In yet another gas-price bitch session on yet another forum thread packed full of mindless prattling I stumbled across perhaps the most articulate and concise rebuttal in the history of the JDDB.

Subject: RE: GAS PRICE!
From: Daver
Date: 27-May-07

This is a rough thread when the name callin’ folks are pointin’ out the other name callin’ folks!

Just a few things from this over-analytical resoist:

1) Oil companies have have record profits. Perhaps it comes from selling a whole lot of product?

2) For the record, the profit MARGIN for oil companies is about 10% (for every dollar of product they sell, they get to keep 10 cents). In comparison, the banking industry (with all the predatory lending practices in this buy-now-pay-maybe economy) runs about a 20% profit margin. I think the jewelry industry is about 18% profit margin.

3) Just who is making the profits from corporations? The shareholders. The people who invest their hard-earned money into a company so the company can grow and profit. That would be almost everyone here who owns stock, or has a 401K, or puts money into a mutual fund, or has money drawing interest in an account. Check your retirement accounts, and see where your money is going (and hopefully growing).

4) The premise that one person has the ability to make gas prices go up at a whim, in a global energy market and economy, cannot be logically defended. Just as anyone who might have claimed that one person was responsible for LOWER gas prices last fall would be considered absurd.

Disclaimers: I have no allegiance to any particular evil greedy nasty corporation (except maybe the one who issues my paycheck). I have to buy gas to get to work and haul my kids just like everyone else, and I don’t get any deals on it. I have no relatives in the energy business that I know of. And, as always, YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY.

So refreshing to see a logical, objective post in such a cesspool of emotional and irrational spewing.

-bh