Fixed.

I’m sorry you can’t be bothered to see the other side of an argument, Oliver.

He sees it just fine, it’s just stupid.

Not that I’m surprised that a narrow minded hack like yourself has never been bothered.

I’m also sorry that you don’t understand simple economic principles like supply and demand.

CHARLES GIBSON: We in the media have made a lot of the profits that ExxonMobil has made, particularly in the last couple of quarters — more than $10 billion in profits first quarter this year; more than $11.5 billion in the second quarter of the year. When people, I don’t know, complain about that to you or say how dare you? Those profits are obscene. What’s your best — in brief form — what’s your best justification?

REX TILLERSON: Well, I think it has to do with an ability to understand just the size of our business. Everything we do, the numbers are very large. I saw someone characterize our profits the other day in terms of $1,400 in profit per second. Well, they also need to understand we paid $4,000 a second in taxes, and we spent $15,000 a second in cost. We spend $1 billion a day just running our business. So this is a business where large numbers are just characteristic of it.

So if their profits are obscene, what does that make the taxes they pay?

Yeah, well we tried taking money from companies that were losing money, but it didn’t work out so good.

I was referring to the sense of alarm at the record profits, and the idea vocalized by some that there should be some sort of surcharge or punitive tax. It reminds me of the big tobacco settlements a few years ago…all the hand wringing when people realized what a 30% attorney’s fee on a multi-billion dollar settlement was going to add up to.

I guess it’s just a different way of thinking, that when someone makes a large amount of money the government is entitled to take a bunch of it.

Progressive taxation, or, you know, the system we currently use in the U.S., or used to, anyway.

God, cons are such teh smartones.

MARY PETERS: You know, I think Americans would be shocked to learn that only about 60 percent of the gas tax money that they pay today actually goes into highway and bridge construction. Much of it goes in many, many other areas.

[SNIP]

(Peters later says that the other forty percent funds earmarks)

GWEN IFILL: Aren’t many of those projects, even though they’re special interest projects, aren’t they roads and bridges, often?

MARY PETERS: Gwen, some of them are, but many of them are not. There are museums that are being built with that money, bike paths, trails, repairing lighthouses. Those are some of the kind of things that that money is being spent on, as opposed to our infrastructure.