Should the Oil Companies Help Out the Folks?

Understanding that many Americans are furious with the oil companies, Barack Obama is trying to tie John McCain in with them and putting forth this:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA: I believe we should give every working family in America a $1,000 energy rebate. And we should pay for it with part of the record profits that the oil companies are making right now.

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Taxing windfall profits? How exactly would that work? Would that be constitutional selecting a single industry for advanced taxation? That's not going to get done for a variety of reasons.

Also, giving the folks another rebate is a bad idea. The government must get out of the giveaway business. This country's now running a half-trillion-dollar deficit. All together we owe about $10 trillion, and that's why the U.S. dollar is a disaster.

If the USA continues to spend more than it takes in, we will have a complete economic collapse. Does Obama or McCain want to be the next Herbert Hoover? If so, continue to run up those deficits.

The United States simply must stop its massive spending, must begin to balance the budget, and must return the value of the U.S. dollar to its once elite status. We're all in big trouble if that does not happen.

But, and this is an important but, many Americans are getting hammered by energy prices, and some will have trouble heating their homes next winter. That is completely unacceptable.

So here is my proposal. I am asking the five major American oil companies — Chevron, Occidental, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Hess — to donate two percent of their profits for the last four quarters to a fund that would help struggling Americans pay their heating bills.

In that way, the oil companies could pay back their country, a nation that has allowed them to prosper more than any other concern in the history of civilization. A two percent charitable disbursement would alleviate the suffering of tens of millions of Americans and not hurt the oil companies much at all. Last year, they made a combined $80 billion in profit, a record amount for any industry at any time.

Now, we contacted the five big oil corporations, and to say the response to my idea was lukewarm is to be kind. Exxon and Chevron pointed out they pay a huge amount of taxes to the government, which is true. But what about directly helping those in need? Not much enthusiasm so far.

If just one of the oil companies would establish such a charitable fund, the goodwill that corporation would receive would more than make up for the money spent, as millions of Americans would buy that company's oil over the others.

So we encourage the oil companies to directly help out their fellow Americans who are struggling. No one — no one — in this country should be cold this winter, but it is going to happen.

And that's "The Memo."

Pinheads & Patriots

Our colleague Bret Baier and his wife Amy recently had a baby son, born with severe heart problems. But through all the skill and good care at the Children's National Medical Center, 13-month-old Paul Baier is now thriving.

To reward the hospital, the Baier family is donating $1 million to it so that other babies might get the same good care. For this, Bret and his family are patriots.

Click here to watch "Pinheads & Patriots."

On the pinhead front, goats. Some of them are fainting all over the place, just passing out, when they are startled.

Now we know politicians like that, but these goats apparently have some kind of condition that makes them faint while other goats still stand around.

It may be unfair to call these goats pinheads, but the video is so good, we had to run it. We had to find an excuse, which come to think of it, may itself be a pinhead move.

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