EXXON MOBILE PROFITS

From Neal Boortz - http://boortz.com/nuze

Recap: In 2006 Exxon reported profits of $39.5 billion. Politicians went nuts. In 2007 those profits went to $40.6 billion. Politicians went nutsier.

The reason politicians can successfully demagogue these profits is that the vast majority .. and we're talking 95% and above .. of Americans couldn't tell you the difference between a profit and a profit margin if their flat screen TVs depended on it. Simply stated, profit is the total amount you make. Profit margin is how much you make on each dollar of sales. You would think that this would be taught in our government schools ... but if you did think that you would be wrong.

So ... what has been happening to Exxon's profit margin during these record profit years? Staying about the same, that's what; around 10%. The reason their profits have been increasing is because the price of crude oil has been going up ... bring gas prices up with them ... thus increasing the dollar amount of sales. Profit – up. Profit margins – 'bout the same.

By the way ... financial institutions and cosmetics companies have been enjoying higher margins... along with many other sectors of our economy.

Now .. the numbers that I presented yesterday. Pretty eye-opening. The research was posted on the Seeking Alpha website.

Over the past three years Exxon Mobile has paid an average of $27 billion a year in taxes to the Imperial Federal Government. This has amounted to about 41% of Exxon's taxable income. The last year for which complete numbers on who pays what taxes are available was 2004. In 2004 there were 130 million individual tax returns filed. If you take the bottom 50% of those tax returns – 65 million of them – and add up the total amount of taxes those households paid you come up with $27.4 billion. This means that one corporation, Exxon Mobile, pays as much in taxes to the federal government as do the bottom half of individual taxpayers. How's that for paying your fair share.

There's more. The Adjusted gross income for the bottom 50% of taxpayers comes out to about $922 billion. This means that these taxpayers are paying an effective tax rate of about 3% of their adjusted gross income. Exxon? Adjusted gross income of around $67.4 billion in 2006 ... for an effective tax rate of 41%.