This is a first: OPEC is pulling in more money from oil sales than the U.S. government is raising from individual taxpayers.
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click for ginormous chart
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Source:
OPEC Revenue Exceeds U.S. Income Tax Receipts: Chart of Day
Peter Robison
Bloomberg, Aug. 15 2008
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aDuZLnxkKPGA&
The cost to America since 2000: $32 Trillion dollars in total liabilities and unfunded commitments for future payments.
In a speech a few months ago at the National Press Club, former GAO Comptroller General David Walker said:
“If the federal government was a private corporation and the same report came out this morning, our stock would be dropping and some people would be talking about whether the company’s management directors needed a major shake-up”.
“The federal government’s total liabilities,” Walker explained, “translates into a de facto mortgage of about $455,000 for every American household and there’s no house to back that mortgage. In other words, our government has made a whole lot of promises that, in the long run, it cannot possibly keep without huge tax increases.”
Hopefully the Canadians won’t drink our milkshake with The Bakken Formation’s 200 or whatever billion barrels.
If we continue without converting to MITs new hydrogen economy, we can scale disaster relief instead of hydrogen.
Methane cathrates will blow up the atmosphere. No biosphere will save us once we destroy our own biosphere dumbasses.
Please don’t feed the trolls . . .
(deleted and banned)
Sorry for the dumbasses comment? I love this site.
My post was a tad activist, I admit. But when will we go outside our interests to avoid disaster?
I thought that’s what this site sometimes stands for.
It wasn’t the nature of your response — its ANY response to these cretins — that’s what these trolls want, and hence why I refuse to feed them.
We were discussing energy consumption and personal income, and along comes some bleeding asshole who decides that we should be discussing the Presidential election — and baits readers in the most obvious and childish way possible.
Sorry, but I refuse to give some rectum the option to control what gets discussed here. (GYOFB!)
Ignore ’em, delete ’em, ban ’em. They can disrupt dialogue elsewhere if they want — not here.
I gotcha. Don’t want to start the peak oil conversation. Too intense.
BTW, peak oil?
Barry,
You are a good person.
“It wasn’t the nature of your response — its ANY response to these cretins — that’s what these trolls want, and hence why I refuse to feed them.”
Darn! Do I wish that the media would use some judgment and do exactly the same as you do Barry.
Jerome Corsi anyone? (air bag ready to use)
A few months ago it would have been the PERFECT time to legislate a floor to oil prices, in order to provide support for alternative energy development (solar, nucular, shale). Put in a floor at, say, $100/bbl while oil’s at $120 and nobody’d notice. Then when demand drops, taxes raked in would, I dunno, pay down the debt or offset spending on the military to maintain access to oil and Freedom of the Seas(tm)..
(And I still think the price of minimum liability insurance should be priced federally into every gallon of gas… There’d still be a lucrative market in ‘enhanced’ insurance (such as comprehensive, increases in dollar amounts or reductions in deductibles), no more uninsured drivers in accidents, inefficient cars penalized by market forces rather than by narrowly-defined laws with their unintended consequences, pay insurance as you go (per mile) so the less you drive, the less you pay, which is how it should be anyway)
All that the above chart shows is that if we have the ability to make more income to pay for higher priced oil, we will.
But somehow I doubt very much that Americans increased their collective incomes by 60% during 2008, and the above relationship will break down this year. People will simply divert money from other things to buy oil. From buying cars, for instance.
In the past, OPEC has been very savvy in adjusting the price of their product to their customers’ ability to buy it.
For whatever reason (getting the last big grab before losing the White House?), Big Oil/speculators/the Devil/Dick Cheney have decided to cash in this year, and OPEC is the (extremely willing) beneficiary.
There is also the possibility that OPEC is the sole bad guy in all this, but somehow I doubt that. There is mischief enough to spread around the blame for it. Just as in the housing mess, there is blame a-plenty for lots of folks.
If renewables are what we want, we don’t want a ceiling on oil prices.
Up up and away!
(Instead of drill drill drill!)
So I had the misfortune of catching the last few minutes of one of those Weather Channel propaganda hours on Global Warming while trying to get info on the hurricane.
They were attempting to brainwash children this time and were showing “Josh”, the “rockstar/Christ-figure” as the, I kid you not, “CHANGE AGENT”. They kept using that term over and over and I thought to myself “how brilliant those magnificent bastards who run the energy cartel are”.
Think about it. Where there once was no “debate” about controlling the price of oil/energy or metering the use of oil as a scarce product, we now have a perfect dialectic. AND, thanks in part to the Weather Channel, we are ensuring a constant supply of new “poles” for the future, fighting for higher oil prices and higher taxes.
Holy smoke, Batman, you can’t make this shit up!
P.S. The Arabs make a great Straw Man; read about Ishmael in the Bible. He hates everyone and everyone hates him.
I’ts their last fling. The petroleum undustry is a type of symbiotic parasite; It gives you big shiny machines that make work easy while charging you for the fuel to run the machines you thought you paid for (printer ink on steroids). Yes it’s true that Carbon Monoxide will kill you quite dead and quite quickly but those machines are so-o-o-o pretty. We can’t get in Jules Verne time macjine and go back to stop Standard Oil from boosting the car industry and gutting electric street cars all over america (They bought them out and shut them down) but we can shake the gasolene habit without giving up our machines. Regardless of what anyone tells you, all the “ineficiency” of generating Hydrogen and Oxygen, packaging them and burning them is nothing compared with what goes on now. We CAN rely on the sun. It’s simple; no sun, no people. The sun is more reliable than OPEC (duh!).
Oh, by the way; that chart looks quite differnet in Euros, not to mention the changes in tax law around the time the chart takes off. There is way to much Mens Rea going around. For example, look at the chart and look at the housing bubble, then look at your budget since 2000.
See what I mean? OPEC keeps their head above water while our government drowns us.
Stay dry. Go electric. Just the money you’ll save from the radically cheaper maintenace on electric engines will save you a bundle. And of course the “emmisions sensor scam” they pull on you when you go for inspection will be gone too.
Very interesting observation, but even as we type the price of oil is coming down and after November — oops, probably shouldn’t mention the unmentionable event, don’t wanna be an OT troll — but after November your taxes may be going up.