Mr. Obama wants to cut us all a check for a thousand bucks, flensing the oil companies for the dough.
I’m against stuff like this in principle, but if Uncle Sugar wants to send a few bucks my way .. well I’m not going to send the check back, now am I?
I hear this is a supply and demand problem – but I’ll leave that for the guys that attended college. But you know what? The numbers in this just don’t seem right.
There are 209 million of us eligible for this money. Not counting overhead that is $209 billion dollars worth of checks being sent around.
According to some smart guys at ISRIA profits for the oil industry in 2007 were $155 billion [1]. I see a shortfall of $54 billion.
Hell, I’m not even sure some of the companies in the report are even American. BP – in’t that British Petroleum? Royal Dutch Shell – hell, I didn’t even know the Dutch still had a monarchy, let alone a big friggin’ oil company. You learn something new everyday.
So … yeah. I dunno where it’s all going to come from – maybe ExxonMobil can take out a payday loan or something from the Cash Store.
[1] HTML version of the PDF, here.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.