Logic Of Crazy People

How do you not want to bang your head against the wall when you listen to Bush try to reason with the American people about oil and the price of gas. While I agree it is a dangerous thing to start taxing businesses that are more profitable than others, their should be some way of keeping them honest. Here is a perfect example of the oil doubletalk.

(CNN) -- President Bush on Friday rejected calls to tax oil companies' record profits, but said he expects those companies to re-invest those profits in alternative fuels and new energy technologies.

"The temptation in Washington is to tax everything," Bush said while taking questions from White House reporters. "The answer is for there to be strong reinvestment to make this country more secure from an energy perspective

Again I agree, but when minutes later Bush says this,

"One reason there's tight gasoline supplies is we haven't built any new refineries since the 1970s," the president said.

So this is what he means by reinvesting. So not only have they not been able to come up with renewable energy, they haven't built new refineries. What exactly are the reinvesting in besides their retired executives?

The price of oil is not the problem. Obviously there are more people using oil in the world, India, China and more Americans. It is the price of gas that pisses me off. I have no problem with the market determining the price of oil, but what determines the price of gas? The price of oil is a prediction of things to come, a future price, but we see that the prices at the pump change right away when oil goes up in price. When the price of oil goes down like it did this week, what happens to the price of gas, nothing.

We are not running into shortages of oil, but rather shortages of gas. There is plenty of oil to meet our needs, for now at least, but nothing is done to make sure there is enough gas. So while they are not directly price gouging, they indirectly effect the price of gas by either poor planning or purposely keeping gas supplies low.

Another form of crazy talk is when we hear that the new ethanol regulations are making the price of gas go up. Why then would the gas in Mid-West go up? We have been using gas with ethanol for years. Nothing to change over in the Mid-West.

To me it just seems like the politicians, lobbyists and oil companies are running a racket that would make Tony Soprano jealous. They are trying to back people into corners so we give in to things like ANWR and drilling in the Gulf and other places to CONTINUE and not end our "Addiction" to oil.