Democrats pushing for goverment control of refineries

I heard that the Democrats in congress are pushing for government control of the oil refineries in an effort to help with Gas prices. I just caught parts of this and I don’t have the whole story, but I’m having a hard time understanding how this is going to help with anything. Many Americans are demanding that something is done about the prices and congress really needs to produce some real solutions. I heard Barak Obama say today that lifting the drilling restrictions and allowing us to drill here, drill now, would not help with prices in the near term and it would take 5 years before it affected anything. This floored me. This guy wants to be president and he does not understand basic market theory. Many analysts believe speculators have been one of the main causes of the spike in prices. The reason they are buying futures is because they are hedging bets that gas will be higher when the futures mature. If you give them more supply to look forward to then the future prices are not as attractive.

I’ll do some more reading on this subject and make a better post in this later, but from what I heard privatization of the refineries is not the answer. You think things are screwed up now let the government try to run the Oil business, they can’t even fix social security or any of the other issues we are facing and if they would have done something to combat this threat years ago then we would not be here now.

We definitely need to invest in other forms of energy, but a realist should understand that currently we are an oil driven economy and without that oil we are not going to make it short term. It will take years to rebuild our infrastructure to use something besides oil, but until we can do that then we have to drill the oil we have. Of course government control of the refineries does put us one step closer to a communist state. Perhaps that is what the congress is after.

Welcome back!