In early May, the U.S. House of Representatives passed HR 5253, a bill that took square aim at Big Oil and that would, in part, direct the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to define price gouging and then impose stiff civil and criminal penalties-including jail time-on those found to be in violation of the new FTC standards. But is price gouging really going on at the pump? Is the oil and gas industry actually raking in obscene profits? According to Webster's dictionary, profit is the excess of the selling price of goods over their cost. Put another way, it's the margin a company realizes on the sale of its products after all costs are subtracted from its revenue stream. With this in mind, we decided to take a random look at the 2005 net-profit margins of 20 of the most recognizable names among the Fortune 500 across a wide spectrum of industries. What we found will surprise no one in the oil and gas sector. But it might prove informative for those media pundits and politicos in Washington who love to shout "Do the math!" but then appear challenged when it comes to grasping Economics 101. With a bit of tongue-in-cheek, we would have to conclude from our research that there are some hefty fines and hard time ahead for Bill Gates and the gang at Microsoft for daring to flaunt a nearly 31% profit margin last year. That's okay, though. The computer giant should have plenty of refreshment in the Big House when it's joined by Coca-Cola which had the unmitigated gall to realize a 21% margin on its 2005 sales of pop. Helping to relieve their stress will be pharmaceutical giant Pfizer; General Electric, the parent of NBC; and cereal-maker General Mills, which turned in 2005 profit margins of nearly 15.8%, 11.05% and 11.03%, respectively. Next, we get to the giant bad boy of Big Oil: ExxonMobil. The firm sported record revenues last year of $328.2 billion. How dare it! Throw the book at it! Forget about doing the math, which shows the company's earnings were only $36.1 billion against that revenue stream, giving it a relatively unremarkable profit margin of 11.01%. Then there's ConocoPhillips, which wasn't a particularly effective price gouger last year, achieving only an 8.4% profit margin, behind corn-flakes champ Kellogg; Apple Computer; News Corp., the parent of Fox News; and IBM. Also not very good in the oil-price-gouging business in 2005 was Chevron Corp. Its sub-par 7.62% profit margin came in even behind the Mickey-Mouse-like returns of Disney, parent company of ABC; The New York Times, whose net gain wasn't all that fit to print; and Starbucks Corp., whose profit margin could have used an extra shot of latte. The conclusion, on the serious side: the 2005 profit margins of the three major U.S. oils in our 20-company research universe weren't significantly different from the mean net-profit margin for all the companies selected. In fact, those margins were either barely above or 2% to 3% below the mean margin of 10.44% for the group. To those in Congress and cable-television pundits like Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, we say, "Do the math again. Then try to find some other election-year issue that adds up."