All Posts Tagged With: "oil companies"
About Those Oil Company Tax Breaks
You won’t catch me saying anything positive about any tax, but I reserve a special animus for a system that gives politicians the power to treat different productive activities differently.
13May2011 | Sheldon Richman | 12 comments | ContinuedShow Us the Money
We’re hearing a lot about the top five oil companies’ big first-quarter profits — $35 billion — but drawing on data compiled by Yahoo Finance, economist Mark Perry notes: [T]he Integrated Oil and Gas industry made an average profit of 6.2 cents per dollar of sales, which ranks #114 out of 215 industries by profit [...]
12May2011 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedRegarding the Oil Spill
“Self-regulation” in a corporate-state context is not the free market. The oil companies reportedly opposed government regulation supposedly intended to prevent spills, saying they could monitor themselves. They prevailed in that contest, but although new regulation was held in abeyance, pro-industry intervention dating back many years was never repealed. So the choice has been between [...]
11May2010 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedHands Off “Windfall” Profits
You don’t have to like the oil companies to reject the windfall-profits tax. All you have to know is that if you tax something, you’ll get less of it. No one can seriously dispute this piece of common sense. That leaves the strong suspicion that the motive for the tax is punitive: those companies are [...]
1Jul2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedRe-Thinking Green: Alternatives to Environmental Bureaucracy
Edited by Robert Higgs and Carl P. Close Reviewed by Michael Sanera
1Mar2007 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | ContinuedStop the Presses!
This just in: The law of supply and demand works. That seems to have come as a surprise to many people. Back in July, at the height of the summer driving season, the gasoline prices that had everyone so upset were—falling! As Associated Press reporter Lisa M. Collins wrote on July 17: Dire predictions of [...]
1Oct2001 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedPrivate Property and Opportunity Costs
In three previous columns I discussed opportunity cost and the importance of this concept to understanding economics. We have considered the advantage the market has over government at incorporating opportunity costs into the calculus of decision-makers. Markets promote the general interest by revealing costs while governments commonly favor special interest by concealing those costs. In [...]
1Jun1999 | Dwight R. Lee | 0 comments | ContinuedEnergy: Ending the Never-Ending Crisis
Jerry Ellig is a professor of economics at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. This highly readable book undermines both the economic and constitutional rationales for federal regulation of energy markets. The truly amazing thing is the sheer amount of information the author packs into 125 pages. The economics of energy regulation take up just a [...]
1Oct1998 | Jerry Ellig | 1 comment | Continued-
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