Bernie Sanders has been a politician since 1981. He just called your employer a thief. Here's what he actually got wrong.

Bernie posted this Monday on X: "Oil prices in March 2011: $105 a barrel. Gas: $3.51 a gallon. Oil prices today: $105 a barrel. Gas: $4.46 a gallon. Big Oil is using the Iran War to rip off Americans at the gas pump."

His solution: a windfall profits tax. Now.

That $0.95 Didn't Go Into a CEO's Pocket

Since 2019 the United States has lost roughly 1.2 million barrels a day of refining capacity. Philadelphia Energy Solutions. Shell Convent. Phillips 66 Alliance. LyondellBasell Houston. Four California refineries in five years. The last new crude refinery built in this country came online in 1977.

The ones still running are operating with almost no room to spare. When that happens, the margin between a barrel of crude and a gallon of finished fuel at the pump expands. Gas prices climb even when crude doesn't move. That's not greed. That's a system with no slack doing exactly what a system with no slack does.

Then you close the Strait of Hormuz. Shipping routes change overnight. Insurance triples. Refineries built to run specific grades of crude get forced onto less efficient supply. Every inefficiency shows up at the pump. That's where the 95 cents went, Senator.

What the Windfall Profits Tax Actually Does to the Patch

The bill puts a 50% tax on every dollar above the 2025 average price per barrel. At current prices that's every barrel coming out of the ground right now. The rebate it sends back to households: $216 a year for a single filer. About $4 a week.

We already ran this experiment. The 1980 Crude Oil Windfall Profit Tax — the last time Congress passed exactly what Sanders is proposing — was studied after the fact. Domestic production fell up to 4.8%. Import dependence rose up to 13%. The tax was projected to raise $175 billion. It raised $40 billion. Congress repealed it in 1988.

Same structure. Same result. A windfall tax doesn't hurt the executive suite. It kills the capital that funds the next hire. When the industry cut spending 50% between 2014 and 2016, 142,000 oilfield jobs were gone in 18 months.

The 95 cents is in the refinery margin. It's in the insurance premium on a tanker rerouting around the Strait. It was never in anyone's pocket. The people he just called thieves are the same ones keeping this country off foreign oil.