Posted on 02/24/2012 4:13:10 AM PST by tobyhill
Gas prices are on the rise, and so like clockwork, a cadre of politicians are now selling the promise of lower prices at the pump.
Newt Gingrich, struggling to regain momentum in the Republican presidential primary, is leading the way, promising to get prices down to $2.50 per gallon.
"I've developed a program for American energy so no future president will ever bow to a Saudi king again and so every American can look forward to $2.50 a gallon gasoline," Gingrich said during his self-introduction at Wednesday's CNN debate.
The promise might garner attention on the campaign trail, but there's little more than snake oil in that rhetorical well.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
” Could you imagine the impact on Medicare and Social Security if we sold our energy to the rest of the world and used the profits from foreign sales to boost those two entitlements?”
What entitles the government to “use the profits” from profits realized by private companies?
With all due respect to Newt this is bigger than a supply & demand problem — at least as far as petroleum and gasoline go. Most of the increase in pump price for gasoline is due to inflation. All commodities are up. If you track the price of gasoline to the price of gold or silver the price for gas has actually dropped.
Now some of this is due to speculation in gold & silver, but it points to the unrestrained spending & borrowing by the federal government as being the crux of the problem. It took Ronald Reagan and Paul Volcker (Fed Chairman at the time) almost 3 years of tight credit policies to kill inflation the last time it got out of control.
Fortunately for Reagan the economy turned in time for his re-election. Until that time his popularity had drifted downward and his re-election numbers looked poor. This is the kind of thing that the next president will be dealing with. There’s no more road to “kick the can” down.
All we need is a president who opens up drilling across the board and the price will fall before the first drop is on the market.
People said the same thing about slavery, so the Republican party was formed to fight it. Maybe we need to form yet another party to fight the modern form of slavery.
One last binge of what?
Tobyhill is obviously one of the "Peak Oil" advocates and ignores all the new discoveries and new methods of drilling that have become available lately. He is saying that if we increase production shortly we would run out of oil and then prices would sky rocket. This attitude totally ignores the facts and relies on the old "The Sky is Falling" theory.
Most likely tobyhill is a greenie and simply thinks he is a conservative or else he is a troll. I think the former, that he is in reality a liberal who actually believes he is a conservative.
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