Windfall taxing big oil: how to make the gas crisis worse

... So theory tells us that excess profits attract the competition that wipes them out... and do so by lowering the prices of those things which were in short supply. So confiscating those extra profits will mean that first, no one making them has the money left to look for more and, secondly, no one is going to dive into the industry if they think that they won't be allowed to keep the profits they might make.

So, umm, a windfall tax on profits means that, umm, gas prices will stay higher in the future than they would have been without the tax. Which, if I've understood this thing properly, isn't in fact what the general public is baying out for.

I'm left with only one important question: who are the fools here?

Is it that those politicians, with their groups of extremely expensive and presumably highly intelligent advisors, are not intelligent enough to see that their plans are entirely counter-productive? Or is it that they know they are, but think that we the voters are too stupid to understand it ourselves?

[we should know this - because it's the chief (of many) poison pills Pelosi plans to put in any bill she allows to be voted on - Recommended > ]

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