These are worldwide profits.  And the U.S unlike most countries taxes your global income.  So, if you choose to move to lovely Buenos Aires, well your individual income is still taxable by the US government.  The same is true of US corporations (though locate your corporate office at a mailbox in Grand Cayman and it is a different story).  Though there are more complex tax rules around all of that.  

If you look at ExxonMobil's SEC filings, they pay roughly 35% of their income in taxes.  And that is excluding the deferred portion, look at footnote number 18 for the full details.  They pay more than that when you consider worldwide taxes placed on their income (most of which don't come from the U.S.).   According to Boeing's financials, they paid 21%.  Who is getting the bigger break?  An oil company or a government contractor/airplane manufacturer?  For your reference on the SEC's site, Boeing's ticker is BA and Exxon's is XOM.  You should look for section 8 of Form 10-K and then notes to financials.  Most companies put the tax disclosure towards the end, depends on how many earlier ones they need to make.

I'm all for simplifying the corporate tax code and closing out some silly benefits, but I don't believe in targeting specific industries in our quest to do this.  And we need to do the same for the individual income tax code too.  The oil companies are an easy target now.  But you know ADM, Monsanto, Cargill are making windfall profits off this spike in food prices.  Are we going to end all these subsidies to ethanol and "farmers" (i.e. big Agra)?

Bemoan pandering?  This is pandering.  People need a boogeyman.  If it's not Philip Morris or Dominion, then it's big oil.  Are politicians good people because they play on this BS with people?  No sacrifice guys, live out in BFE, drive an SUV, and I'll punish those big, bad oil companies that are making your lives miserable (eye-roll).

While certain taxes on oil companies are sketchy, "big oil" clearly doesn't care that the price of fuel is horrendous.  People don't have much of a choice (most of the time).  Everything is somewhere else and you get there in a car.  I'd imagine more people are taking the bus and the metro these days as it's financially smarter, but most Americans don't have that luxury.

We don't have enough money to invest in renewable energy because all our cash is going to the crappy fuel we use now!  We need to tax them, we need to invest - it's not just smart because it will create jobs, but it will give people an alternative to such ludicrous prices.

I don't call encouraging any sort of tax hike pandering - I say good for Glenn Nye, and I'm glad to be supporting him.

Oil companies' taxes in the U.S. should be higher than other companies?  I mean does Boeing, GM, Ford, and others not contribute to this problem.  Heck, they aren't the only users and distributors of oil powered or oil based products.  As far as companies caring about your individual circumstance, do you think Monsanto gives a fat rat's arse about what you or Mexican citizens have to pay for corn?  I'm sure their CEO cries himself to sleep over those who can't afford food while his company reaps a boat load of profits from seed prices.  

Oil companies' profits are bad versus other companies you buy products from?  I mean there is a laundry list of companies that do "bad" things.  You like Kleenex?  Kimberly-Clark, their manufacturer, clear cuts forests to produce that tissue and TP.  Darden restaurants, who owns Dead Lobster (sorry, Red Lobster), supports dredging the bottom of the ocean to feed all their customers.  Who creates these problems the companies who do these nasty things or the uninformed consumers who eat this sh*t up?  I mean really, there is a limitless supply of crustaceans to supply unfettered demand for them?

If we want to punish a specific group, why not tax consumers who own fuel inefficient vehicles?  Why not tax people who live far from their work sites?  Why not tax people for their poor decisions?  I mean we tax people for smoking and drinking.  Why not a carbon tax?  Let's punish people for making poor decisions, that's fair?  And we can punish the companies that enable those poor decisions too?  Fair, right?

I'm trying to get at what is fair.  There are a lot of corporations, some not so nice, that benefit from the tax code that are not just oil companies.  Why single them out?  Because people are b*tching about high gas prices now.  Because they have some crazed sense of entitlement to cheap oil prices.  And we should reward this ignorance by punishing just oil companies.  What sense does this make?

Altogether, I agree with most of the tenor and substance of your remarks. It is counter-productive and corruption-enabling to specifically reward certain industries via the tax code.

However, we're at this weird moment in this country where you can always cut a tax, but never raise one -- while we're hemorrhaging money hand over fist, wracking up debt, and generally acting fiscally insane. So, if it takes the specter of tax breaks for the most profitable companies in the history of the world to get some of these corporate subsidies revoked, then I'm all for it. If we had a balanced budget and were mostly debt-free, then we could discuss changing the corporate tax code (full disclosure: I'm for repealing the corporate tax code entirely, and recapturing the lost revenue, and more, through increased dividend and capital gains taxation and a more progressive income tax that fully taxes the wealthiest individuals that are currently exempted from much taxation). But since we won't be in that scenario any time soon, I'd settle for getting rid of these subsidies.  

It's seems like you are saying let's take the easy way out, because that is all that is possible.  We cannot be honest with folks or educate them to the fact that money doesn't grow on trees?  What we need is true candor.  Rather than playing around the margins, we need to cut to the heart of the matter.  We need to be honest with ourselves and our chosen leaders need to stop treating us with kid gloves.

I honestly hate the let's-mess-with-the-tax-code approach to everything.  That is why it is so complex and then we groan about how complex it is.  This complexity employs hundreds of thousands of accountants and lawyers to decipher, debate, and comply with the code.  These bright minds could be doing something infinitely more useful for society, but we choose for it to be this way.

Back to the topic, this is pandering.  People need a demon to fight, and here big oil is a demon.  This feeds into the public's bad habit of searching for and accepting answers that require nothing of them.  In politics, there is always a free lunch for constituents.  The honest answer is that something will be required of you and me to solve this problem.  We can't dump this on Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron and Conoco's door and expect them to fix it.  And the revenue raised here is a drop in bucket and does nothing to help our fiscal situation when we turn right around and spend that money.

As far as the most profitable companies in the history of the world, it depends on how you measure that.  From a profit margin perspective, big oil companies don't top the list.  But why should that make any difference in their rate of taxation?  If you want to tax very profitable companies, increase the gradation of the corporate tax scale and eliminate deductions for all corporate taxpayers.  ExxonMobil's profit margin is 9%.  They have so much because commodity prices are so high.  9% profit margin is not ridiculously high.  

I don't think windfall profit taxes are a good idea in general, and, yes, suggesting such remedies is populist pandering.

But I think it's ridiculous, when oil is $125 a barrel, to be incentivizing and subsidizing energy exploration via the tax code. The market has provided all the incentives these companies need -- profit. This is pure corporate welfare. And the fact that other industries also receive some amount of corporate welfare, even more, does not change that.

End the subsidies, and use that cash to spur R&D into alternative fuel markets. It may be a drop in the bucket in the large scheme of our balancesheet, but it's still smart and effective public policy that's in our long-term environmental interests.

And you must not have read most of what I wrote, because I explicitly stated that I would end all corporate taxation if I had my druthers and recapture the income through other means. But, as that's not going to happen, here in the real world I think it's a good idea to end these subsidies and, as Glenn suggests, use that money to invest in other technologies.

I read what you wrote and I understand your argument.  I just think we should work from principles, ideals.  Let's start with what is the better idea, the better solution, the better action and work from there.  Why start from the lowest common denominator?  And why should anything be off the table?  If we are getting the populace riled up about something, why not inform them and get to a better solution?

There are better solutions out there, Representative Charles Rangel had a bill that would have done much to close out a lot of loopholes in the corporate tax code.  Was it perfection, no; but it was a great start.  Why not have a petition to get his full bill HR 3970 (introduced last October) signed into law?  His will get rid of LIFO method accounting, one of the biggest corporate tax giveaways.  And his would get rid of the manufacturing credit for all filers not just oil companies.  Net revenue gain is zero because all the provisions balance themselves out (it includes a repeal of AMT).  The fact that it is revenue neutral puts it in the realm of the possible given the upside down world where we can't have tax increases, right?

Well, revenue positive would be better (as I'm sure you'd agree with), but I think your read on the situation is right.

I'm cool with all that. And were I in Congress, I'd be advocating for what you describe here. But I'd still support a separate attempt to just go after oil subsidies IF that money went specifically to research and development for environmentally better, non-fossil fuels. A couple billion a year into research into a new gen of biofuels, or even a next gen of more fuel efficient hybrid vehicles, would seem to be a smart move, and taking that money from corporate oil subsidies is just good optics and smart politics.

But I understand your principled argument, and I completely respect where you're coming from.

I'm sure that money could be put to good use and the environment would thank us for it.

So - let's start with the oil companies.

C'mon, petitions like this are greeting with a shrug. This has zero political effect.

What it is really good for is building a handy potential donor list full of email addresses that Glenn Nye can tap periodically.  I'm not necessarily condemning this. Donor lists are the bread and butter of any political campaign. If I worked for Nye's campaign, I might very well have cooked up something similar. I'm just calling a spade a spade.  

Also known as "demoralizing."

By the way, did you ask what impact the anti-abuser-fee petition would have when IT started?  More importantly, did you sign it?  Did you work hard to get others to sign it?  If not, why not?