I logged this morning to check my web mail. After doing so, I subsequently found a story that was carried by my ISP about how the price of crude oil is falling, but that the price of gasoline at the pump has been slowly going up.
So what's the deal? The article did a somewhat decent job of describing the overall situation of what's happening in the worldwide oil markets, or at least not a bad job for a journalistic article, but at the end of the article there were a pair of statements that were made by two people interviewed for the story.
"Drivers are being ripped off even more now than before," said Stuart Pollok, who was filling up recently at a Chevron station in downtown Los Angeles. He pointed out Exxon Mobil Corp. reeled in billions in profits last year when oil prices neared $150.
Others see the conspiracy reaching higher.
"It got really low during the elections and now it's going back up," said Christel Sayegh, a 23-year-old graphic designer in Los Angeles. "They do that every election, though, right?"
In response to both Mr. Pollok's wailing about Exxon's obscene profits and to the young graphic designer's conspiracy oriented view of the world, I present an article that was written in this past week's U.S. News and World Report by Robert Bryce about how Exxon paid $116 billion in taxes in 2008. That's right gentle readers. Exxon made an immoral and obscene $45 billion in profits in 2008, but the corporation's overall tax bill in 2008 was - oh well - only a petty $116 billion or 2.5 times as much.
Exxon of course is the largest privately held Big Evil Oil Company in the Big Evil Oil industry. However, as everyone knows there are plenty of other companies in the oil and gas industry that are also paying untold billions of dollars every year in taxes to governments of all stripes.
I posted this message to an Internet discussion group that I belong to and got a response back from a well known guy in the transit industry:
That headline – Exxon’s 2008 tax bill was $116 billion – reminded me of something I was just working on.
From Federal Highway Statistics, Table HF-10, “Funding for Highways and Disposition of Highway-user Revenues, All Units of Government, 2006,” the Grand Total Receipts, from all sources, was $161.061 billion.
That $161 billion includes:
Motor Fuel and Vehicle Taxes $85.540 billion
Tolls 8.108 billion
Property Taxes and Assessments 8.599 billion
General Fund Appropriations 25.979 billion
Other Taxes and Fees 9.878 billion
Investment Income 9.512 billion
Bond Issue Proceeds 17.828 billion
(It does NOT include road use fees not used for roads, including:
Nonhighway purposes $ 8.794 billion
Mass Transportation 10.520 billion
Collection Expenses 3.218 billion
Used for Territories .245 billion)
OK, not that I have done my accounting busy work for the day, what this means is that the amount of taxes paid by Exxon-Mobil for 2008 was about 72% of the entire spending on U.S. Roads in 2006.
Now, Exxon-Mobil is the largest oil company, but it sure isn’t the ONLY oil company that pays U.S. taxes, and while there are a lot of different uses for oil, transportation uses (ALL modes) is two-thirds of U.S. oil use, and I think it is not unreasonable to believe that road use of oil for transportation is the biggest share of that.
You folks have heard me whine before about FHWA not including most fuel sales taxes into the computation above.
So, when someone tells you that roads don’t pay their way, here is another thing to bring into the analysis.
Sigh...
Wizard
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at February 16, 2009 11:46 AM