It’s another egregious example of the Democrats wanting to overreach boundaries in an effort to appeal to voters:
The Democrats, worried about higher gas prices, want to set up a board that would apply a “windfall profit tax” as high as 100 percent on the sale of oil and gas, according to their legislation. The bill provides no specific guidance for how the board would determine what constitutes a reasonable profit.
The Gas Price Spike Act, H.R. 3784, would apply a windfall tax on the sale of oil and gas that ranges from 50 percent to 100 percent on all surplus earnings exceeding “a reasonable profit.” It would set up a Reasonable Profits Board made up of three presidential nominees that will serve three-year terms. Unlike other bills setting up advisory boards, the Reasonable Profits Board would not be made up of any nominees from Congress.
According to the bill, a windfall tax of 50 percent would be applied when the sale of oil or gas leads to a profit of between 100 percent and 102 percent of a reasonable profit. The windfall tax would jump to 75 percent when the profit is between 102 and 105 percent of a reasonable profit, and above that, the windfall tax would be 100 percent. The bill also specifies that the oil-and-gas companies, as the seller, would have to pay this tax.
Let’s go after the greedy oil companies as a cash cow to fund our politically motivated government projects:
Kucinich said these tax revenues would be used to fund alternative transportation programs when oil-and-gas prices spike
Of course, when the Left hyperventilates over the (seemingly) huge profit numbers of the oil/gas industry, they always choose not to mention the enormous amounts of monies this industry needs to invest just to produce a profit. I’ve written about this concept before when I discussed free will and capitalism.
How delicious is it that our government — unable to even produce a working budget or spend within its limits — is deemed fit to determine what a reasonable profit is.
What happened to free markets in America?