Windfall profits taxes on big oil companies are not the answer to our oil problems. When you tax something, you get less of it. Why would we want to do that with oil? The average American is led to believe that we ought to tax the oil companies since they are making so much profit. The problem is corporations don’t pay taxes, only people pay taxes. Corporations are tax collectors and they pass all their taxes and other costs onto the consumer, so what would a windfall profits tax accomplish? We had a bill up yesterday that would have a windfall profits tax and put it towards alternative energy. I’m all for alternative energy, but the marketplace is already producing all the alternative energy we can produce. It’s just a matter of time until we have more wind, ethanol, biodiesel, biomass, cellulosic ethanol. You can put a trillion dollars to put into alternative energy and you won’t get a trillion dollars out of it because the market can’t absorb it. It will become a slush fund for appropriators to play around with and won’t produce more alternative energy. It’s a fig-leaf for the Democrats that are tools of the environmentalists that don’t want to explore for more oil. We need to produce more oil and go where we know there is 13 billion barrels in the outer continental shelf and the Gulf of Mexico. This will reduce the price of oil through the law of Economics, when supply goes up, the price goes down. It seems that like all the promoters of this legislation never read Economics 101.