Word: oils
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...numbers of service stations around the country rationed sales to $5 or less per customer, Congress began battling over Jimmy Carter's plan to raise fuel prices still higher. Already the strategy is drawing heavy fire from left and right for being everything from a giveaway to Big Oil to a bureaucratic interference with private business to a dangerous new fuel for inflation...
...sharpest attacks are against the package's two most important parts. They are to phase out domestic oil price controls beginning in June, and to bring in a "windfall profits" tax. Scrapping controls will allow U.S. oil prices, which average about $9.45 per bbl., to rise during the next two years to the cartel-set world level, which already stands at a minimum of $14.55 and is certain to climb still higher. The oil companies would get an extra $6.5 billion in earnings annually from decontrol, but about half of the money would be taxed away. The Government would...
Many legislators have urged Carter to come up with just that sort of program all along, but now they seem ready to condemn him for doing so. Senators and Congressmen from New England, where home heating oil prices in some cases have jumped by 25% since last autumn, complain that decontrol will just make matters worse. Says Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy of Carter's program: "It's bad economic policy, it's bad energy policy, and it's bad for the country." Legislators from Texas, Oklahoma and other petrobelt states argue that Carter...
Oilmen insist that all the profits of decontrol, not just some of them, are urgently needed to finance the search for crude. Asks Hugh Liedtke, chairman of Pennzoil Co.: "Are we to raise more tax money or raise more oil?" But some of the biggest firms are swinging around to an emotional accommodation with the idea of a tax, so long as it is phased out in a couple of years. What they want is a temporary levy with a so-called plow-back provision. Under it, companies would be able to reduce their windfall profits taxes each year...
Congress will find it difficult to avoid the passage of some sort of tax. Oil industry profits for the first three months of 1979 will soon be released, and they will show a surge of perhaps as much as 40%, largely because the OPEC cartel's price rises have caused higher prices in the U.S. too. In addition, companies benefit because their stockpiled inventories of crude, bought at lower prices, also rise in value. That alone will be enough to anger a public already critical of the oil industry, and the continuing rise in gasoline and other fuel costs...