Are you paying more for gas than you were four years ago? The answer should be a yes, unless you prefer to bike or walk everywhere. There is no doubt that there is a great deal of frustration, when you are shelling $100 to fill up your SUV (or gasp…$45 to fill up your supposedly fuel efficient car), and it appears that Congress and President Obama does not want to address the situation at hand.
Gas prices have skyrocketed with the national average hitting $3.50 a gallon before the summer travel season. The prices have also jumped $1.59 more per gallon from the time Obama became President.
I guess we could have seen this coming four years ago, when then-Presidential Candidate Obama was on the campaign trail criticizing President George W. Bush for his support on offshore drilling and that it would not lower gas prices. Since Obama’s election, he has done everything to stand in the way of production. According to an op-ed that appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Obama has slowed the process of granting offshore drilling permits, killing the Keystone XL pipeline, and has placed more regulations on the energy industry.
Additionally, the President’s advisors have turned a blind eye to the rising gas costs and its effects on the economy. David Harsanyi recently wrote in a Reason Magazine op-ed that Democrats have been hell bent on not utilizing our own natural resources, rather they are relying on a European model that would only destroy our economy.
If Democrats had their way, after all, we would be enjoying the economic results of cap-and-trade policy these days—a program designed to increase the cost of energy by creating false demand in a fabricated market. As the theory goes, if you inflate the price of fossil fuels, the barbarians might finally start putting thought into how peat moss might be able to power a toaster.
In 2008, Steven Chu, Obama’s (and, sadly, our own) future secretary of energy (sic) lamented, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” The president, when asked whether he thought $4-a-gallon gas prices were good for the American economy, said, “I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment.”
The problem, in the end, is the fact that rising fuel prices are killing the economy. Since Obama killed the Keystone XL pipeline, he not only killed potential jobs, but he ensured the fact that Americans would not have access to an oil supply that would have the equivalent to a third of Iran’s oil exports.
For a President who is so focused on turning the economy around, you would think he would want to address the energy crisis as one of his re-election platforms.