Obama lies on Oil Companies Taxes Profits and impact on consumers, Obama energy policy based on Chicago pay to play politics, Truth Team notification

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”…George Orwell, “1984”

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed
–if all records told the same tale–then the lie passed into
history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the
Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present
controls the past.”…George Orwell, “1984″

The Truth team was created to keep the candidates honest. Once again I am here to help the Truth Team in their efforts. One of the candidates, Barack Hussein Obama has been spreading lies about oil companies and where the blame should be put for high gas prices.

From Business Week March 29, 2012.

“Obama Says Oil Profits Justify Ending U.S. Tax Breaks”

“President Barack Obama said oil company profits justify abolishing $4 billion in annual oil and natural gas subsidies and shifting those savings to research on clean-energy fuels.

With the Senate scheduled to vote on the matter later today, Obama again urged Congress to repeal the tax breaks. The measure is opposed by Republicans, who have the votes to block the legislation.

“It’s not like these are companies that can’t stand on their own,” Obama said in prepared remarks delivered in the White House Rose Garden. Last year, the three biggest U.S. oil companies took home more than $80 billion in profit, with Exxon Mobil Corp. collecting almost $4.7 million each hour, he said.

“And when the price of oil goes up, prices at the pump go up, and so do these companies’ profits,” he said. “Meanwhile, these companies pay a lower tax rate than most other companies on their investments — partly because we’re giving them billions in tax giveaways every year.”

Energy company subsidies are a staple of Obama’s re- election campaign rhetoric, meant to highlight the differences between himself and Republican presidential candidates and cast them as defenders of such spending as they propose cuts in health and other social programs to reduce a deficit forecast at $1.3 trillion this year.

In his Feb. 13 budget, Obama said existing tax “loopholes and expenditures” for the oil and natural gas companies amount to an unwarranted “preference” of these industries over others.

Criticism of Republicans
At Ohio State University March 22, Obama ridiculed Republican presidential candidates as the “flat Earth crowd,” who’d “rather give $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies to oil companies this year than to invest in clean energy.”

“We have been subsidizing oil companies for a century. That’s long enough,” he said.

Republicans today cited a March 3 Congressional Research Service report that found repealing $22.8 billion in tax breaks over five years would reduce the tax breaks for independent companies and, on a small scale, “would make oil and natural gas more expensive for U.S. consumers and likely increase foreign dependence.”

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, in an e-mailed statement, said Obama’s proposal is a political gambit in an election year and called the plan a “tax hike on American energy manufacturers” that he’d oppose.

Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Republican Speaker John Boehner, said today in an e-mail that the president is giving a speech “with gas prices at $3.92 per gallon, calling for policy that would make gas more expensive and increase foreign dependence on oil. You wouldn’t believe it, right? Yet this is happening.”

Ending such breaks would reduce the deficit by $41 billion over a decade, according to Obama’s budget for fiscal 2013.

Subsidies were worth $24 billion for the five largest oil companies operating in the U.S., including Irving, Texas’s Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) (XOM) and Chevron Corp. in San Ramon, California, Senate Democrats said.”

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-03-29/obama-says-oil-company-profits-justify-ending-u-dot-s-dot-tax-br

Let’s begin with profits.

Combined, US oil companies are huge and employ millions of employees. Of course their profits will be large numbers.

Also, we want them to make a profit so that they can keep the gasoline and other petroleum products flowing and people working. If they fail, so does our economy.

And how big are the oil company profits?

Net profit margins:

Oil & Gas Refining & Marketing 3.00 %

Oil & Gas Pipelines 6.00 %

Compare these profit margins to other industries.

http://biz.yahoo.com/p/sum_qpmd.html

What about taxes?

First, the corporate tax rate in the US is near or at the top in the world.

US oil companies pay enormous amounts of taxes. How does this compare to one of Obama’s pay to play buddies GE? Check this out for yourself.

Here is the really important point about raising taxes on oil companies and other companies.

Companies (corporations, LLC’s, partnerships, sole proprietors) do not pay taxes!

Consumers pay for the tax increases.

Taxes are part of the cost of doing business.

A tax increase to a company results in some combination of the following:

Product and service price increases.

Employee and hours cutbacks.

Reduced hiring.

Does any of this sound familiar?

The Obama administration has been responsible for rising gas prices and they are now trying to raise them more.

Of course this has impacted food prices and jobs.

Sound familiar?