High gas prices result of government regulation

To The Daily: How did we let the politicians sucker us into blaming oil companies for high fuel prices?

Big Oil didn’t create the regulations that strangled new refinery construction. It wasn’t Big Oil that devalued the currency by printing too many dollars to cloak outrageous overspending by Congress. Big Oil didn’t use junk science environmentalism to prevent drilling in Alaska or on the Continental Shelf. Big Oil didn’t institute a moratorium on mining oil shale. Big Oil didn’t regulate nuclear power to death with yet more environmental junk science.

Big Oil didn’t increase world demand for oil by building up Third World economies like communist China with dubious “free trade” deals. Big Oil didn’t mandate several dozen blends of gas that complicate gasoline production and transportation, not to mention the ethanol fiasco.

Federal and state governments add an average of 47 cents in fuel taxes to every gallon of gas (53.6 cents for diesel), with which they pretend to maintain the roads. Big Oil explores, analyzes, drills, extracts, refines, transports, and after all that, still manages to sell gas as cheap as bottled water, and does so for a profit around 9 cents a gallon. Out of that profit they then have to pay corporate taxes, and after that, their shareholders get hit again with even more taxes.

We need government to stop “doing something” and just get out of the way. Ronald Reagan said it best: “Government is not the solution to our problems, Government is the problem.”

J. Kennon Ledbetter
Trinity