Obama Responsibility for High Gasoline Prices

If Obama had cared about the people's welfare he would have taken the following actions to have greatly reduced the run-up in gasoline prices that are now slowing the growth of the economy and hurting all Americans' standard of living:

1)  Have allowed more drilling off-shore and in the excessive federal land holdings.

2)  Have ended the ethanol blend edicts that add greatly to cost and reduce production.

3)   Have ended the cellulosic ethanol penalties the refineries must pay for not using the cellulosic ethanol which is not commercially produced and available, requiring that the cost of the penalties be passed on to consumers.

4)  Have allowed the building of the Keystone XL Pipeline early in his administration so it would be delivering oil from Alberta, North Dakota, and Montana to oil refineries in the US and to the central oil pipeline hub in Cushing, OK, thus bringing down gasoline prices.

5)  Have made it easier to build new refinery capacity in the US with reasonable EPA rulings.

6)   Have put more effort into getting Iraqi oil production up and into world markets.

7)  Have avoided threatening oil and gas companies with higher taxes and punitive government actions thus frightening them (and their credit sources) from investing more in US production of oil and finished petroleum products.

8)  Have not issued threats against the use of fossil fuels claiming a role in catastrophic AGW by the Obama EPA specifically causing uncertainties in the future demand for oil and gas products.

9)  Have not encouraged those interested in energy production to waste their money and manpower on unreliable and very expensive wind and solar power, thereby deflecting money and interest away from economically useful sources of power.

10)  Have not slowed economic activity in general causing a feedback effect upon the investment put into oil and gas production and the production of products from them since it becomes harder to expect a general growth in demand for these products.

11)  Would not have failed to control Iran's ability to create uncertainty of oil supply from the Middle East.  This is perhaps the least of his failures due to the completely unreasonable nature of the Iranian regime, but he surely might have done a better job here.

12)  Would not have flooded the economy with printed money, causing the value of the dollar to fall with respect to the value of the imported oil commodity.  While the responsibility is shared with the Federal Reserve, the heavy deficit spending largely forced the Federal Reserve to print money.

When Obama tries to make it appear that none of this is his fault, he is making a huge lie. In addition, his radical environmentalist allies have a very long track record of responsibility for harming US oil and gas production and the production of their products.  We can count on Obama to find many ways to use the suffering of the people caused by these high prices as justification for still more governmental controls over their lives and over all economic activity.