I wish I were able to present a solution but I think the way we select or candidates is not working.

First in my opinion not one of the three remaining candidates is a really good choice. I would chose Hillary but her statements last night once again proves to me that those we put in power are either brainless or so out of touch that they cannot work for all of us. I know what she was trying to point out but how clueless could she be to mention the assassination without thinking it would cause a storm of negative press.

Second, all candidates support a so called windfall tax against gas companies. If you look into things at the oil companies you will see that this is a joke. Search on the net for a series of shows from Glen Beck. Most of what he said is what I had been finding out on my own about the financial condition of the oil companies. The politicians and the press all are piling on about Exxon getting record profits but somehow they are avoiding the reality that their profit margin is not rising to record numbers. In fact in the lat quarter it actually dropped.

For those of you less financially adept I will try and explain. If you got a 10K bonus and invested it and at the end of the year your investment earned 1K you would be ecstatic of course so when you got another 10K you invested it in the same place. At the end of the second year your investment earned 1.1K you might not be quite so happy but you would have just earned a record profit. If every following year you did the same thing and earned just a little bit more than the last year each year would be a record but it should be obvious that you would need to put your money somewhere else.

The oil companies are not making huge profit margins, they are not much more than a blip on the screen for those producing the oil. You may want to claim they are the bad guys but if you look into their business you will realize that the hearings were a huge waste of time. But everyone piled on and I have to believe that they all know what the reality is. I watched as they grilled the Sec of Energy and you could see the look on his face as he tried to answer inane questions that shouted out how stupid the congressperson was. He had to answer and he did but it was incredibly clear that the people in congress wanted to have proof they were hard on the gas companies.

Third, You have to be rich to run for office or you have to be willing to sell your soul.

Lastly, so many of the people voting are so quick to just swallow the mantras of their candidate. Remember how not supporting the war meant that you were not patriotic and should leave this country. How about how often I have read here that McCain is 4 more years of Clinton, and that Reps are only for money. The reality of the money thing is that the richest people in this country are Dem's. Oh and of course every supporter of Obama is force to say he is change you can believe in.

If anything might change the way things are now, I think there has to be a way to make it possible for more people to run. There has to be a way to get real information out. Most of the media is totally biased one way or the other.

Oil companies--I guess my biggest question is this, and perhaps you can help me with it:

We were told that oil would go up due to Katrina, due to the war, due to several other issues.

We understood the issues in times like these, and in the case of Katrina, production was affected in the Gulf of Mexico/South Texas areas. So gas prices went up.

But....didn't production prices go up as well? Didn't it cost them more to make the gas due to those issues? I think thats where the rub lies for many.

Exxon Mobil, for example, did have record profits. In fact a couple years ago, they reached something like $36B in profit income, the highest EVER recorded for a public company in our nation's HISTORY.

But wait.....then this past year they hit in the neighborhood of $41B in profits. PROFITS. Eclipsing that record-setting profit from the prior year.

And....weren';t we told that oil from the Middle East, as we were overthrowing a dictator and saving the Middle East from itself, that oil would be plentiful and even "pay for the war"

I guess I am just trying to understand it all....

The problem is that the people who can make the changes necessary to fix the system, are the same ones who will be vulnerable/lose power if said changes are enacted. Public financing of campaigns (everyone who qualifies gets the same amount of $$ and no more) would level the playing field and introduce a variety of candidates to the process. Additionally, this would give rise to many political parties and affiliations, so a “serious candidate” would no longer have to conform to one of two ideologies to have a real shot. No Washington jerk one will ever write, submit, or vote for legislation that would make it harder to keep their power. Competition is great, until you’re the incumbent. Notice how the idea of term limits never goes very far for legislators but is totally acceptable for the executive. It’s a small wonder that there are few new ideas or approaches from people who’ve been in the senate/house for 40+ years consolidating their power and wealth. We are rife with politicians and woefully short on statesmen.

OK the easiest to answer is the part about the oil coming from Iraq. In the days leading up to the war we still were getting oil from Iraq. Yea that is lunacy but that is what we were doing and I think we were one of their largest customers. I am saying that from memory so I may not be completely correct but we were getting oil from them is something I am sure is correct. Secondly, anything or should I say virtually everything that came from Bush's administration related to the war in Iraq, and especially why we should have gone to war in my mind is BS. I think Oil was part of it but so was having a military presence there was also a factor. Reality is a major upheaval there would total our economy.

As far as the profits go the total means nothing essentially. Their net profit margin is a bit over 9 percent. Net profit is the money they have left after paying for all the costs of selling their product. While this is a reasonable profit margin it is less than the margins of thousands of other companies and about one third the net profit margin of Goggle.

Say you just use dollar amount and the number is large so we take half of it to give back to the people of this country. In that move their profit drops to just over 4.5%. At that number they are closing in on totally safe investments where it makes less sense to be in business because you can make just as much with no risk. Those who invest in the company look at this difference as the premium for the risk they take.

In the extreme if you have 100 dollars to invest, you can put it in a number of places where the money it earns is guaranteed i.e savings account, a bond, money market account etc. with luck you get 3 or 4 percent. By contrast you can put the money on red in a roulette game or buy lottery tickets where the return could be 50% or in the millions. The difference is the risk involved. If playing the lottery and winning returned 100 dollars how many tickets would anyone ever buy when the odds of winning were in the millions to one range.

Be it 1 dollar or a billion dollars it may seem like the amount is the key but it is the rates of returns that actually matters. You can say that there are no risks for the oil companies but the examples you mentioned are all risks. If say they cannot get any crude, they cannot produce anything to create revenue, yet they still have lots of costs that are not related to the cost of goods sold.

Lastly, the cost at the pump is too some extent subject to supply and demand. The storms cut production while demand stays pretty much constant the price has to rise. Go to Google finance or yahoo finance and check out the financials and I think you will be surprised.

Since I tend to be pretty cynical I have to believe that the Oil companies are very careful not to generate even more profits to dampen the outcry from the misinformed public forcing the implementation of taxes that will deeply cut their net profit margin. I have to believe that has something to do with their productivity dropping this year compared to last.

What I mean by this is that for every unit of sale there is a cost associated with that unit. So for every gallon sold they after paying this cost they generate what is called gross profit which is directly related to the units sold. So if they sell more units this percentage stays the same but the total amount increases. I know this contradicts what I said above about ratios meaning more but stay with me.

In addition to the costs to produce the gallon of gas they have fixed costs that are pretty much static if they produce 1 gallon or billions of gallons. So as the gross profit in total dollars rises every dollar above these fixed costs is profit. So if they went to 100 percent capacity their net profit would rise to not only a larger number in total dollars but the margin would rise as well. Now 100 percent capacity probably is a number that cannot be obtained but my guess is that there is very little pressure within the company to increase their productivity numbers.

I work for a large company and once the numbers are met, the pressure is turned off so that in essence that revenue is allowed to occur in the following period.

One other factor I am sure they think about is that should they go to 100 percent they may push prices down because of the same supply and demand effect meaning their gross profit margin drops with serious consequence to their net profit margin. Remember public companies are a slave to this number. So they could make more money in sales and in net profit but hurt their net profit margin which would have a negative impact on their market value.

Market value - stock price - is a reflection of the earnings multiple that investors are willing to pay. If the multiple stays constant and net profit drops the price of the stock drops.

Essentially capitalism is why this country is so wealthy. The more we dampen the incentive to maximize profits the less successful we become. If you follow the above explanation, If the oil companies were to receive a tax break if they hit very high production levels, subject to the effect on market prices they would have incentives to increase productions which in all likelihood would drop prices. Probably not as much as you might think but prices would fall.

They have no incentive to do this and a great deal of incentive to stay in that gap between the lower numbers their investors are willing to accept and the upper numbers where governement interference would negate their efforts.

greenflash75XX:

The problem is that the people who can make the changes necessary to fix the system, are the same ones who will be vulnerable/lose power if said changes are enacted. Public financing of campaigns (everyone who qualifies gets the same amount of $$ and no more) would level the playing field and introduce a variety of candidates to the process. Additionally, this would give rise to many political parties and affiliations, so a “serious candidate” would no longer have to conform to one of two ideologies to have a real shot. No Washington jerk one will ever write, submit, or vote for legislation that would make it harder to keep their power. Competition is great, until you’re the incumbent. Notice how the idea of term limits never goes very far for legislators but is totally acceptable for the executive. It’s a small wonder that there are few new ideas or approaches from people who’ve been in the senate/house for 40+ years consolidating their power and wealth. We are rife with politicians and woefully short on statesmen.

I typically do not like to quote in entirety what someone else wrote but in this case I thick it is justified. Every word you wrote is incredible. I agree with you 100% and wish I could write something so concisely and accurate, not to mention insightful.

While such an approach would raise some problems with the freedom to support who you want to support I am sure that if what you wrote were accepted as true and acted on this country would be so much better for it.

The founding fathers would rise up in revolution if they saw what we did to their country. Being a politician then was not meant to be a means to gain power and wealth. I think I will shut up hear because in contrast to your statement anything I might add will look trivial and stupid in contrast.

raptor: thanks for the info. Being in the restaurant biz, I get the "gross profit above fixed costs" deal. I guess its my passion and not my head that doesn't understand. It seems like (and this is totally my opinion, not fact) the oil companies saw this war and natural disasters such as Katrina as an opportunity to fiddle while Rome burned.

Thanks again for the extensive reply. I need to do some readin'!

:)

Glad to help if I did. I have to believe that some of what you think is correct. They are in business for the benefit of their shareholders not for the good of the country.

If you are in the restaurant business I am sure you prepare food that people will buy and not just foods that are good for them. I would guess if it is legal you allow people to smoke in your building and do not refuse to sell fatty foods to someone who is overweight.

I think our governement is to blame just as much as we the people are. I was around in the 70's when gas really was a problem and even after that we still kept buying big cars Suv's even though we did not drive off road. Tiny cars and diesel (which I drive) did not sell, big cars did. In essence what is happening now is a consequence of our decisions.

However we as a society have found it distasteful to take any responsibility for our choices. I am not saying our choices are good or bad but no one wants to accept responsibility.

We want to preserve our environment so we limit drilling, we make it impossible to site Nuclear power plants or waste sites, We want convenience so we have 2 or 3 cars per house, We limit the use of coal, we do not buy fuel efficient cars so it is not financially viable to sell or manufacture them here, Dams for power are hard to get approved, as are the building of processing facilities. Then what do we do we take our food producing capacity and divert it to fuel manufacturing (ethanol) and then wonder why food has gone out of sight.

What is really needed is some very straight talk to take place. There are some very smart people in this country that can work on turning things around. For the most part they have been silenced because they do not fit the blame game. When you are done reading I believe you will find that some of what is being publicized as common knowledge is either wrong or is presented in a misleading manner. I think you will also find that it will take very little effort to gather the facts that show how misleading some of these so facts are.

Time and time again I have found this to be true. If you recall, when Bush had Collin Powell make that speech with all the facts of why we should go to war with Iraq, most of those facts were easily disputed and the information was readily available for quite a while before he stated it. A good deal of it just made no sense and no one in the media said a thing. So a majority of the country wanted to go to war.

While I think we all would agree that most of the media is biased one way or the other, none of them is willing to provide facts that would put an end to a good story line. If they all stated the real facts of why our gas prices have risen so drastically everyone would realize that what is being proposed by the government in many cases is counter productive, insignificant and in the case of ethanol an outright joke.

What we need is a national policy that supports R&D, more Natural gas and coal, more Nukes, effective conservation, alterneative power sources (solar, wind, water, geothermal) and enhanced domestic production.

1. We were not buying oil from Iraq. We get our oil from Canada, Mexico and Venezuela. Europe was buying Iraqi oil.

2. Exxon/Mobil, for as bad as they were doing with that low margin, did manage to give their ex-CEO a $500m goodbye kiss. Not that it was part of his contract. It wasn't. Of course, the compensation committee was appointed by him.

3. Every time OPEC raises the price of oil the oil companies get part of the profits from them. Every oil company has a "Revenue Sharing Agreement" with the Opec nations.