Whether high gas prices at the pump are referred to as a tax is irrelevant. Although high gas prices are not a tax, they may as well be because it is a distinction without a difference. Everyone pays the price regardless of your economic status or family budget.
Under normal circumstances, the president could effectively lower the price of a barrel of crude oil in a matter of minutes. All he has to do is announce and commit this country into becoming an oil producer instead of an oil buyer.
Using his bully pulpit, he can announce an energy policy that actually gets energy.
- Free-up natural gas and oil drilling and exploration
- Call for the rapid approval of the XL Pipeline
- Building of new refineries.
- Stop fining the coal industry out of existence with Cap and Trade.
- Reverse himself on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depot.
All the needed parts to get to energy independence can be announced, and the markets would react.
There is a problem. These are not normal circumstances. We have heard his commitment to reach energy independence before. We have seen his actions doing the opposite. His liberal man-made-global-warming ‘theology’ is calling the shots.
President Obama could hold his press conference on energy independence, a new ‘war,’ if you will, on high energy prices. But his biggest obstacle to him using the bully pulpit on this subject is that no world leader or oil speculator would believe him.
