Tag Archives: Profit

News

How much does the average American corporation make in profit?

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How much profit does the average American corporation make?
How much profit does the average American corporation make?

A while back, there was a story about how Americans vastly overestimate how many people in the USA are homosexual. According to Gallup polls in 2011, Americans estimated that 25% of the people in America were homosexual. In 2015, it was 23%. The actual number is about 3%. So it’s very clear that Americans can have wildly inaccurate perceptions about reality. Why are Americans so wrong? I think it’s because they see a lot of gay people in high profile areas, particularly in the entertainment industry.

I thought about this failure to perceive reality when I saw a story about how much profit Americans think that corporations make. My guess was that the average corporation makes about 5-10% profit margin. I know this because I used to buy and sell stocks regularly and that’s one of the numbers I would look at. Most Americans own stocks, so I thought they most Americans would know the number as well. But it turns out that American perceptions of corporate profits are wildly off the mark.

Check out this article from the prestigious American Enterprise Institute:

When a random sample of American adults were asked the question “Just a rough guess, what percent profit on each dollar of sales do you think the average company makes after taxes?” for the Reason-Rupe poll in May 2013, the average response was 36%! That response was very close to historical results from the polling organization ORC International polls for a slightly different, but related question: What percent profit on each dollar of sales do you think the average manufacturer makes after taxes? Responses to that question in 9 different polls between 1971 and 1987 ranged from 28% to 37% and averaged 31.6%.

How do the public’s estimates of corporate profit margins compare to reality? Not surprisingly they are off by a huge margin. According to this NYU Stern database for more than 7,000 US companies (updated in January 2018) in many different industries, the average profit margin is 7.9% for all companies and 6.9% for more than 6,000 companies excluding financials (see chart above).

[…]“Big Oil” companies make a lot of profits, right? Well, that industry (Integrated Oil/Gas) had a below-average profit margin of 5.6% in the most recent period analyzed, and separately, the Production and Exploration Oil/Gas industry is losing money, reflected in a -6.6% profit margin. For the general retail sector, the average profit margin is only 2.3% and for the grocery and food retail industry, it’s even lower at only 1.6%. And evil Walmart only made a 2.1% profit margin in 2017 (first three quarters) which is less than the industry average for general retail, possibly because grocery sales now make up more than half of Walmart’s revenue and profit margins are lower on food than general retail.

Sometimes, the government makes MORE from the sale of goods or services than the company that does ALL the work:

Interestingly, Walmart’s profit margin of 2.1% is actually less than one-third of the 6.5% the average state/local government takes of each dollar of Walmart’s retail sales for sales taxes. Think about it – for every $100 in sales for Walmart, the state/local governments get an average of $6.50 in sales taxes (and as much as $10.12 in Louisiana and $9.45 in Tennessee, see data here), while Walmart gets only $2.10 in after-tax profits!

I think that Americans are getting their false anti-corporation views from listening to the mainstream media. The mainstream media is overwhelmingly leftist according to recent studies of their political donations. I think that the anti-corporate views of the average American comes from their uncritical consumption of mainstream media propaganda. They think they are getting objective news reporting, but what they’re really getting is socialist propaganda.

Here is a short little video that explains more about profit margins, and what would happen if a socialist like Bernie Sanders were put in charge of a corporation:

If you’d like to help with this problem of anti-business economic illiteracy, please watch the video and share it, or share the AEI article, which contains the video. America will be a better country when Americans have accurate, informed beliefs about important issues.

News

Google’s YouTube censors video of national abortion conference speakers

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Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood
Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood

I can’t show you the video any more by embedding a YouTube clip, because YouTube censored the video. YouTube is owned by Google.

The Washington Free Beacon has an article about YouTube’s censorship of the video.

Excerpt:

YouTube has deleted a video that showed Planned Parenthood executives admitting abortion is “killing,” leading pro-life activists to accuse the site of censorship.

[…]The link to the three-minute video now redirects to a message from YouTube, saying, “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s Terms of Service.” It does not elaborate on which terms or condition the video violated, nor does it give a reason why it was taken down. YouTube did not return request for comment.

But the Daily Signal has posted something about the video.

Exerpt:

Lawyers for Center for Medical Progress founder David Daleiden released a new video Thursday that exposes horrifying statements from leaders of the abortion industry during National Abortion Federation conventions in California in 2014 and 2015.

The National Abortion Federation describes itself as “the professional association of abortion providers.” The group says it “exhibits and presents at numerous conferences … about topics related to abortion care.”

The video notes that “Planned Parenthood makes up about 50 percent of [the National Abortion Federation’s] members and leadership.”

The video opens with a Planned Parenthood medical director speaking on a panel about “heads that get stuck” and the “hemorrhages that we manage.”

She is later seen telling a panel: “Given that we might actually both agree that there’s violence in here, ask me why I come to work every day. Let’s just give them all the violence, it’s a person, it’s killing, let’s just give them all that.”

A Planned Parenthood abortionist then complains about how an unborn child “is a tough little object” and “very difficult” to take apart.

A lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union is heard remarking, “When the skull is broken, that’s really sharp” as the crowd laughs about the difficulty of “getting that skull out.”

Another Planned Parenthood official, speaking on a panel, recalls that an “eyeball just fell down into my lap, and that is gross.”  The crowd laughs.

The video shows a procurement manager from StemExpress, which acquires fetal tissue for research, commenting that there are “a lot of [abortion] clinics that we work with that, I mean, it helps them out significantly.”

At another point, a  Planned Parenthood official says of clinics providing tissue from abortions that “the truth is that some might want to do it … to increase their revenues. And we can’t stop them.”

The Daily Signal article notes that California is currently prosecuting the Center for Medical Progress for releasing videos of abortionists explaining in plain English what it is exactly that they do for a living, and how they maximize revenue earned by killing unborn children.

CMP is being defended by the Alliance Defending Freedom.

If abortion were such a wonderful thing, you would think that abortion providers would be anxious to brag to the public about the great work they are doing.

Instead, countries that have legalized abortion have to censor news stories and prosecute nurses and doctors who refuse to perform abortions. Naturally, these nurses and doctors are not allowed to tell their stories or they will face criminal charges.

There is a great push in the United States right now by the abortion profiteers to force pro-life nurses and doctors out of the medical profession.

Wesley J. Smith explains in First Things:

Doctors in the United States cannot be forced to perform abortions or assist suicides. But that may soon change. Bioethicists and other medical elites have launched a frontal assault against doctors seeking to practice their professions under the values established by the Hippocratic Oath. The campaign’s goal? To force doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and others in the health field who hold pro-life or orthodox religious views to choose between their careers and their convictions.

Ethics opinions, legislation, and court filings seeking to deny “medical conscience” have proliferated as journals, legislative bodies, and the courts have taken up the cause. In the last year, these efforts have moved from the relative hinterlands of professional discussions into the center of establishment medical discourse. Most recently, preeminent bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel—one of Obamacare’s principal architects—coauthored with Ronit Y. Stahl an attack on medical conscience in the New England Journal of Medicine, perhaps the world’s most prestigious medical journal. When advocacy of this kind is published by the NEJM, it is time to sound the air raid sirens.

Naturally, in countries with single payer socialist medicine, that effort is much further along. Canada, for example, has been prosecuting pro-life nurses and doctors for decades. In a signle-payer system run by the secular left, there just is no room for conscience, much as there was no room for Germans who wanted to abstain from killing innocent Jews in Nazi Germany. When you are in a single payer health care system, you have to kill or be prosecuted for listening to your conscience.

Here’s an article about it from Evolution News:

Ontario, Canada, has passed a law formally legalizing lethal injection euthanasia. And it will force all provincial doctors to be complicit by either doing the deed themselves to all legally qualified patients who request to be killed, or by tasking them with procuring a death doctor.

From the website of the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (my emphasis):

In Ontario, health regulatory colleges are responsible for regulating their respective professions in the public interest. In doing so, colleges may establish policies and standards that their members must comply with, including policies and standards regarding medical assistance in dying.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario requires that when physicians are unwilling to provide certain elements of care for reasons of conscience or religion, an effective referral to another health-care provider must be provided to the patient. An effective referral means “a referral made in good faith, to a non-objecting, available, and accessible physician, other health-care professional, or agency”.

Think about this. Three years ago, it would have been a felony for doctors to kill patients, potentially landing them in prison.

Now, refusing to participate in homicide could cost them their medical licenses.

Single payer countries are very supportive of killing the elderly, since this reduces health care costs and allows them to have more health care money to buy votes by providing things that leftists want with taxpayer money, e.g. free sex-reassignment surgery, free contraceptives, free drug injection clinics for people addicted to illegal drugs, free breast enlargements, free IVF for unmarried elderly feminists, etc.

I see the effort to censor the CMP videos as part of the attempt to nationalize health care and criminalize dissent from the leftist agenda of deeming certain lives not as valuable as other lives.

 

Commentary

Greed drives the advocacy of organizations on climate change

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Atmospheric temperature measurements though Sept 2015
Atmospheric temperature measurements though Sept 2015

This article from the The Stream is helpful.

Excerpt:

Global warming alarmism is big business. On one side you have Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, Environmental Defense Fund, The Climate Project and dozens upon dozens of other non-governmental organizations who solicit hundreds of millions from private donors and from government, and who in turn award lucrative grants to further their agenda.

You also have the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health, the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture, both Houses of Congress and many more government agencies, spraying global warming money at anything that moves and at staggering rates — billions of dollars.

And then you also have every major and minor university — with contributions from every department, from Critical Literature Theory to Women’s Studies — all with their hands out and eager to provide the support Greenpeace, the government and others desire. Add to that another two or three dozen think tanks which are also sniffing for grants or which support government intervention to do the impossible and stop the earth’s climate from changing.

Every scientific organization which is dependent on grant money has released a statement saying “something must be done” about global warming. They’re supported, fawned over and feted by just about every news and media agency. And don’t forget the leadership of most major organized religions have their own statements — and their hands out.

We’re not done: we still have to add the dozens of Solyndra-type companies eager to sell the government products, to get “green” subsidies or to support its global-warming agenda. Included in that list are oil companies. Oil companies?

How much money are we talking about? Billions:

Joanne Nova has documented the massive amount of money pouring from government into the pockets of individuals and groups associated with the environment. “The U.S. government has provided over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, foreign aid, and tax breaks.” $79 billion.

Now it’s important to note that when the government hands out money, they are not handing out part of their profits from the sale of useful products and services, the way a private company might. No. What government does is they borrow money from future taxpayers and add it to the national debt. That’s why our national debt has doubled under Obama and will be $20 trillion by the time he leaves office in January 2017. So, government is busy manufacturing support for government intervention and regulation of businesses and individuals using money that will be taken from future job creators and taxpayers.

Would you like to have your money back so you can support causest that you care about instead of global warming socialism? So would I. But that’s why people ought to support slimming down government and letting it only perform those minimalist duties that are laid out for it in the Constitution.