Laugh at Liberals Archive for June, 2008
LIBERALS: THE REAL CAUSE BEHIND HIGH GAS PRICES
No blood for oil! Bush, Cheney and Haliburton are evil!
You’ve seen the signs and heard all the protests blaming blaming Bush, Cheney, evil oil companies and Republicans for high gas prices but the real cause of rising gas prices and the faltering U.S. economy are liberals. Liberal agenda’s against refineries, oil exploration and drilling and Democratic votes in congress have taken America out of the oil production business and put it in the oil brokerage business.
Back in May oil industry executives were called before a Senate committee to testify regarding oil profits and the state oil industry and gas prices. It was basically a bunch of politicians trying to appear like they were doing something.
What was intended to be a television commercial for why big oil is bad turned out to be a lesson in world economics for anyone who cared to watch it. Consider some of the following statements made at the hearing.
John Lowe, Executive Vice President of Conoco/Phillips:
Access to resources is severely restricted in the United States and abroad, and the American oil industry must compete with national oil companies who are often much larger and have the support of their governments. We can only compete directly for 7 percent of the world’s available reserves while about 75 percent is completely controlled by national oil companies and is not accessible.
Stephen Simon Senior Vice President -Exxon Mobil
With respect to petroleum reserves, we rank 14th. Government-owned national oil companies dominate the top spots. For an American company to succeed in this competitive landscape and go head to head with huge government-backed national oil companies, it needs financial strength and scale to execute massive complex energy projects requiring enormous long-term investments.
To simply maintain our current operations and make needed capital investments, Exxon Mobil spends nearly $1 billion each day.
A BILLION DOLLARS A DAY! That’s a chunk of change, but don’t be fooled by the phrase, “record profits.” It’s just flat out misleading.
The average price of gas last year was near $2.80. Approximately 58% percent of that was the direct cost of crude oil. 17% went to federal, state and local taxes, 4% represents oil company profits. That figure is relatively unchanged from the previous decade. The point is, if oil companies gave up half of their profits, that’s 50%, the price of a gallon of gas would drop about a 5 cents. If we lowered taxes by half, we could all be saving 23 cents a gallon. John McCains gas tax holiday would save you and me almost 50 cents a gallon. Obama might scoff at that as a gimmick, but my truck has a 23 gallon tank and that would save me about $11 ever fillup, which I have to do at least once or twice a week. That’s real money.
The moratoriums on off-shore drilling, insurmountable restrictions on building refineries and the daily battles that liberals wage against research and exploration for new reserves here in the United States continue to make us dependent on the likes of Hugo Chavez and OPEC for our oil. It doesn’t even make sense!
Don’t blame big oil for high gas prices. Blame liberals and Democrats for the mess were in today.
