Is this high gas price really oil company's fault?
For past few weeks there were many articles and broadcast news on TV about gas price. Most of those articles blamed on those oil companies' for the rise of the gas price. In April 28th, CNN broadcasted about ExxonMobil's quarterly profit which as 8.4 billion dollars. It was showed at USA Today on same day news paper. In this article, you can see how bias this article has. It showed how much profit Exxon made in dollars, and compared with other industries not with dollars, but percentage of some sort. The article chart said 'Net profit margins of other sectors and industries, the average over the last 12 months" and Energy was 13.2%, Techonolgy was 15.0%, Software was 21.6%. I don't know what this percentage means but it doesn't look much to me, compare it to software and technology. In this chart, they showed only Exxon's $ amount of company's profit margin, and other companies has percentage in it. Readers of this news paper might think that just look at the numbers of Exxon's profit, and say 'that's why gas price is so high', but they didn't show other conpanies' profit margin in dollar amount. Such as Exxon has 9.3% margin, and Microsoft, has 31.6% margin. It doesn't mean Microsoft has three times higher income than Exxon, but they have three times higher growth in their company. We don't know how much money Microsoft made in last quarter. And it also said that Exxon's profit margin went up by $0.5 billion from 2005. I'll say good for them! What does that got to do with anything? Its business, and this is free market country. What is the problem? They don't have to lower their price to just favor us! Oil price is not only thing does that. Microsoft is doing same thing, and other food companies, manufaturing companies, and even clothing companies raise or stay same as before. Shortage of oil MAY cause gas price go up, but that doesn't mean oil companies' profit goes up as well. Exxon made more money because of their business and trade skill, not because they are monsters who tries to strangle people to give money to them. Businees is very simple in some way. All you have to do, in Exxon's view, is buy oil from or pump oil from refinery and calculate how much money they spent on certain amount of oil and add some of their profits to it, and sell it to retailers. And it is happens to be no more than 10 cents per gallon that oil companies make out of gas. 10cents! is that THAT much to people? they make only 10Cents!!! oil price is about $2.80 now but about $2.00 is for cost of oil itself and transportaion, and state, federal taxes they have to pay.
People blame high gas price on oil companies, no, media blames it on companies. Because public is getting upset about the gas price, and media has to find someone to blame on, and oil companies were easyest and closet they can find. They couldn't blame on the governemnt, because they already did and didn't work that great. Is really oil companies destroying our economy? Are they greedy money hungry monsters? I'll just say one last thing. Average oil companies get 9cents per gallon as their profit, and states and federal taxes are about 34cents per gallon.
