Why Did Obama Drop the Oil Tax Proposal?

[Supercritical]

ExxonMobil Q4 2008 (source)
Net Profit: $7.82 billion
Revenue: $84.696 billion
Profit Margin: 9.23%

Profit Margins from previous quarters (from Yahoo Finance and Exxon's investor reports):
Q3 08: 10.77%
Q2 08: 8.46%
Q1 08: 9.32%
Q4 07: 10.00%
Q3 07: 9.20%
Q2 07: 10.43%
Q1 07: 10.64%
Q4 06: 11.39%
Q3 06: 10.53%
Q2 06: 10.46%
Q1 06: 9.44%

It's interesting to note that many media outlets including the NYTimes reported the profit drop of 33% in terms of the current economic crisis, as though "the once high-flying oil sector is scrambling to adjust to a sharp downturn."

On the contrary, while oil prices varied from $60 to $140 and back to $40/barrel during the past 3 years, Exxon's profit margin remained in the range of 9-11%.

I think there's a lot of misplaced anger toward ExxonMobil, but it's died off substantially now that a gallon of gas is cheaper.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Where are you getting your data. I don't see it.

I did see this:
Net income (U.S. GAAP)
4th qtr 08 7,820
3rd qtr 08 14,830
2nd qtr 08 11,680
1st qtr 08 10,890
4th qtr 07 11,660
http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/Files/news_release_supp4q08.pdf

Beyond that, it was public information that Exxon made greater profits recently than any company in history.

 

[Supercritical]

It's located about halfway down the page on each report (Q4 08 report).

It's true that ExxonMobil has set records for profits in terms of dollar amounts (although I haven't read if the all-time record is adjusted for inflation). However, China eats the most food in the world in terms of tonnage (speculative), but nobody says they eat too much. The point being: ratios and proportions tell more of the story. For instance, for the year 2007 Coca Cola made $5.98 billion profit on $28.9 billion revenue, amounting to a 20.73% profit margin. This means that if Coca Cola had generated the same amount of revenue as ExxonMobil did, Coca Cola would have raked in roughly twice the profit (assuming everything scaled).

In Exxon's case, it just so happens that businesses that are more profitable (pharmaceuticals, for instance) don't have the revenue/sales volume that Exxon has; and those giants that are less profitable (Wal Mart, as an example) don't have the sales to top Exxon's profits either.