It’s A Gassssss…

Gas prices are rising.  A couple months back, someone shoved a statistic in my face that gas has risen 83% since President Obama took office. It seemed hard to believe, especially amid claims in the article (from a conservative website) of the average gas price of $1.87 at the time of President Obama’s inauguration.

But doing research I found…it was true.  Gas prices had risen 83% at the time of the article.  Of course, gas has still not hit the all time high of a $4 average that it hit during the Bush Administration.

Wait-what?  You see, what happened was that all the way until late November of 2008, we saw standard high gas prices like we see right now.  December shows this really weird freefall drop in prices that lasted exactly a month.  After the drop, they started to rise and even out to what they were in the pervious eight years.

Republicans are running around claiming they will reduce gas prices.  They talk about Obama’s policies.  Yet they ignore that our national oil production rose as did our oil exports.  Really.  You would not know that from Republicans.  You would also think that a party so consumed with the rights of businesses and such would understand that producing more oil does not mean we automatically have dibs on it.

Oil companies who lease the land may be producing more oil stateside…but they do not say, “Hey, America, do you want this?  Or can we sell it to someone else?”  It goes right into the world market.

The President has little power over gas prices.  If presidents had that power…don’t you think they would be quick to use it to curry favor with the people?  Imagine the boost Obama would get if he magically knocked gas prices down to $2.50.  And do you really think Bush would not have made sure to get gas prices down if he had the power?  If you want to control oil and lower gas prices?  You have to nationalize the industry…