George Will: Windfall For the Dimwitted

Windfall For the Dimwitted:

...ExxonMobil, which has more than $50 billion of past profits invested in energy development, made 9.8 cents per dollar of sales, much less than the 21.2 cents made by a company selling another fluid that lubricates American life -- Coca-Cola. Nevertheless, another Midwestern populist, Sen. Charles Grassley, the increasingly eccentric Iowa Republican who chairs the Finance Committee, admonished the oil companies to contribute 10 percent of their third-quarter profits to augment existing federal subsidies that help some Americans pay their heating bills. Many of those Americans live in the chilly Northeast and vote for liberals who, in Congress, write this narrative:

By blocking much drilling in Alaska and offshore, Congress does nothing to lower the price of oil. Then Congress spends taxpayer dollars to soften the impact of the price, thereby encouraging consumption that raises the price. Then Grassley asks oil executives to join the moral grandstanding by squandering their shareholders' wealth -- diverting it to protect oil consumers from some consequences of their representatives' irrationality.

The Senate, having flirted with this loopy idea of oil companies tithing themselves, then contemplated a worse idea -- Dorgan's "windfall profits" tax. A "windfall profit" is a technical term denoting a profit made by someone else. Americans do not say there was anything windfall-like about this year's $2.5 trillion increase in the value of their houses...

Hat Tip: Betsy's Page