from the Wall Street Journal:
Rove wants to know why McCain is “angry, frankly, at the oil companies not only because of the obscene profits they’ve made, but their failure to invest in alternate energy.” Rove points out that the airline industy was not pioneered by the railroad industry and that automobiles where not championed by the makers of buggy whips.
Rove’s point is that innovation rarely comes from people with a vested interest in the status quo.
Rove also bashes Obama for singling out oil companies with his disastrous plan for a windfall profits tax. Rove points out that the oil industries “record breaking profits” net them about 8.3 cents per sales dollar which is far less than other industries such as electronics which net 14.5 cents per sales dollar or Microsoft that nets a booming 27.5 cents per sales dollar. He adds that perhaps Obama is looking at the total net profit made by the oil industry, but not even that would put the oil company at the top of the list. The oil and gas industry made $85 million which seems meager to the nearly half a billion made by the financial services industry last year.
Rove makes a couple of excellent points here. Either the candidates are simply pandering or they lack a firm understanding of basic economics. In the case of the latter, however, Obama stands to do much more damage to the economy.