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Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Blame Democrats for high gas prices

This is a letter to the editor from The Mercury. This guy makes a lot of sense.

Blame Democrats for high gas prices
To the editor:

I keep hearing how most people are blaming the president and the Republicans for the high fuel prices. If you look at the facts, you’ll see it’s not so.

A few years ago, the president backed an energy bill that would have increased domestic energy production including drilling for oil in the ANWR region of Alaska. Environmentalists succeeded in blocking this bill as it failed in the Senate by one vote.

In 2006, the Democrats took over Congress and many of the supporters of domestic oil drilling were defeated. Since that time gas prices have gone up over a dollar a gallon with nothing proposed to stop it.

Most Democrats do not understand that we need to increase the supply of oil in order to bring the price down. Instead they want to put a windfall profits tax on oil companies which was tried by President Jimmy Carter and led to oil shortages and even higher prices.

If Democrats increase their numbers and win the presidency, oil prices will only come down after we go through a major recession which will kill the demand.

DAVID PENNYPACKER
Boyertown

1 comment:

Brian said...

If you look at the facts, you will see that the reason for high gas prices is a very complex issue that has no panacea. We as a public have two options. One is to play the blame game and point fingers. The second is to look at the problems objectively, and formulate long term solutions. For arguments sake let us pursue the first option to see where it leads. We could blame the Chinese or the Indians for increasing global demand. We could blame President Bush for creating instability in the Middle East, and raising U.S. debt. We could blame financial analysts on Wall Street for the financial crisis that contributed to the fall of the dollar, or for speculating on crude prices. We could blame the boomer generation for not doing more to curb oil dependency and pursue alternative energies after the first oil shocks. We could blame Henry Ford for creating a cheap automobile which may have led to such a large inelastic American demand for gasoline. The list can continue.
There are a great amount of people, parties or events to blame. There are a select few with the vision and fortitude to attempt to address the problems at hand. Coming up with a comprehensive energy policy is essential. Just drilling in Alaska, putting a solar panel in front yard, buying a truck that gets 15 mpg instead of 10, or screwing in a better light bulb is not enough. So in the time leading up to November talk to friends, neighbors, and politicians about what they are doing to deal with this issue and vote for the individuals you believe have shown the best judgment.