While you paid over $4 for a gallon of gas...
 

http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/30/news...ex.htm?cnn=yes

Exxon Mobile reports record breaking profits for the third quarter of 2008. The last time they had record breaking profits was the second quarter of... yeah, 2008!

My local economy has weathered the economic crisis pretty well thanks to oil and gas prices so I'm not complaining.

Did you forget to include the "record demand" part?

Let's let them pay for the next bailout, then. ;)

Those words are used nowhere in the article. It does say that demand is falling, but it does not indicate that there was record demand.

1.Oil and gas companies don't set the price of gasoline. Speculators and market analysts do.

2.Oil and gas companies make an average of 10 cents on the sale of a gallon of gas.

3.The federal gas tax on a gallon of gasoline was around 18.4 cents last time I looked.....that doesn't include state gas taxes. In Texas, it's 20 cents.

4. Exxon Mobil's profit margin last time I checked was 10.7%. Microsoft's was 30%.

5. Instead of getting up in arms about a company making money, allowing them to expand production, employ more people, and research energy sources......why don't you raise question about why the US Government (especially the left part of it) has done their best over the last THIRTY YEARS to strangle oil and gas production to the point where we have to now import 75% of our energy. Our country sits on an ocean of oil and natural gas.....and we can't use a huge amount of it. 95% of off-shore drilling sites are off limits. Pure brilliance. But oh.....if Cuba and China want to come over and drill off of the Florida coast, no problem, take what you need. People want to bitch about how much we are spending on Iraq.......go look up how much we spend importing energy that we could go get in our own damn country.

It's amazing, $137.7 billion in revenue and only $14.83 billion in profits. That's $122.87 billion that was spent by the company in overhead such as salaries, oil, rent, insurance for employees, etc.

Like Kevin pointed out, it helps people weather a bad economy.