Democrats Want To Tax Oil Companies And Send The Money To Working Class Families

Democrats introduced legislation late last week that would put a 50% tax on the windfall profits of oil companies and send that money directly to working class families in the form of quarterly payments. While the payments wouldn't be huge, they would certainly help struggling families who can't make ends meet right now, in addition to cutting off the price gouging that oil companies have been accused of engaging in. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this plan.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Democratic lawmakers late last week, put forward legislation that would tax the windfall profits of oil companies here in the United States and they would use that money, as the legislation says, to send quarterly checks to American citizens, right? To working class, lower income Americans, you would get a check every three months. That would be money directly from the oil companies because they've been price gouging us for so long. In the House, the rep, legislation, excuse me, was put forward by representative Ro Khanna in the Senate, put forth by Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. Two great people, by the way, they typically are very progressive on most of the issues. This is brilliant legislation, but let's be totally clear about something here, folks. The purpose of this legislation, should it ever become a law, which I don't think it will, unfortunately, but the purpose of the legislation is not to actually get you money.

In fact, the amount of money that each individual person would get, um, is, is, is pretty, pretty small. So, you know, we're, we're literally talking about a couple hundred dollars per year. Like, no, no, no, not per payment, per year, because yes, there's cutoffs just like the last round of stimulus, $75,000 income for a single filer, $150,000 income for joint filers. So you'd get 240 to $360 per year based on the current prices of oil and the formulations that they use to determine how much money you get. So again, even though that money would help lower income people, there's no denying that, let's be clear. But the real point of it is not to actually put money in people's pockets. The real point of the legislation is to stop these companies from gouging us at the pump because the windfall tax would be a 50% tax on those excess profits that the oil companies make. And again, there's a rather complicated way that they would figure this out. It's in the legislation. I could try to explain it, but it's too complicated.

Just understand a 50% windfall tax on excess profits for anything over what the price of a barrel of oil was between 2015 and 2019, plus the difference of today, than 50% over that. See what I mean, little complicated, but trust me in the legislation, they do have it all worked out and they understand it. So that's, that's what's important. But again, we're getting screwed. Oil profits in the last 12 months have risen by 60 to 80% yet we're paying over $4 a gallon on average for gasoline right now and we're supposed to believe that it's only because of the friction over in Europe. Oh, it's because of inflation. Bull. It is because of corporate greed. That is what this is. And yes, international tensions, conflicts do raise the price of oil, but not because there's any kind of real disruption. But because volatility sends the price of oil skyrocketing, because the people who control the price of oil do that. That's why that is. It's not as complicated as a lot of people want to think. We're paying more for gasoline right now because they want us to. It's as simple as that. And this legislation from Ro Khanna and Sheldon Whitehouse might help to put an end to that in the future.