2 November—Joe Biden is kvetching about excessive oil prices and the excessive profits they’re generating for the oil companies. And, of course, he’s posturing about squeezing a windfall tax out of them.

Joe is absolutely right to kvetch—make that bitch—about oil and gas prices that we peons are paying (but he’s not). He also knows but isn’t saying that releasing—selling to those same oil companies—the millions of barrels of crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is nothing but a ploy to con the voters into believing he’s responsible for lowering prices at the pumps.

In reality, the oil predators are getting a bargain in the crude they can buy from the SPR while taxpayers and bottom-of-the-food-chain consumers are getting a royal screwing. So what else is new? And how long will the emergency-reserve oil last if the SPR keeps losing a million barrels here and a million barrels there?

Did you know that since 2015 our good friends in Congress—both houses, both parties—have been selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help fund the deficit they created and keep on growing? Gee, didn’t Donald Trump and his tight-fisted GOP flunkies take over in 2017?

Getting back to Joe Biden, there are at least two problems with his popular populist posturing. First, while we can argue till doomsday whether the gargantuan petroleum profits are in fact windfall—unexpected good fortune (for the greedy bastards)—just what makes profits “excessive”?

As an aside, windfalls like lottery winnings are fully taxed as ordinary income in the United States. But if you win a lottery or football pool jackpot in the United Kingdom or Canada, among many if not most other countries, you get to keep the whole damn kitty. Would the same apply to oil company “windfall” profits in those countries?

Back to Joe again, assuming the profits of the oil price gougers—including refiners (who have shut down refining capacity to increase demand, cleverly rationalizing the strategy with current events) and every other link in the chain—are making excessive (windfall) profits, they’ll be taxed like any other profits the oil industry makes. That means they’ll be taxed very, very little, thanks to preferences and allowances and other tax-avoiding fiddles out the ying-yang that their lobbyists have bought from Congress.

So after the excessive part of petroleum profits will have been determined arbitrarily, Joe wants to tax it especially punitively. Great. Delightful prospect for the great unwashed. But not only is it a bad idea for any number of economic reasons, he’d never get it through even one house of Congress—even a Democratic one.

Keep two things in mind: First, profiteers and price gougers are merely extreme capitalists making the most of the system we all love; we can call it abusing the system, but isn’t maximizing profit what capitalism is all about? Second, never forget that the United States Capitol has been the biggest whorehouse in America since before it was built . . .