Common Sense University

Our most recent article (The Great Oil Debate) was an attempt to bring some perspective and sense of reality to the current energy or more specifically, the oil crisis in our country. The essential conclusion was that the blame for the high prices for gasoline does NOT rest with the oil companies, nor are their profits the primary reason for paying $4.00 for a gallon. This is, of course, contrary to what we have been hearing from the media and our elected representatives who have attempted to make us believe that the oil companies and their excessive profits are to blame for this crisis.

As always happens when oil company profits are high, Congress calls the CEO’s of the major oil companies ‘on the carpet’, inviting them to testify under oath before congressional committees to explain their profits and to defend themselves against charges of ‘price fixing’. These kinds of hearings are spectacles in that the representatives attempt to be smarter than the company executives while trying to ask questions they themselves do not even understand and this year, the oil company execs fired back and did not allow themselves to be insulted and cornered as the main culprits behind the high oil and gasoline prices.

And they have to be congratulated for keeping their cool when some questions really bordered on libel. For example, Democrat representative Debbie Wassermann Schultz from Florida asked the CEO of Exxon/Mobil:” I can’t say that there is evidence that you are manipulating the price, but I believe that you probably are. So prove to me that you are not.” Without going into the carefully crafted response to this statement, we here at www.considercommonsense.com cannot understand the people who vote these types of individuals to represent them in Congress.

We firmly believe that it is time to end this unrealistic ‘reality show’ called Congress and we mean both, the House of Representatives and the Senate, all 535 persons! They are obsessed with finding culprits who they can blame for anything that is or appears wrong in America. They are not interested in the truth or in facts, they talk about solutions that are totally wacky and unrealistic. Let’s take one example of their so called ‘solutions: Windfall profits tax. This means that oil company profits can be taxed again when they, the profits, are allegedly too high. Our previous article showed that the profit of oil companies amounted to 15.7 cents per gallon in 2007. Even when increased to current prices, the prices would rise only to 22.4 cents per gallon. O.k., then take their profits and what does it do to the price of a gallon of gas at the pump currently in California? It brings it down from $4.35 to $4.126, big deal! It still is well over $4.00 per gallon.

Now then, Congress, what do you want to do now? Two presidential candidates, Clinton and McCain proposed to eliminate the federal taxes on a gallon of gas for the summer months and that proposal was dead on arrival. No way, can Congress agree to that. So, what did they do? They voted to authorize the Justice Department to sue OPEC to increase oil production! It is impossible for us common sense thinking individuals to comprehend the mindset of these people, led by the Democrat leadership in Congress. The price for a gallon of gas is over $4.00 and the solution as far as the Congressional leadership is concerned, is suing OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. And how soon will that bring us results? What if these countries say: We will stop selling oil to the USA as long as the lawsuit is going on? Will that bring the price of oil down? Do you realize what utter nonsense this is?

Back to reality: The real culprits are sitting in Congress, all 535 of them! They have been sent to Washington D.C. to represent us people and our interests and well-being, but in fact they are harming our interests and are in fact hurting us. Now you might say that this is not fair to some of them in Congress but we cannot differentiate at this time since those individuals are not speaking up loud enough and are simply voting ‘NO’ and think they did their job. We cannot agree with nor accept that, the least they could do is scream loud enough when nonsense is approved in Congress.

Now then, why are we calling Congress the real culprits? The answer is very simple, they are the ones that have voted against any additional exploration for oil in America. Be it in Alaska or the continental shelves in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans or the extraction of shale oil in those vast deposits of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. Congress has been afraid to vote in a plurality in favor of any oil drilling because of the environmentalist movement in our country, nor have there been any new oil refineries built in America for over thirty years. After all, the oil as it comes out of the ground is not refined enough to put into our gas tanks. The only thing that has happened during the past three decades is the expansion of existing oil refineries but that has not been adequate to keep up with the demand. The population in America has grown by 80 million since 1978, an increase of about a third in people and does anybody seriously think that demand does not go up?

Let us demonstrate this with another example: Let us assume that for whatever dumb reason Congress decides that there will be no additional bakeries build in America. This means, the existing ones have to continue to make bread for the general population. While the exiting bakeries can be worked around the clock, there comes a time when bread production is maximized, yet the demand keeps going up and more and more people want to eat bread. Sorry, says Congress, eat something else (can you make the correlation to alternate energy sources?) but we will not allow to increase (refine) more bread production (gasoline). Does this make any sense? Of course not! It is utter nonsense but Congress is the place that got us into this mess, they are the real culprits in this particular crisis and this truth is unfortunately not fully known to the general public. They are the ones that ‘bottle-neck’ this country by forcing us, the electorate, to change our freedoms and lifestyles to what they think it should be. A liberal media has been and is continuing to play along with Congress and shade the facts.

We here at Common Sense Politics think that it will probably take $5 to $6 or even higher prices for a gallon of gas before the general public wakes up and sends stronger messages to Congress. The best one of course would be not re-electing the current representatives and voting for candidates who understand the simple facts of supply and demand and will do things to correct things the way they are right now.

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