Note she's not using the Carteresque term "Windfall Profits Tax" for her proposal. In today's Democratic Party, that counts as being a strongly pro-business stance.

Everybody's all for cleaning the environment, developing alternative sources, etc until they realize it is going to cost them more at the pump.

Also this depends on timing. If oil and gas prices continue to decline there will be less pressure for this.

If the GOP is smart this will be filed under Hillary = big government/anti-business for the '08 run.

Which is why you crank taxes while prices are artificially high already.

Hilary is trying to sell this as a way of "sticking it to the man." Something many on the left just love to hear.

"The point of hiking gas taxes is to change consumer behavior, not punish business"

So what to do? Yeah punish consumers. And as a side benefit punish Business. A twofer.

I don't care what the point is.

So oj, any prospect of you voting for the Hildebeast in 2008?

Many voting democrats still work in the auto industry and have ties to it economically. Domestic auto industry getting crushed by this is not good for her as she loses the middle by shoring up the base. A bad move only a leftist could love

Given that the energy industry is generally quite competitive, any tax such as the tougher of the two Clintons proposes would fall in varying proportions upon consumers and on the shareholders of energy companies. That latter group, of course, includes pension funds, IRA accounts, church portfolios, and other parties whom one might think the minority party would normally wish to spare. A smarter move would be to eliminate the corporate income tax altogether and impute earnings to shareholders: that would hit high-bracket taxpayers while sparing lower-income and non-profit shareholders.

A profits tax suffers from the further defect that it would remove funding and incentives for effective research from the very organizations that have the most expertise and incentive to conduct it. Letting Congress get its hands on even more cash will simply lead to a flood of boondoggling research grants to politically connected and otherwise unemployable lab geeks in Alaska and West Virginia, to judge by the current flow of pork.

Mrs. Clinton strikes me as too bright to believe her proposal actually makes any sense. So I assume it is merely a throw-away rhetorical sop to the populists and other dim types that sustain her party's chronic sense of victimhood and conspiracy.

"Mrs. Clinton strikes me as too bright ..." Faulty assumption. Remember HillaryCare? She is a tone-deaf liberal whose tries to keep her centrist mask from slipping, not always successfully.

h:

If you think gas company profits will go down just because taxes go up you haven't been paying attention for the past few decades. They'd use the taxes as a screen for gouging.

Ali:

The GOP would have to nominate a Tancredo.

OJ: If the oil industry needs a screen for "gouging" , it looks like there's lots of folks ahead of them that folks like Hillary should be "sticking it to" first?