Let's run to a place somewhere the party never ends

Reverse_Vampyr shared a video of Maxine Waters' solution to high energy problems:



Well, that got a lot of attention. From Ground Report:

Her response came after an executive said that oil would certainly rise to $5 without intervention from Congress or a substantial decrease in demand. She had asked him for guarantees that prices wouldn't increase. Maxine responded:

“And guess what this liberal would be all about? This liberal would be all about socializing — er, uh. [Pauses for several moments] …. would be about … basically … taking over, and the government running all of your companies.”

She meant to say "nationalizing," to which the oil industry reps said, "we've seen this movie before, it's called Hugo Chavez, in Venezuela."

On the surface, it seems like a low blow, since Chavez's justification for nationalization was presumably to prevent foreigners from looting Venezuela. Is Waters worried that the Dutch are looting the United States? I doubt it.

And, as has previously been noted, the real money on oil isn't being made by the oil companies. Yes, oil company executives are making millions of dollars per year, and the oil companies are making record profits.

But take a gander at Table 1 in this post. Looking at the first 16 of the Bush-Clinton-Bush years (1989-2004 are included in the table), combined Federal and state tax revenue exceeded oil company profits in every year. For example, in 1989 the oil companies made $14.5 billion dollars (in 2004 dollars), but the Feds made $14.5 billion of their own and the states made $28.3 billion. During Clinton 1.0 (which, to be fair, was also Gingrich 1.0), Federal tax revenue alone exceeded oil company profits in every year except 2000.

So will Maxine Waters be campaigning against the obscenely high gasoline taxes?

P.S. The title of this post came from here.

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