I own stocks. So do more than half of America’s households, mostly through mutual funds or pension plans. Many of those portfolios feature a significant investment in shares of oil companies, and the financial stability of retirees (or soon-to-be retirees) and their families depends to a considerable extent on the performance of the U.S. oil industry.

Obviously, the price of gas increased recently, and it’s an understatement to say that consumers are not pleased. But that shouldn’t be allowed to justify a hasty overreaction, like the current effort in Congress to pass a windfall profits tax on oil companies. Because 41 percent of oil company stocks are now held in various forms of retirement accounts, 41 percent of the burden of the tax would fall on investors and pensioners. For their sake, and the sake of the economy in general, cooler heads should prevail.

First, a windfall profits tax would be an unwarranted punishment. In the horrific aftermath of the Gulf Coast hurricanes, a huge portion of our oil refining and distribution capacity was disabled, drivers rushed to the pump and filled up their tanks just to be safe, and the market response to this sudden scarcity was inevitable: Oil prices went up, as did the profits of oil companies.

It was supply and demand in action. Nothing inherently wrong occurred, and there’s every reason to expect that profits will come right back down as oil supplies are fully restored. Indeed, gas prices are already starting to fall on average nationwide (though probably not as quickly as we’d like).

Moreover, penalizing oil companies for supposedly making too much money in the short term would punish all of us in the long term. We’ve been down this road before, and it’s a road to nowhere. In 1980, with the country still reeling from the oil crisis brought on by the OPEC cartel, a windfall profits tax was placed on oil companies after fuel price caps were lifted. It only made a bad situation worse.

The Congressional Research Service found that the windfall profits tax reduced domestic oil production by as much as 6 percent and increased oil imports as much as 16 percent. Paying an extra portion of their profits to the government meant that America’s oil companies had fewer financial resources to reinvest in production, which in turn left us even more dependent on foreign oil than we were before. A scarred but smarter Congress did away with the tax in 1988.

What was a bad idea yesterday is still a bad idea today, especially because so many Americans now have a vested interest in the fortunes of our oil companies. It’s not just conservative Republicans cautioning against the windfall profits tax. According to Robert Shapiro, an undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration, slapping a 50 percent tax on oil produced at prices over $40 a barrel would bring in as little as $9 billion in additional tax revenues over five years.

In exchange for giving Congress a few extra dollars to play with, Shapiro concluded that the tax would cost oil company shareholders upwards of $122 billion a year by nullifying potential increases in stock value and dividends, and remove upwards of $50 billion a year from pension and retirement holdings.

How exactly is that supposed to help anyone?

The windfall profits tax makes less sense the more you think about it. Here’s hoping Congress thinks about it as well, before it makes the same mistake it should have learned from a long time ago.

Chris Bakkie is the director of finance for Harland Financial Solutions.