Those Nefarious and Evil Oil Speculators

As President Obama launches faux investigations of oil price-fixing (helpful tip for Democrats: pricing is dictated by a phenomenon called 'supply-and-demand', an economic principle that has guided pricing since the dawn of human trading activity), his Chavez-like rhetoric has targeted greedy "speculators".

It turns out that in this matter, like so many others, the President must ignore facts, logic and reason. Because national oil companies control nearly 95% of all petroleum reserves.

It is easy to show that Obama's attack on the oil companies is baseless. To begin with, what do "subsidies" have to do with high gas prices? I assume that by "subsidies" Obama means that there is still some oil company income that the government doesn't tax. But the effect of a tax break is to lower prices, not raise them. On the other hand, the government does raise the price of gasoline, very significantly, by levying massive taxes on gasoline at both the federal and state levels. In fact, the government profits much more from the money you pay at the pump than any American oil company does...

Many people do not realize that the American oil companies are relatively minor producers on the international scene. Because of our restrictive drilling policies, they do not have access to substantial quantities of oil in the ground. They are major refiners, but relatively small producers of crude oil. The largest American oil company, Exxon-Mobil, barely registers in terms of control over supplies of crude oil...

...It is too bad that demagoguery isn't a useful product. If it were, the Obama administration could add materially to our GDP.

That's a hell of a good point.

The kind of horses*** this administration manufactures would prove exceedingly useful in promoting organic gardening, like FLOTUS' "health eatin' garden" at the White House.