A recent CNN headline screams:

Exxon posts record $11.68 billion profit

Wow, that works out to $1,485.55 per second! Those greedy bastards! Down with Big Oil! From now on let's just drill our own in our backyards.

But buried deep in the story we find paragraph 28:

In addition to making hefty profits, Exxon also had a hefty tax bill. Worldwide, the company paid $10.5 billion in income taxes in the second quarter, $9.5 billion in sales taxes, and over $12 billion in what it called "other taxes."

Carpe Diem does a little math on the numbers and comes up with this chart:

ExxonMobile pays $4,114 in taxes per second. Communist goons like Reps Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) and Maxine Waters (D-CA) might want to think twice about nationalizing a goose that lays such large golden eggs.

Once again we see that if anyone's to blame for the energy crisis driving our economic downturn, it's not the people who provide us with energy, but the parasitical bureaucrats who go out of their way to prevent them from providing it more efficiently — and of course the media sycophants who prop up those bureaucrats.

On a tip from Wiggins. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.