Venezuela is a major oil producing nation and unless you missed it that country is a mess. Iran is dealing with “crushing sanctions™” that will expand to other nations who continue to buy their oil as of today. OPEC cut production quotas in January. Why is gas in the US still so cheap?
Excluding California, of course.
Where’s the oil shock? Why no parade of politicians pontificating about Federal interventions or tapping our ‘National oil reserves?’ They are not calling for austerity or pandering to the pains of the little people.
Why is the price of oil relatively speaking so damn stable?
Any single one of those events, Venezuela, Iran, OPEC, might send prices through the roof. And while oil is up $20/bbl from a low in January ($45) after a high in October ($75) the 12-month average is in the mid-sixties. What gives? Shale, gives.
Going back years now I’ve been ranting about what a game-changer shale is. That thing Democrats would use the government to shut down if we let them.
It’s an in-the-ground national reserve that’s not just massive. It can be tapped in short-order. And while the break-even point for this commodity was around $75/bbl in 2014, it’s down to as low as $30 today.
The government had nothing to do with lowering production costs. Private oil companies, most of them small, did that. They invested in people and technology. They cut the cost of doing business in half. The result of that private innovation is a greater degree of stabilization in the price of oil.
It’s easier to ramp up, build inventory, and offset global changes that in year-past created a potential for embargoes and panics. American Shale Oil has changes the oil politics of the world.
We can use sanctions on oil against the world’s leading exporter of global terror and not screw energy prices in the process.
Stable oil affects every sector of the economy. From the price of everything else to jobs to wages to benefits. Stable oil prices, predictable energy costs, help stabilize everything else.
That’s not to say the government/Democrats aren’t trying to make it less stable and more expensive. Taxes, regulations, blocking pipelines, knee-capping new refining capacity. California has done all those things. New Hampshire has done a few of them or tried. The attacks always coming from the left.
For a party that says it works for the little guy (gal, etc.) they do an awful lot to contradict that.
Policy and activism that enable dependence, not just on government but on foreign interests, many hostile to the US. Like them. These act as a tax on low and middle-income Americans. Priorities that empower and enrich our enemies. Things we don’t have to deal with at the moment.
BUt will if we elect enough Democrats or a Democrat president to office.
How about we not do that?
Let’s not give our enemies power over us like that again. For the little people.
