Word: excessive
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Congressmen who are urging an excess-profits tax on the oil industry are making a proposal that is more innovative than they may realize. Major excess-profits taxes have been clamped on U.S. business three times since 1917, but in every case the tax was levied on almost all corporations in order to help pay for a war. Never before has the nation debated imposing an excess-profits tax on a single industry in peacetime...
...Previous excess-profits taxes have been justified partly as a way to raise vast amounts of money quickly. Now, practically nobody bothers to talk much about how many dollars an excess-profits tax might collect. Instead, the controversy turns on issues of fairness and effectiveness...
...very nature, an excess-profits tax is highly complicated. Many economists contend that there is no such thing as "excess" profit because in a free economy a corporation is supposed to earn the highest profit it can. Alan Greenspan, a member of TIME'S Board of Economists and adviser to the Nixon Administration, contends that people who favor the tax are unconsciously adopting a Marxist view that profit is basically exploitation...
...answering philosophical argument has been that profits can be considered "excess" if they result not from a corporation's efficiency or inventiveness but from outside circumstances that remove the normal checks of the market and allow profit at the expense of the public. Historically, that argument has been given a moralistic cast by war: it seemed wrong for a company to earn outsized profits out of a situation that imposed suffering on many citizens...
Advocates of an excess-profits tax on oil now make exactly that pitch. Senator George McGovern, introducing a bill to tax "excess" oil earnings, declared: "Simple justice demands that no company or individual profits unconscionably from a national crisis." A more economic argument is that the artificial shortages created by war or an Arab oil embargo give companies a chance to post higher prices than normal markets would justify. In such cases those prices may have to be tolerated to encourage needed production. But, the argument goes, Government should make sure that at least some of the "abnormal" profits generated...