
Waiting for my 4th IRS 90 day notice. “In 90 days we’ll tell you what we need”. Then repeated every 90 days. And we want to give them more $?
I don’t have a problem with oil company’s paying taxes once. If they pay taxes on crude oil in the country in which it’s obtained, that’s fine. If the refine it here, they should pay taxes on the incremental work done here.
Because someone made it worth their while to announce their disapproval. I don’t think they denounced the Russians because they are nice guys. They might trade added oil production for something in return.
It may head that way for Olympia, prices have already inched up to $4/Gal The Arco at Sleater-Kinney and Martin way here in Olympia is at 4.05 for credit. News reports are saying biggest jump in one day since Katrina.
This was a reply to the assertion that there was but one reason why the price of gas had increased… I just included a few more. But to address the concerns…
Both must be done concurrently. It should be pretty obvious that unforeseen global events require parallel sources of energy.
Why, yes, yes it would. When we broadcast to the world that pipelines on our soil are blocked and oil exploration in our own country are being stopped, the world oil market sees this as an opportunity to increase the price of oil by holding down the supply as demand increases becuase they KNOW they will not have future competition.
OK, we’ll start with the Guv’s own site… CPI is a backwards looking number so it is always late data. See FAQ #2
Also on the Guv’s site, a chart of the last 20 years of late data… note the steep rise in inflation from Jan 2020 to Jan 2022. If it doesn’t appear, click on the the drop-down menu for the 12 month CPI data for the last 20 years…
Based on personal anecdotal observations and the current discussion about gas prices would anyone argue that the NEXT backwards facing data point will be lower than Jan 2022? If No, then that would indicate the inflation rate is higher right now than the reported annualized rate of over 7.5%.
Addressed in an older Forbes article…
Additionally, depending on your economic status, the rise in fuel costs and rent affects some groups much more if they pay a higher percentage of income in rent and live farther from their jobs. Their “real” inflation they feel reflects the 30% increase in the cost of each of these.
And we have them. We’re a net exporter of oil. We have all the oil we need. Yeah, we’re paying more for it, but we have it. And the oil companies are more than welcome to not charge us more for the oil. If they choose to take advantage of Eastern European wars to charge their domestic customers more money, it seems our ire should be directed at them, not the government.
And if we were still an innovative company, we would see this as an opportunity to supercharge (pun mostly not intended) our drive (ok, fine, puns intended, flame away ) toward converting more of our fleet to electric.
I mean, I don’t care on a daily basis what the price of horse feed is because I don’t require old horse technology to get around. They can charge $1m per feed bag for all I care. Won’t impact my finances one whit.
We could be in the same position with oil, but we’d rather sit around blaming “the government” for high oil prices (when in fact it’s “the oil companies” and “our own stupidity in refusing to push forward for improved technology” to blame).
That’s… Pretty much true of all statistics.
We’ll just cast those aside
No, it’s going to be higher. But 15% is, I think, a stretch. And so do the finance professionals I work with on a daily basis, most of whom think the 10% number that got floated around shortly before Russia invaded was a stretch.
Now, if you want to go down the road of “government statistics underreport the problems,” well, I’m happy to go right down there with you. They do. For example, government statistics on what is and is not a living wage in a given location are usually woefully optimistic. Government statistics on the unemployment rate are absurd, because people who have been unemployed long enough to lose eligibility for unemployment payments are no longer counted as unemployed. Not to mention that the statistic most commonly bandied about is new unemployment claims, which means all the people who claimed unemployment last month and who are still unemployed are ignored in the reporting.
I’m also happy to concur that many of the metrics we use to measure the health of our economy (inflation being only one of them – lookin’ at you, Wall Street) are not actually measuring the health of our economy.
But by the same token, claiming an inflation rate of 15% is also a bit out there. Further, claiming that an inflation rate of 15% is all the government’s fault is ignoring the actual factors that go into inflation, which is that things cost more. The government isn’t forcing Chevron to raise prices. It’s not forcing grocery stores to raise prices. If you look at this period of “record inflation” you will see that prices did indeed go up, but so did corporate profits. What that tells us is that corporations are making things more expensive than is necessary to compensate for increased production costs.
Or, in short, they’re price gouging and then getting people to blame the government for the increased prices. To the extent the government is to blame for that, it’s in its failure to properly regulate corporations to prevent windfall profit-taking.
It’s more expensive to produce our own oil then to import from states like Russia and the middle east. When oil prices go high enough then oil production in the US will go up. Has been that way for decades.
This kind of says it all for me right here. Doesn’t care what it costs to buy gas because “we” want to do away with it anyway. I think that’s about the same way the current admin looks at it too. But “we” feel bad for the guy who’s not making a “living wage”…yet “we” don’t care what that guy has to spend out of his paycheck on fuel to get to work and heat his home?
The horse feed analogy doesn’t work for me because no one is riding a horse to work. They’re driving gasoline powered cars. You probably are as well. Who is going to buy everyone a new electric one, even if it were feasible for everyone to drive an electric car?
Yes amen. Analyze that for a moment and see if anything behind the curtain pops up.
And for the record, trees are a renewable resource. We’ve been growing them for centuries and cutting them down for our use. Seems silly to just let them rot and become fuel for forest fires when they blow down.
That isn’t what I said. We should not have to care what it costs to buy gas because we should be much further along the road to full electrification than we are. We, and I, do care about the price of gas because our country collectively forced us to have to.
That’s the point. You don’t care what it costs to feed a horse because you don’t need to feed a horse in order to get to work. By the same token, we should not care what it costs to fill a gas tank because we should not need to fill a gas tank to get to work.
This is one of those cases where conservatives try to sound like they have a legitimate point, but when you notice that the premise of making that point is an outright fabrication, the legitimacy kinda gets shaky.
sorry I did not go back and re-read the post. but millions of people do not live in the big city’s and do not want too. are you saying they should? or should everyone have EV’s
) toward converting more of our fleet to electric.