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*JimH* wrote:
wrote in message
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That's:
Bad for Bush
Bad for the US
Bad for boating. :-(
I agree.
And what exactly did Bush have to do with this?
Here you go Jim:
Don't Blame OPEC; Higher Gas Prices Are Almost Entirely Bush's Fault
Dave Lindorff, ILCA Associate Member
What is making oil so expensive is not energy policy or even SUV's,
dangerous as those are for the environment. It's Bush's massive
deficits and his willful destruction of the US dollar that has gas
selling at $2.30 a gallon and rising.
There's been a lot of hand-wringing going on among economists and
politicians, and a lot of fuming at the gas pump by consumers over the
soaring price of oil over the last two years.
Increasingly, concern is being expressed by treasury officials and
economists about the negative impact soaring oil prices and related gas
prices could have on the overall economy. Politicians--especially
Republicans--are also fretting, since the thousands of extra dollars
consumers are now spending on electricity, home heating and gasoline
have, for all but the wealthiest taxpayers, more than cancelled out any
minimal benefits they saw from the president's tax cuts.
What's wrong with this picture?
The focus of all this anger and angst is oil prices. As a result,
everyone is looking at culprits in the wrong place, blaming wasteful
energy use, OPEC production quotas, monopolistic oil companies and/or
conniving oil traders.
In fact the real culprit behind these higher oil prices is the Bush
Administration, which, thanks to its massive deficits and tax
give-aways to the rich and corporations, to its war spending, and to
its failure to combat unprecedented and ever-larger trade deficits, has
been causing the dollar to plunge in value.
Oil is a commodity and it is priced in dollars. If dollars decline in
value, then the price of oil will rise in inverse proportion.
One need only look at Europe to see what this means.
Over the period from February 1, 2003, just before the start of the
Iraq War, when oil prices began to rise in earnest, to Feb. 1, 2005,
the price of a barrel of oil in dollars rose about 30 percent, from
$30.13 a barrel to $42.91 a barrel. But over that same period of time,
the Euro, Europe's new combined currency, rose 21 percent against the
U.S. dollar, from .93 Euros to the dollar in February, 2003 to just .77
to the U.S. dollar in February, 2005.
For Europeans, then, the net rise in oil prices over the two years of
the Iraq War has been just 9 percent, or less than 5 percent per
year--hardly the kind of energy inflation that would cause economic
problems.
And this situation is likely to get only worse. Some Wall Street oil
industry analysts are now predicting that oil could, before too long,
hit $100 a barrel. What they are saying really is that the dollar is
likely to fall in value by 50 percent.
Should that happen, though, the OPEC states would likely at some point
along the way decide that it is ridiculous for them to continue pricing
oil in dollars, since the piles of dollars filling their bank vaults
will be losing value faster than their oil wells are being drained.
At some point, the oil producing states, including Russia and Norway,
will inevitably switch to pricing their oil in a basket of
currencies--a basket that would prominently feature the Euro and
probably the Japanese Yen.
At that point there would be little left to prop up the dollar, and it
could end up becoming little better than a Third World currency.
The above is scary and most likely true except for one point. The current
increase in prices (not the ones cited over the last two years, they are
most likely the result of the dropping value of the dollar) is probably due
to supply/demand issues as China, India and other developing third world
countries make their needs known on the world market for oil.
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