Filed under: Rants and raves, Presidential elections, Oil, Headline news, Federal Reserve

Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting, John McCain is going to be all smiles as we approach the November election. If you are a conspiracy theorist, or just find it a curious irony as I do, you must be noting that, just this week, the Federal Reserve decided to leave the Fed loan rate at 2%, the Iraq and U.S. governments are negotiating a withdrawal timetable for our troops, and oil prices are falling fast.

All of these headline-worthy items will benefit the Republicans more than the Democrats. Furthermore, all of these improvements will help the folks on Wall Street and Main Street. The stock market is way up today, they state on dropping oil prices: Stocks jump as oil prices fall sharply.

This has the taint of political engineering or “electioneering,” even if it is just coincidence. Maybe the world is just happy to see Dubya go into retirement … who knows?

Earlier I posted Obama’s $1000 giveaway is a take away! and now it’s time to rant about Dear John. He’s on record as claiming he has the ability to balance the federal budget by the end of his first term without raising taxes. I think we have heard that before. It’s not going to happen. Why do politicians insist on uttering such nonsense?

This ridiculous campaign rhetoric comes with ZERO corresponding thought about what major programs could be cut to even come close to this worthy goal. The answer is none that I know of.

The only way that the federal government will balance the budget will be if officials simply take more expenditures off-budget and pretend to have accomplished something. If you ask the American people what things government does extremely well, you will find agreement that it ‘pretends’ excellently.

If John McCain’s budget balancing act continues to be discussed, then he’s truly the more experienced candidate, for he can pretend with the best of them.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture & planning firm. He writes the columns Chasing Value and Serious Money.

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Filed under: Rants and raves, Apple Inc (AAPL), General Electric (GE), Exxon Mobil (XOM), Johnson and Johnson (JNJ), Chevron Corp (CVX), ConocoPhillips (COP), Politics, Presidential elections, Oil, Headline news

If Barack Obama is receiving advice from “my pal Warren” then he must not be listening. There’s no way that Warren Buffett, the national debt hawk, would support Obama’s stupid idea of giving another $1,000 back to every family in America. It is reported that he would pay for this by creating a windfall profit tax on oil companies.

This give-away program is an attempt to purchase votes plain and simple. It would add to the national debt, discourage oil companies from investing and worse it would handicap American companies more than others and mortgage more of our children’s futures.

The last thing the the people of the United Says need is more deficit spending. If we did tax oil companies, which I am against, I would only support using the funds for expanding education, research and development in science and engineering with the goal of maintaining our waning leadership in technology.

We need to do things that increase our productivity. Increasing our dependency on government handouts is a colossal mistake.

The so-called windfall profits of the oil companies is another thing I question. The profits are large because the demand is high and the gross receipts are high. It is simply a large number, not necessarily a high margin. When the profits were absent during periods of lower oil prices, nobody stated anything.

Here are some net profit margin facts.

Three oil companies:

• Exxon Mobile (NYSE: XOM) 11.32%
• ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP) 6.93%
• Chevron Corp (NYSE: CVX) 9.16%

Three popular large non-oil companies in three different industries:

• Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) 14.56%
• Johnson and Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) 17.31%
• General Electric (NYSE: GE) 13.09%

I would much prefer to hear anything about balancing budgets, or even just slowing down spending, not more government taxing and spending. In the end Obama’s give-away would be a take-away!

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture & planning firm. He writes the columns Chasing Value and Serious Money. Disclosure: I own shares of COP, GE, & JNJ.

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