Exxon Mobil made history recently with its announcement of the highest annual profits ever for a U.S. company – more than $40 billion last year. And that news was greeted with horror by Democrats like presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Clinton said that if she is elected president she will take those profits – notice she didn’t say a portion of those profits – and invest them in alternative energy sources. A very green thing to say, although plenty of private companies are already investing in alternative energy. What is she going to do to them if they start getting profitable? And it makes me wonder what her policy will do to Exxon share prices if Clinton is elected. If you were a stockholder, and you knew the government was going to confiscate whatever profit your investment in a particular company yielded, what would you do?
But the bottom line for Clinton, based on her rhetoric, is that profitable companies are bad – very bad.
So, I wondered about her silence when we heard this week that General Motors announced a record loss for 2007, of $38.7 billion. Why wasn’t she out there applauding? Here’s a company that’s doing what Clinton seems to want all American companies to do – lose money. She excoriates those that make money as “greedy.” Here’s GM being, in her worldview, a shining example of a lack of greed.
