A big focus in the election now is Obama's call for a windfall profits tax on oil companies.  With that in mind, we wanted to see how much taxes various sectors were already paying the government.  Below we highlight a table of the cash taxes paid in 2007 from the ten sectors that make up the S&P 500.  As shown, Financials paid the most in taxes last year at $88.6 billion, while Energy was second at $69.6 billion.  Financials and Energy paid about 49% of the taxes in the S&P 500, even though their weighting in the index was about 30%.  When looking at taxes paid as a percentage of gross revenues at year end, the Energy sector was the highest at 6.37%.  The consumer sectors, Industrials, Telecom and Tech have the lowest taxes paid as a percentage of revenues.  The '07 taxes paid by the Tech sector made up about 5.8% of total taxes paid, while the sector's weight in the index was 16.7% at year end. 

The Energy sector already seems to be pulling its weight as far as taxes go.  If you're going to tax corporations even more and give the money to US citizens, it's probably fair to tax all sectors equally and not just Energy.  But fairness and windfall profit taxes don't really go together in the first place.