Hillary likes to frame her position from a people-vs.-the-big-bad-oil-companies perspective, which is a pretty smart approach to the situation. They are big and they are bad. Some of them are downright disgusting, if you ask me (I'd rather push my car than buy gas at Exxon/Mobil).
Lee Raymond
But, the problem with Hillary's tax holiday is that it offers nothing that would change the behavior of Big Oil. In fact, it would be doing them a terrific favor because gas prices would drop, which would in turn raise demand. They could sell more oil without lowering their prices! It's almost like Hillary has worked out a deal with these guys.
But here's another idea.
[Let me note here that this proposal does not offer any sort of long-term solution to our energy problems (neither does Hillary or McCain's for that matter). It just buys us a bit of time, which I would hope we could use to take drastic and dramatic steps to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.]
So, there's the idea. At this moment, we have 700 million barrels of oil in the US Stretegic Oil Reserve. What would happen if we suddenly unleashed just a million of those barrels on the market? Well, I'm guessing prices would drop precipitously, which would help out the consumer quite a bit. And, there would be the special bonus benefit of screwing over the oil companies, too, because they'd be forced to drop their prices in response to the sudden increase in supply. Ha! Teach them to screw over their customers for the sake of record-breaking profits and hundred-million-dollar golden parachutes.
Then I would go one step further. I would pull our troops out of Iraq. If the oil companies want Iraq's oil, let them use those all record profits to fight their own freakin' oil wars (hell, send Lee Raymond over there to fight), but leave us out of it. We've already spent over half a trillion dollars (and counting) trying to secure their oil supply. Now it's time for them to do their own damn dirty work.
And there you have it. That's my proposal.
2 comments:
I'd vote for you.
I like the idea of screwing over the oil companies and letting them fight in Iraq. Unfortunately, I think that would panic most Americans because we can't imagine doing without oil after a century of using the stuff for everything. (I'm wondering if Norway has given any of this any thought; doesn't look like it.)
That said, implementing your idea may very well be the wake-up call necessary. It may force the oil companies to release or use the patents for alternatives to oil-using ICEs they supposedly have been secretly buying for decades in order to quash competition.
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