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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (377831)	4/14/2008 7:32:36 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573954

Its what they can sell if for in a competitive market. Ever wonder about that? Consumer gasoline prices are fairly flat across most markets; not a lot of variance in price. Maybe +/- 2% to 3%. You would think that with their huge profits, in a "competitive maret", that there would be at least one supplier that would undercut the others to gain volume. Unless they all are really not competing on price, of course, but just sticking to a fixed margin percent. If you raise the price for the consumers, the supply and demand curves intersect at a different point. Slightly. Frankly most gasoline usage isn't discretionary spending. The government profits more from the industry than the industry itself does. That's objective fact. The significance of that fact is subjective, apparently you consider it very low. But it would at least make the idea of "windfall profits taxes" rather questionable, when the real windfall goes to the government. Say you are in the 30% tax bracket. Do you 'save' 30% of what you earn each year? If not (and few of us do) then the government 'profits' more than you do from whatever work you do. If you pay rent chances are the owner you rent from 'profits' more than you 'profit' from your yearly paycheck. Same with the grocery store. On the other hand the government gives you a lot of services, not the least of which is our entire (hopefully stable) economic system which allows you to make money in the fist place.