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Comment by aktuel | Hacker News Reader

It is amazing what you can do with oil money.

Maybe more what amazing things you you can achieve for your people when the citizens are the shareholders of the economic benefits of your country’s natural resources?

100%.

How much better would the US or UK or wherever else be if our wealth of natural resources was shared instead of hoarded by private land-owners and SuperMegaCorp?

Norway drills about 1/4 of the barrels we do here in the US, but reaps more than double the revenue into public coffers. ~78% tax rate in Norway vs a published rate of 21% in the US (and a real rate of <10%).

True but even if it was 100% the amount of money per capita would be tiny compared to Norway. Only some of the smaller gulf states are comparable to Norway.

IIUC, USA is ~60x more people than Norway.

Increasing the tax rate by ~8x to match Norway would drop 60x to ~8x. What percent of Norway's per capita is from Oil & Gas? I have to imagine that 10% of that is actually still meaningful for an average American.

Government revenue wouldn’t increase by 8x. First increasing oil production in the US over the last 10-20 years required a massive amount of investment. Shale oil is much more expensive to extract so companies simply would have drilled less if they knew they couldn’t profit as much. Developing new wells is only profitable of oil is above $60-70, in Norway it’s up to 40-50% less.

Norway’s reserves are mostly conventional and much cheaper to exploit and develop.

Secondly even if corporations and their share holders get a much bigger share in the US a significant amount of that money ends up in the federal budget anyway.

So idk maybe 2-3x at best? Which of course is still a lot

I’d apply this to all extractive industry. Not just oil.

When you get a dollar bill, you can actually tell whether it's from oil or not? I can't..

What's really amazing are the lengths by which people justify they cannot have a nice society. It's easy to see, mathematically, the willingness to share has no relation to absolute GDP or where it comes from.

It's public money. I assume the government keeps track.

Way to miss the point. Any government can take any share from economy and redistribute it more fairly. There is nothing specific to oil that makes society more equal.

The argument "but Norway has oil" is so tiring. So what, US has a big tech with huge profits. Why can't you have a UBI from ads? Of course you can.

btw, Norway is the only country in the world which didn't get Dutch disease.

It's super impressive, isn't it!

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

Your linked evidence contradicts you

Nope, “The Economic Effects of North Sea Oil on the Manufacturing Sector” != Dutch d.

Generally building public works becomes quite difficult when you have one dominant sector pushing up wages (oil and gas in this case). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

No, it's amazing what you can do with oil money _that you decide to nationalize the oil industry and use it for the public good_.

The US has plenty of oil money too.

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