Memo to Business Week: Cheap Fuel...GOOD (omg...)

Memo to Business Week:

Cheap Fuel GOOD, Expensive Fuel BAD
....omg.....

Business Week trumpets "Should Oil Be Cheap?" on their July 23rd cover, and you have to wonder if the inmates have indeed stormed the front office and taken over the asylum. John Carey writes: "(e)xpensive energy is a powerful medicine. It may hurt when taken, but it brings long-term cures for a host of ills."

Carey's laughable take on high oil prices is thinly veiled in economics, and heavily smeared with the politics of big government and market manipulation, all, he writes, to teach consumers to use less. Business Week should be ashamed of ever having run such a piece as Carey's. His spurious and vague statement that there is "pressure from the left and right" to put a "floor" of taxes under the price of oil borders on science fiction. The pressure from the "right", right now, is to build out our refining capacity, and to drill for more oil. Mr. Carey, are you paying attention? I don't think so.

The fact that a debate about whether we should be strapped for fuel is so ridiculous as to make one wonder if the earth has fallen out of orbit. Business Week, listen up: AMERICA NEEDS MORE OIL REFINERIES. AMERICANS CANNOT AFFORD $10 A GALLON GASOLINE. One political party in this country is onto a solution. The other, like Mr. Carey, seems bent on giving us that painful dose of hurtful medicine that is ever mounting fuel costs due to our inability to process crude into gasoline any faster than our current capacity will allow.

BW, honestly, have you lost your grip? Let me suggest a couple of other covers for your editors: "Should America Be Strong?" "Is It OK To Be A Superpower?" "Is The First Amendment Relevant Anymore?" "Is Family Really Important?"

While BW and the Democrats wonder about "whether" oil should be cheap, Republicans are getting serious about becoming the voice for the small guy, and molding the GOP into the Party of Energy Independence, as Sean Hannity has been recommending for months. While traveling with my daughter to visit colleges, I saw a video clip of House Republicans decrying Speaker Pelosi's refusal to allow discussion on fuel costs to come to the floor, and was thrilled to see my own Representative Scott Garrett talking about hearing us and wanting to help us get lower gasoline prices, and even gave an email address of painatthepump@house.gov.

There is no question that the Republican Party is answering the call on this issue, while the Democratic leadership of Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and the blundering Barack Obama, refuse to lead. (Hey, Senator Obama, can I see that tire gauge...?)

What a surprise. According to Mark Levin (forgive me on minor errors of recollection), 92% of House Democrats and 98% of Senate Democrats since 1973 have voted AGAINST adding refineries or drilling anywhere in the U.S. for more oil. This is a generation of Democratic Party leadership, and their leadership has spawned a generation of "industrio-phobes", rabidly environmental, who believe that deer and polar bears will stop procreating if they once smell crude oil or sight a derrick. No wonder Senator Obama's answer to the fuel price crisis is that he'd "rather fuel prices had risen more slowly," nor is it mysterious that he would think that checking tires would save more money at the pump "than drilling for oil ever would."

Simple research about Alaskan oil reveals that one major field only produces half of what it could pump south---because, California cannot process any more than that. We need more refineries, and we must begin building them now.

Some simple economics: First, the announcements of adding refinery capacity and of our drilling for more oil domestically will lead to an almost certain immediate downward pressure on crude prices. Futures will be sold short, and the dynamics of the fuel marketplace will begin to shift. If we begin building out our refinery capacity today, in two years or less we can be delivering more gasoline to the pump, and that will sink gasoline prices to pre-2004 levels without a doubt.

So, Business Week, you keep scratching your head and ponder things like "should oil be cheap," "should it hurt when I fall down," and, "should I bandage an open wound?" The Republican Party knows gasoline CAN be cheaper, and WILL be cheaper, if we build more refineries and pump more AMERICAN OIL.

James A. Bridge
www.loudandtrue.blogspot.com
jim@james-bridge.com