[Hostage]

That’s right. Venezuela’s oil is heavy and dirty. It is good for some products which are no longer in high demand.

Saudi Arabia has been relentless in their pursuit to starve new US oil production of market share.

It costs about $6 per bbl to extract oil in S.A. (stick a straw in the sand) versus an average of about $35 per bbl in the US.

A Trump Administration could propose Congress to put a ‘price floor’ in place for S.A. and others that could be set year to year starting at about $35 per bbl. The Saudis would be crushed and the independent American wildcatter could get rich (nothing wrong with that).

A lot of stuck-in-the-past stupid ‘conservatives’ think any such price floor would amount to regulating prices as they bark back to the days of Reagan and the movement towards general deregulation. What they fail to see if that the pendulum swings. In Reagan’s day, deregulation was critically necessary to spur innovation and economic growth. Today the pendulum has swung so far to the opposite side that foreigners are eating our lunch and making us poor. At this end of the cycle, it’s time to put Americans first.

[RayChuang88]

In fact, Venezuelan crude oil is so viscous that it has to be mixed with "sweet" crude oil from other parts of the world in order to turn it into a form that can be loaded into oil tankers. I actually wonder why Venezuela didn't think about running their crude oil through some form of a cat cracker to reduce it to a form that is easily shipped out by tankers.

[ResponseAbility]

***Today the pendulum has swung so far to the opposite side that foreigners are eating our lunch and making us poor***

With a new built in mechanism to raise prices of fossil fuels called the Carbon Tax that was invented here in America by our own Owl Gore. So extracting and using our homegrown oil has another burden that SA oil never had.

[semimojo]

In Reagan’s day, deregulation was critically necessary to spur innovation and economic growth. Today the pendulum has swung so far to the opposite side that foreigners are eating our lunch and making us poor. At this end of the cycle, it’s time to put Americans first.

Right. A Five Year Plan for the New Millennium!!

Sheesh.