Andy, John Galt,
John has a point. To be clear, people aren't saying that Chemicals are performing poorly due to having low prices, because of surpluses.
Rather that the base price/production/consumption/hiring levels, make Chemicals a bad product to produce, even when Chemicals are selling for max price.
Presidents can make very small profits on Chemicals selling at max price.
However, CEO's will always lose money on Chemicals.
There are two main causes for this...
1). Chemials use a lot of Mining Products as inputs, which have had their 'base/max' price increased. Meanwhile 'base/max' price of Chemicals has not kept up.
Proposed Solution.
Reduce the quantity of Mining Products, required by Chemical Corporations per month.
This would bring base profitability of Chemicals in line with other products, while still allowing Mining Products to have a high base/max price.
I very much agree with Daniel, this revenue cost based price is very bad for my CEO and I would be wiling to pay taxes based on profit but not revenue which hurts me a lot.
Chemicals: 
I’ve dumped all my chem corps because of this. It is not possible to turn a profit on them with ceo’s