Let's take a closer look at what our presidential candidates are calling "outrageous oil company profits". "$10.9 billion in profits while we are paying nearly $4.00/gal at the pump? That's outrageous!" No, not really.

That figure represents less than an 8% profit margin from gross sales, a lower profit margin than most other industries offer. Oil companies work with very large dollar amounts in both costs and income which makes their quarterly reported profits look huge at face value until you consider how many investors it takes to produce those numbers.

Politicians won't tell you that, but only like to throw out the big numbers to make you think that corporate America is ripping you off. They don't tell you that it took over $136 billion in investments to produce that $10.9 billion profit.

To put it another way, it would be like someone manufacturing a product that costs $125 to produce and selling it for $136, for a profit of $11.00. Is that outrageous? Democrats seem to think so.

People invest their hard earned money in stocks to try to make a profit, and it is the responsibility of the corporation to provide that profit or people won't invest in it. And if people don't invest in it, we won't have any gasoline at the pumps at all.

That $10.9 billion, or 8% profit, must be divided among all of the investors, or in the case of Exxon Mobil, about a 500 billion shares. That means that if you are an investor with one share of Exxon Mobil stock, your profit is $2.03. Exxon Mobil stock sells for about $90 per share so if you own 100 shares at a cost of $9000 of your money invested, you get a quarterly return of about $200.00, or an annual profit of $800 on your $9000 investment. Now that profit doesn't look so huge, does it?

Politicians love to talk about "windfall profits" but never talk about "windfall costs." The windfall is to the foreign oil producers in OPEC and others who provide the crude oil to the American oil companies. Then oil speculators like George Soros get involved and drive the cost of crude oil up even higher on the international market. OPEC's cost is a mere, roughly, $15 a barrel to produce the oil but they currently sell it for more than 7 times that amount or at a 700% profit margin. We have to pay those high prices because Democrats in Congress won't allow our own oil companies to drill and pump our own oil from our own ground nor build new refineries to turn it into gasoline.

Would politicians using the cost of gas as a campaign tool be willing to give up the $5.12 billion, or 26% they collected in taxes from Exxon last year, and even more this year, to help lower gas prices? Why would they do that when they can just send the bill for all of their special interest pork barrel spending to Exxon? Congress depends heavily on Exxon and the other American oil companies to keep them in spending money. The more money the oil companies make, the more money Congress has to spend. Still they want the citizens of this country to think that they really want to do something about the high gas prices including taxing them even more. What Clinton and Obama want to do is take more money from the public and put it in their own greedy, congressional pockets.

If we could depend on our own domestic oil supplies instead of foreign oil, we would be paying only an 8% profit margin instead of a 708% profit margin on our gasoline bringing the cost at the pump down to under 50c a gallon. Isn't it nice to know that Democrats in congress who care so much about the poor and the working class are doing all that they can to maintain our standard of living at affordable costs? Are we really so stupid that we would allow this despicable abuse of the American people to continue by reelecting these charlatans?

Yep, big oil companies sure are getting rich off of high gas prices... not.

Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) requested $2.3 billion in earmarks for fiscal 2009, nearly three times the second largest senatorial request this year. Clinton’s request takes pork-spending greed to a new level after last year’s $837-million request by Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) turned reformers’ heads. Among the three presidential candidates, Clinton is by far the biggest spender. Barack Obama foreswore earmarks for 2009 and all his requests have totaled $740 million in his three years in the Senate. John McCain has yet to tally a single earmark request, sticking to his position against wasteful government spending.

Clinton’s request is heavy on grants for homeland security, but her office has given no details as to specifically where the money would be spent. Some think that she is looking to spread gobs of money around New York State in case she loses the presidential race and finds herself in need of support for a third Senate term. Nah, couldn’t be.

The House is debating what will likely be the last supplemental spending bill for the Iraq war of President George W. Bush’s term, and another round of political games is set to begin. The president’s $108-billion request has been padded by the House with an additional $70 billion, which Democrats want to offer the next president so that he (or, God forbid, she) won’t have to ask for more money right away. Presumably, the Democrats are counting on one of their own winning the White House, meaning that the new president wouldn’t have to ask for more money at all, since the general plan is to withdraw from Iraq unilaterally at the earliest possible opportunity.