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Show Consumer to pay "windfall" tax The windfall profits tax before the U.S. Congress "is not a profits prof-its tax, but a proposal for increasing increas-ing the excise tax that already applies to domestic crude oil revenues," rev-enues," a Standard Oil Company (Indiana) executive said recently. The size of profits has nothing to do with the windfall tax plan, said Walter Peirson, executive vice president of Standard. "The real questions are how much additional ad-ditional consumer revenue government gov-ernment will absorb and what effect this rakeoff will have on domestic oil production." Under existing law, he pointed out, federal, state, and local governments gov-ernments will already receive 60 per cent of added crude oil revenues rev-enues resulting from decontrol. If oil companies could invest the remaining 40 per cent for new production, "the industry would increase domestic oil production by an estimated four million barrels bar-rels a day in the late 1980s," Peirson predicted. With the tax, he added, the increase could be cut by as much as two million barrels a day. |