Letters to the Editor
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Obama is right about the gas tax
Looks like voters in North Carolina did not fall for the okie-doke. Clinton was attempting to play a card shark game with voters and what we have found out today is that her hands are not fast enough.
Look - here is what the author overlooks. Clinton talks about a windfall profits tax on the oil companies and just what they are pulling in at ~$120 a barrel; what she fails to consider in her tax plan are the refiners - that step in between the oil companies and the wholesale/retail market for gasoline. Refiners are not doing so well, as their costs for oil are rising as fast as they can raise the price on the back-end for their product.
Unless you throw in an 18.4 cents per gallon gas tax holiday.
In one move, you have created a profit window for the refiners - Valero and Tesoro are prime examples - to improve their margins. By law, corporations are tasked with increasing value for their shareholders. They have a fiduciary responsibility to take as much of those 18.4 cents per gallon as they can.
And what about the integrated oil companies - ExxonMobil and ConocoPhilips? If they had trouble meeting their quarterly estimates because their refining operations were getting squeezed - and they did - then what is to stop them from improving the profits at those operations?