Tag Archives: gas prices

Reading around

02 Friday Dec 2016

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I’m promiscuous – when it comes to what I read, that is. While I’m working my way through newspapers, blogs, etc. I come across occasional nuggets, often buried in larger articles, that, while they don’t deserve to be treated in depth, are still intriguing and bring up a point worth noting. A few examples from the week that has just passed:

  • The New York Times reports that Socialist French President François Hollande has decided to step down. His approval ratings are so low that his candidacy was likely to sink his entire party. Of interest to American Democrats who think that it’s smart to toe the center to center-right line, what brought Hollande down was the “ideological fuzziness” that led him to put financial and business interests before the interests of the folks who elected him. According to the Times, he “campaigned as an old-fashioned Socialist, with threats against finance. Once in office, he quickly veered to giving tax breaks to companies.” It didn’t help that he was squishy even after he changed his focus; he even backed off his business friendly labor “reforms.” Remember this the next time you hear a squish like Claire McCaskill cautioning us about principled socialists like Bernie Sanders who are “too liberal.”
  • A Reuters story reprinted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch quoted automakers who want Donald Trump to repeal Obama administration vehicle efficiency rules. They whined that the rules not only impose costs, but are “out of step with consumer preferences.” Well golly gee. Let’s poison our children with pollution while we destroy the climate, but for God’s sake, don’t let us defy consumer preferences – much less make the jokers pay a little more if they insist on driving climate-destroying, energy hogs everywhere they go. Do these captains of industry know what the word “fatuous” means? And does any one think “fatuous” should drive energy policy?
  • And speaking of energy hogs, stop and think about what cheap gas has done for us. Business Insider reports that SUV’s and pickups are “crushing” the auto market, observing that there “will be a temptation with results like this for automakers to go back to the future and neglect small cars”because “Americans like big cars.”
  • And lest you believe that this re-emergent preference for automotive tanks is anything more than the marriage of misguided conspicuous consumption and cheap fuel, just consider that the largest share of the SUV market is for “luxury” SUVs that are mostly used in town and surburban driving. They aren’t working or rough-country vehicles. Even Jeep is planning to produce a luxury model.

And finally, there’s always the things that I don’t see while I’m reading around, but they’re still there in the background even if they are not always easily perceived – kind of like the Gestalt concept of the shifting figure where the black ground shows two candlesticks while the white ground shows two faces in profile. Today’s winner is a headline message that I haven’t seen, but which was there just the same:

  • Carrier sends 1,300 jobs to Mexico; disregards Donald Trump’s pre-election tantrums and gets a tax giveaway for doing it.

Ask Roy Blunt about gas prices

10 Thursday May 2012

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You know how GOP Senator Roy Blunt’s been going on and on about how high gas prices are going to bring on the end of Western Civilization and it’s all Barack Obama’s personal fault? For a few months recently, it seemed that he couldn’t talk about anything else. He even tried to justify his don’t-let’s-tax-the-rich Buffet rule vote by evoking the bane of high gas prices. When he delivered the GOP weekly remarks in late April, all he could do was gas about the cost of gas, which was so high, he claimed, because Obama “focused on the wrong things” – like the dreaded “economic fairness.”

Well, guess what? Gas prices are falling. They’re falling, just as they rose in the first place, for reasons that have little or nothing to do with direct political intervention. Gas is a commodity. Its cost responds to global market forces and international events such as the relative stability of the Middle East and, in common with other commodities, can be exacerbated by rampant speculation.

Funny fact: the voice of today’s GOP, Fox News, after leading the chorus of Chicken Littles who claimed that the sky was falling because of high fuel prices, now proclaims the lower prices to be equally bad news. Go figure.

Do you think that Media Matters might be on to something when they speculate that Fox is just trying to help out the folks who are really worried about low gas prices – Republican strategists (and, I would add, politicians like Blunt) who “were hoping to reap the political benefits of high gas prices at the polls this year”? Media Matters’ Shauna Theel analyzes Fox’s new line:

Stuart Varney, the Fox Business host pictured at the top, tried to explain the claim that the recent gas price drop might be “BAD,” saying it may be “just a sign of a weakening economy.” The Wall Street Journal reported that one of the reasons for the drop in gas prices was the “softening economies in the U.S. and Europe,” along with easing tensions in Iran and changes in the oil market.

Note that Fox is now raising how worldwide economic factors are affecting gas prices, after spending weeks blaming Obama for the price increase since the president’s inauguration. Fox won’t explain that the extremely low price in January 2009 was a short-lived drop caused by the massive economic recession. In fact, last week on Fox News, Varney explicitly said with a straight face that the price increase since the bottom of the recession had “everything to do with” Obama, but the recent drop in gas prices “has nothing to do with” him.

So does the new Fox position mean that Fox fanboy* Blunt will follow suit? How will he pivot now that he can’t beat the same dead horse over and over any more – at least not in quite the same way. Will he take the way out offered by his Fox News cohort? Will he find some other way to stay the course? Or will he just pretend the topic never came up in the first place?

*Fox fanboy = Republican politician

 

Roy Blunt should listen to George Will

27 Monday Feb 2012

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Today GOP Senator Roy Blunt’s latest, typically sclerotic, effort at political jujitsu, a missive with the subject line “skyrocketing gas prices,” popped into my email box (it’s also available online here). Blunt, who has always reciprocated the affection that the fossil fuel industry has demonstrated for him via big chunks of campaign change, claims that the President has some how appropriated his own “”all-of-the-above” energy strategy – although Blunt’s actual proposals have been pretty short on “all” and long on “drill.” Alas, Roy laments, the president just doesn’t know how to go about achieving that goal. The proof of that contention, Roy claims, is demonstrated by the aforementioned “skyrocketing” prices:

During the three years since the president took office, gas prices have doubled from $1.85 to $3.59 per gallon — meeting his prediction that fuel prices would “necessarily skyrocket” under his administration’s policies.

With no end in sight, families and job creators in Missouri and nationwide are bracing for the prospect of paying $4 a gallon for gas by this summer.

What’s wrong with this? It is, to hear Blunt’s fellow conservative, George Will tell it, “preposterous”:

Blunt’s right that gas prices are higher than when George Bush left office in 2009, but the reason isn’t because Bush’s policies were better. It’s just a simple economic fact that energy prices  plummet when the economy tanks and ol’ George did a real number on the economy. Speaking of a recent downturn in gas prices, economics professor Jerry McElroy observed:

So goes the economy, so goes the price of oil, […] When the economy is booming, then the price of oil is rising – and vice versa, as we see today.

The bad news is that greater economic activity spurs demand which fuels speculation which, in turn, raises prices at the pump. Want to know how speculation works? Read this Think Progress report on how such GOP über-supporters as the Koch brothers play the energy markets. Then tell me that the surge in gas prices are the fault of the Obama administration.

The good news is that it’s possible to see the rising cost of gas as one more of several recent indications that the economy is, indeed, improving. And, as far as energy goes, thanks to President Obama’s successful application of the “all-of-the-above” strategy that Senator Blunt wants to take credit for, the United States, as USA Today reports, is:

…. enjoying a mini oil boom. It’s producing more crude oil and, for the first time in decades, has become a net exporter of petroleum products such as jet fuel, heating oil and gasoline.

None of this, of course, would be of interest to Senator Blunt, who, like the current crop of GOP presidential contenders, seems to have little interest in the way things actually work in the real world. All of which obviously leaves conservatives who, like George Will, still retain some small shred of integrity, grinding their teeth in frustration.