Fun. There are so many things that aren’t profitable that are good for people…the financialization of American industry is an overall negative for American citizens. As each industry turns to financial instruments instead of products (GE becoming a credit card company…Tesla selling carbon credits to make their profit margin), we decline as a citizenship - more and more products become out of reach (home ownership, medical care, decent primary education), because we have a new industry milking profits out of them.

70% of US gasoline is sold in the US, and before Obama it was 100%; the world pricing is on oil, which is just as low as it’s always been, except gas is priced higher, giving a wider margin than ever before. Did they not have oil exploration in 2019? Why do we have a 10-20 percent margin up until the pandemic, now we are in 40-50% range?

Also, oil exploration isn’t really a thing these days -97% of oil is coming from existing fields using new tech, like shale. They don’t spend money to find it, they already own and know where it all is.

What they will really do with the profit is the same that every major corporation has done - pay it out via dividends and stock buy-backs, increasing shareholder value, not spend on the business, because that extra money isn’t needed - their margins are great without spending a dime extra.

Yeah no they can only incentivize private businesses. Biden can push them to “do the right thing”, and help out by increasing supply, but honestly we never had a supply issue to start with - we had intentional withholding of fuel to artificially push up prices. We all know that’s how gas cartels operate, it’s in the news how OPEC decides on the price of oil, and how much they will sell, controlling the price for both economic and political pressure. All we can do is try to make the market more favorable, while Congress can take action like windfall profits tax, to discourage profit-taking and encourage reinvestment.

That was a huge mistake. Getting retirement and putting them onto an investing club hoping that businesses will always increase profits, while we have contrary tax laws that push businesses to SPEND all potential profits and encourage hiring and growth. At the same time we say “oh but to fund 401k, the companies have to LOOK good so people keep “investing” their retirements. In order to do that, businesses need to extract profit and pay dividends - reducing the money that can be used instead for growth, since we don’t tax business expenses like cost of goods sold or employees (payroll tax is not the same because it’s the same for every employee, not pro or regressive like income tax).

We have two different incentives pushing opposite directions, invest money, helps our economy, or profit-taking, pleasing the investor class, but does very little for our general economy (no incentive for the profits will be re-invested at all when they can use financial instruments to multiply the invested money)

no business is guaranteed profits. The idea that they kept pricing artificially high in the name of recovering past lost profits is nuts, and it only works because we have a series of cartels monopolizing the entire trade. Any other industry would be in court for the amount of price fixing going on. Oil prices were long the same as they ever were while we paid triple at the pump. They don't have any additional costs, and the 2020 loss was well made up for by 2021, their profits exceeded the losses for 2020 and expected profits for both years.

The price of gasoline has been pure opportunism, and we are so beholden that we are afraid to address it - or they might punish us by charging even more. Unbelievable, completely captured economy.

Our area only has stores from those companies. We would have zero competition.