Media Uses Price Of Gasoline To Make Political Ads For Democrats

Lee P. Butler

Someone recently asked me a question that perfectly illustrates the problem that exists among the current American electorate and demonstrates just how effective liberal media elitists who control the dissemination of information through their liberal filter have been since President Bush took office.

The question was, “Will the price of gas go back down once this president is out of office and a new president takes over?”

It’s not hard to understand why people are thinking this way with the daily, almost non-stop drumbeat from liberal ‘news’ reports on radio, television, and in print about Bush’s ‘oil buddies’, or Cheney’s ‘connection to oil’, or even recently as the election has moved into high gear that Secretary of State Rice has ‘ties to oil’.

In most cases you will get a quizzical, almost disheartened look in response when you give the emphatic answer ‘no’.

Looking at the reasons for this answer let’s first eliminate what is the most logical and easily identifiable. The President of the United States, no matter who that president is, what family he or she came from or that person’s party affiliation, doesn’t control the price of gasoline in this country.

Just to be clear on this. The president can ‘request’ that certain things be enacted by Congress that would directly effect the price of anything, including gas, but the president does not do this alone.

Price controls were put into place in the Seventies and it created a crisis bigger than the high price of gasoline, by decreasing the incentive for producers to provide more oil to feed the artificially driven price of oil needed to sustain the market which increased the price of gas because of the lack of supply to satisfy the demand.

Which brings us to the biggest factor in the current price of gasoline… supply and demand.

The benchmark for all commodities in a capitalistic economy is set by supply and demand. The market is put into motion by the consumers in that market and the prices for goods and services there fluctuate based on how much supply of a certain thing is available for the existing demand.

This is exactly why liberal progressives hate capitalism, because the market is controlled by the buying habits and entrepreneurial spirit of the individual consumers and producers in that market and not the grandiose platitudes and market manipulation of socialistic minded government types.

Too many people today believe it is better to have the government control the price of everything and in many cases the services that are provided than by allowing individuals to decide how successful they want to be and provide that level of comfort for themselves.

These same liberal progressives also rail against our government protecting us from terrorists who want to kill us and take over our society. Government controlling our ability to buy and sell goods… great, government protecting us… bad!

So unless the new president wants to come in and turn America into a communist country, such as the one run by Hugo Chavez, the framework of free market controls will continue to be the ruling factor in the price of gas at the pump.

Along with supply-and-demand are other mitigating elements. The one that is the most profound and is almost exclusively ‘reported’ on is the price of oil.

It would stand to reason and shouldn’t need to be pointed out that the President of the United States also does not control the price of oil, but too many people actually think he, or his ’oil buddies’, are doing that very thing.

If we invaded Iraq for oil as a large contingent of liberal progressives assert, then we would already control enough oil to prevent market fluctuations from affecting the cost of the commodity for our country, conspiracy theories aside, of course.

According to Donald Klepper-Smith, chief economist of DataCore Partners in New Haven recently explained some of the issues concerning the price of oil on the market. “The bulk of oil's cost -- about $70 a barrel -- is due to increasing global demand, particularly as countries like China and India continue to industrialize,” he said, adding, “Another $20 a barrel, roughly, is caused by investor speculation and hedge fund activity, and the rest is due to the declining value of the U.S. dollar, which makes imports like oil more costly.”

Specifically, that is the larger picture of how the price of oil directly affects the price of gas in this country. Remember, oil is not gas, oil has to be refined to produce gasoline and only a portion of oil becomes gasoline, so the price of oil also affects the price of many other things especially things that are composed of plastic.

But our focus here is on the price of gas and having dealt with the oil side of the equation, we turn to the domestic side. “Oil is not the only factor driving gas prices, which are also rising because refiners are switching from producing winter grade gasoline to the more expensive, but less polluting, version of the fuel they're required to sell during summer. When they do that each spring, they tend to draw supplies down to low levels as they try to sell off all their winter fuel,” reported the Associated Press recently.

The AP also pointed out another factor, “contributing to the price spike, refiners have been cutting back on their production of gasoline, which has a low profit margin. Refiners have to buy the crude they process into gasoline, and soft demand for gas has prevented them from boosting pump prices fast enough to keep up with soaring crude futures.”

What would help curb the ‘soaring crude futures’? Having more crude on the market to compensate demand.

If we were drilling more in our own country, we would essentially boost employment, our economy, provide more oil for this country helping to negate the dependence we have on foreign oil and lessen our burden of competing for that foreign oil with burgeoning countries such as China and India.

The very people who are yelling the loudest today about out dependence on foreign oil, are the same people who have created the problem that is directly responsible for the rise in gasoline prices.

Once President Bush is out of office and the price of gasoline remains high, will the media blame the new president’s ‘oil buddies’ or will they finally realize that they need to start looking for a solution instead of making political attack ads for Democrats?

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Lee P Butler is the Vice Chairman of the Richmond County Republican Party where he resides with his wife and three children and has been published in several outlets including The Richmond County Daily Journal, OpinionEditorials.com, The North Carolina Conservative, The Lasting Joy, and is the owner/publisher of leepbutler.com.

lee@leepbutler.com