All right! Party time! Break out the funny hats and noisemakers! The International Energy Agency (IEA) is releasing 60 million barrels of oil from its emergency reserves!
Emergency reserves? What's the emergency?
The stated emergency is the determination to hold off - notice carefully: hold off - a spike in oil prices that will strain the global economic recovery.
Friends, I hate to always be telling you... there ain't no recovery. What is passing as a recovery are the chewing gum and bailing wire fixes begun by the last administration and accelerated under the current administration. The shell game is not hard to figure out: run up trillions of dollars in debt, increase the money supply, and eventually tap honest hard-working Americans with higher taxes in order to shuffle money already in the economy - and IOUs already in the economy - to corporations too big to fail and a few strategic vote-getting businesses. In turn, these businesses get to throw big money around for a bit until it runs out. A few Americans get to return to work and keep up their mortgages for a bit, and this passes as a "recovery."
So what is the emergency? Liberals losing credibility and votes... and running out of money to buy more. So why not toss out a few emergency supply barrels of oil. Look what it has already done to the price of oil: an overnight drop from about $96 per barrel to about $91 per barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude. On the international market, Brent crude decreased 6.1% to settle at about $107 per barrel.
I can't help but wonder, though, how much liberals must hate seeing markets work. Their backs are against the wall, votes are getting pricey, and they have run out of ideas to fix the economy (ideas that actually work, that is). Gasoline prices, a piece of the economy immediately noticeable to American consumers, are getting unsettlingly high (even though liberals always champion higher gas taxes).
What to do? What to do? Increase supply to ease the price pressures of demand. Simple, classical supply-demand economics. The kind of economics lessons that conservatives explain to liberals every day. The kind of economics that all those smart folks living in the land of left-believe keep telling us don't work. Until they need to buy some more votes, that is. Then they actually do things like lower taxes, cut a little spending, and allow supply to grow to meet demand.
Why, it's almost as if allowing more domestic oil exploration and extraction would have a positive effect on our energy prices. Who'd-a-thunk-it!
Unfortunately, the party won't be lasting long. 60 million barrels are being released internationally and the U.S. alone uses about 20 million barrels per day for just gasoline use.
Poor liberals. Reality rears its ugly head in the land of left-believe yet again.
