In total, Exxon makes about 8 cents on the dollar for everything it does, soup to nuts: Its profit margin for the past 20 quarters averages 8.26 percent. That is, it is worth noting, a good deal lower profit margin than Wired parent company Conde Nast generally achieves, according to the company’s CEO, Charles Townsend. Apple’s profit margin runs about three times Exxon’s. Chip-maker Linear Technology’s profit margins routinely run four times those of Exxon. Energy is a high-volume business, not a high-profit-margin business. (National Review)
This comes by way of Breitbart:
Effective January 1st, drivers in California will be in for a shock as gas prices jump. This overnight price increase has nothing to do with the fluctuations of the market, nor will drivers be getting a better grade of gasoline. It’s simply the price of supporting a government that wants to control your every move.
Under complete Democrat domination, Gov. Jerry Brown’s appointee to the California Air Resources Board (CARB), Mary Nichols, has decreed that every driver must pay for another level of government control. As California singlehandedly attempts to combat the ever-elusive “global warming”—now conveniently renamed “climate change”—CARB is putting gasoline and diesel fuel under the Cap-and-Trade scheme authorized by AB32 (known as the Global Warming Solutions Act).
It doesn’t matter that theres no evidence that raising the cost of fuel will do anything to alleviate a problem that is rooted in llaklitics instead of science. By requiring refiners to buy a permit, this unelected board is doing nothing more than confiscating capital from ordinary Californians. Even though the cost is passed on at the pump, it will be paid by more than just drivers: the cost of every product that must be transported on California roads will cost more.
And for what? The only clear beneficiary of this hidden tax on fuel are the bureaucrats whose ranks will increase, and the Democrat politicians whose socialist programs will be funded, further solidifying their control over every Californian. This is how government continues to grow faster than the economy at large—and the never-ending growth of government is the greatest threat to our future, and our freedom. Tomorrow, 900 new laws take effect, many of which limit our freedom or raise the cost of living in the most oppressed state in the union….
So let us recap some of the taxes imposed on California drivers per gallon of gasoline (a sorta update to an older post):
- State Underground Storage Tank Fee: The state underground storage tank fee is currently 1.4 cents per gallon.
- State and Local Sales Tax: An average state sales tax rate of 2.25% percent is used in the calculation of the distribution margin although the actual sales tax rate does vary throughout California.
- State Excise Tax: The California state excise tax is currently 35.3 cents per gallon.
- Federal Excise Tax: The federal excise tax is currently 18.4 cents per gallon
That adds up to roughly 55-cents per gallon, not including state and local sales tax. This new tax will add a minimum of about 10-cents to this… meanwhile “Evil Big Oil” makes out like a bandit! with their 8-cents a gallon profit margin. Here’s an old 2007 Neil Cavuto discussion about essentially the above… lackluster profit margins for evil oil companies (my 2nd ever uploaded video onto my YouTube channel):
And as Fox already pointed out, these taxes like others will go to pet projects. Now, Jerry Brown’s pet projects versus covering the 500-billion dollars in un-subsidized retirement promises to California workers.