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Posts Tagged → gas prices

December 12th, 2010

Gas up 60 percent since Obama took office

No amount of promotional lip balm is going to make folks feel good about this, but the price of gasoline at the pump is up sixty percent since Barak Obama took office.

When Obama was sworn in, the average US price at the pump was $1.81 per gallon. That was a huge cut from the crisis price of the Bush years, in the summer of 2008, when gas reached over $4.00 a gallon, briefly. But while the price hasn’t crept back to that level yet, the 60 percent increase is starting to cause economic pain.

In the Bush years, the biggest contributing factors to the price hike was unrest in the Middle East over the Iraq War and other political disruptions, as well as out-of-control energy commodity speculation in the market. That’s not entirely the case today.

The Obama Era gas price is inflated for entirely different reasons. First of all, the speculators are back and ruining the market again, but that’s not the biggest cause. The biggest cause at the moment is the weakness of the US dollar.

The weakness of the US dollar is caused by all the out of control spending and borrowing Obama’s indulged in; the US deficit has ballooned under his watch like it has under no other president. Perhaps being forced to work with a Republican-controlled House will be exactly what Obama needs to bring spending under control, allow the economy to rebound, and see prices at the pump deflate once again.

By Craig Hansen • Posted in Democrats • No Comment
March 3rd, 2010

Obama policy: $7/gallon gas

A new Harvard study is that the Obama Administration’s emissions goals for so-called greenhouse gases, which he wants reduced by 14 percent from 2005 levels by the year 2020, would result in boosting the cost of gas to a staggering seven dollars a gallon, more than four dollars above current prices.

The bulk of the increase would arise not from oil shortages, supply chain challenges or even war in the Middle East, but simply from new, confiscatory increases to fuel taxes, sufficient to drive most low- and middle-income Americans out of their cars and force them economically onto transportation.

The naivety of such a policy, however, is readily apparent to anyone who understands market economics, as well as anyone who remembers what nearly $4.00/gallon gas did to our economy in 2008. To wit: we’re still recovering from the economic slow-down it caused.

To make matters worse, gas at seven dollars a gallon would skyrocket inflation to unheard-of levels and force even the middle-class into the category of the “working poor,” effectively killing off most small businesses.

Real bright idea, Obama… go sell insurance quotes to Acorn and leave the country alone, will ya?

By Craig Hansen • Posted in oil prices • No Comment
March 28th, 2007

Is Iran crisis all about OPEC?

The British hostages. The tension between the US and Iran. Rumors of missle exchanges. The constant threats to wipe Israel off the map, and the US with her.

We’ve heard it almost endlessly, but no one’s been looking at a startling possibility: Could all of Ahmadinejad’s saber-rattling toward the West be more about OPEC than about Iran’s national sovereignty?

Follow the money. After enjoying hefty price-per-barrel profits last summer, the OPEC nations have been taking a bit of a bath once prices began to fall last fall. In the last month, though, prices have shot back up in the wake of tensions in the Middle East, most of them caused by Iran’s Ahmadinejad.

Money is about power, and it seems to Wonderful Pessimist that the latest saber-rattling is less about real tensions and more about power supply repair; in other words, Iran wants its power back, and rising gas prices accomplish that, so if you can create some tensions about Middle East peace and cause those prices to go back up, you get your power back.

It makes more sense than one might think, once you take a moment to ponder it.

By Craig Hansen • Posted in Uncategorized • No Comment