All right...a few things have been rattling around in my head.
So, argument #1 seemed to be "record profits are bad." I hope no one really believes that. Can they be an outcome of bad behavior? Sure. Should we assume that they are? Not without considerably more evidence than that.
So the next argument seems to be that the overall economy isn't doing so well, so it's illogical for ExxonMobil to do well. While there are certainly signs of weakness, we have not even had *one* recessionary quarter yet. Our weakened economy is still *growing*...it's just not growing as fast as it was. So for corporate profits to conitnue to grow (and XOM's net income grew less than 3%...about 2.7% from 2006 to 2007...a new record, yes, but they hardly went out and ran a 3-minute mile). Oh, and it's not like the global GDP is shrinking either...and XOM is a global company.
Then there's the argument about car sales in the U.S. This one is far too simple on multiple levels. a. Just because car sales are down in the U.S. does not mean the overall number of cars is down. What you'd need to know is how many cars are being retired vs. how many are being bought new...haven't seen that stat, but I'd be surprised if our overall number of cars is shrinking. Even if our # of cars is staying static, I'd say we're likely driving more miles overall (with vehicles that really don't seem to be getting markedly better in the fuel efficiency category)...which is what would matter for ExxonMobil profits. Of course, gas consumption in the U.S. is a drop in the bucket for ExxonMobil profits. The portion of XOM's net profit that comes from their "Downstream" business, which includes, among other things, refining motor fuels looks to be something less than 25%. It's hard to tell from their annual report exactly how much of that profit slice is from the U.S., but it looks to me to be far less than half. So to say it doesn't make sense for XOM to have record profits because U.S. new car sales are down makes about as much sense as one of my students telling me they shouldn't fail because they got a good grade on that one homework that was 5-10% of their grade.
So, there's some non-Socratic stuff.
And if you want to educate yourself some about where the profits come from:
http://exxonmobil.com/Corporate/File...te/fo_2006.pdf