The Oil Drum

34 comments on A proposal for the windfall profits

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Twilight on October 29, 2005 - 2:22am

Bravo Dave. What a depressing world to live in: Greed is good, nobody owes anything to anyone (or to the nation), there is no common good, those who have less are lazy & worthless & deserve their lot, take what ever you can get away with, use up everything and give nothing back. We really are fucked. Attitudes like that, that profit is good, no matter how ill gotten the gains, no matter how extreme and unreasonable, are why I say there will be no societal solution. Any society that is insane enough to permit such an obscene taking of national wealth (from a captive population with no practical alternatives) will NEVER have the capability to prepare for what's coming, even if it's in 20yrs.

This obsession with accumulating wealth above all other things is a national character flaw.

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PaulS on October 29, 2005 - 1:13pm

Look, for the most part this is not a captive population. The vast majority of those who are getting in trouble are the ones who have willfully overextended themselves - in distance from work and in house size - expressly for the purpose of making huge windfall profits on real estate. In the short term, I invite all of these folks to feel free to borrow against their ever-increasing equity, because we don't owe them a subsidy just so they can leave a larger inheritance to their children, who are no more deserving than anyone else's children. In the slightly longer term these folks need to reconsider their own greed and lavish lifestyles.

Whatever comes next in terms of energy supply looks like it is going to be expensive, whether it is lower quality hydrocarbons, nuclear, windmills, solar panels, whatever. Handing out huge subsidies to consumers of energy - such as all these bellyaching massively overhoused suburbanites - while punishing suppliers of energy - be they oil companies or whoever - is obviously a recipe for much worse trouble than we can really stand. Those grand houses aren't going to be heated and cooled if Seventies-style foolishness takes the energy supply away. Read the closing chapter of Simmons - energy supply "bridging" is going to take all the windfall profits that can be found, plus a whole vast lot more.

I really do not understand this point of view that holds, simultaneously, that windfalls that arise from producing (extracting) something, i.e. these grand and probably transitory oil co. reports, are immoral and worthy of high dudgeon, but yet the tremendous windfall profits that arise from hoarding and consuming something, namely oil-soaked gargantuan remote real estate, should not only be held sacrosanct as examples of the American way, but should also be supplemented with all manner of enormous special subsidies and deductions.

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Twilight on October 29, 2005 - 2:49pm

My commuting distance is long because I am unwilling to live in the sprawl zone created next to the industrial park where my job is located. Engineering jobs are scarce, so I'm stuck with it for now, but I commute in a 36mpg car I paid off years ago. Probably I should leave the manufacturing world and get a service job.

Both the sprawl and the industrial park where I work were once some of the best farm land anywhere. We have subsidized the industries that created the sprawl, as well as the petro industry for decades. Now, when it looks like this might not work out anymore, were all worried about the corporations and their investors, but it's tough shit for the people who drank the coolaid and bought into that lifestyle.

Show me a plan to raise fuel prices that has an element of human decency in it, and uses the money to work on the basic issues we face, and I'm all over it. I'd love to use my engineering ablities to work on the problems. But it ain't gonna happen, so I'll keep as much of my money as I can to plan for my family's future. We're going to need it.

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wkwillis on October 30, 2005 - 3:14am

We can legalize building higher density if we want to. We can adjust taxes to encourage moving closer to where we work if we want to.
Lack of cheap oil is a problem. The other two are policies.