I applaud them, slightly!

I want to applaud the politicians in Washington. Now my applause is not the loud thundering applause that the politicians feel they should receive, its more on the level you would hear on the PGA tour.

The moratorium on offshore drilling is soon to be gone. Democrats have conceded defeat and not brought it back up for vote. The way the moratorium goes, every year it has to be voted to continue another year. Well this year with little to no public support for it, and with it being election year, the Democrats have decided to not force it through.

This moratorium is a good start, but only a start. The politicians are spoon feeding this crap that this will fix the problem with gas prices. And the lemmings of this population believe it.

But there is more that will have to be done in order to see long lasting price reduction.

The first thing to put in place is the pumping of our own supply. Now this will only work IF the extra supply being pumped stays within this country. If the oil being pumped is being sent outside of this country. Then we will see no relief at all. the only thing that would be gained if it is sold outside this country would be tax revenue, and with the way politicians are with money, it would be frivolously spent before it was ever made. Also if we kept everything we pumped, it would cause a surplus on the market due what we were not buying from Opec, thus making the worldwide oil price go down. Not to mention that Opec would not cut production rates seeing as to how their current ally would no longer be helping them prop up the rates. That ally is our government.

The second thing to do is to get it off of the speculative futures market. This will probably bring about the biggest drop in fuel prices, just by itself. Market analysts predict the gas prices would drop to $2 a gallon on average in 30 days or less just from taking oil off of the futures market.

Thirdly, we must build more refineries. Not just more refineries in the gulf cost areas, but nationwide. Currently the refineries in this country are running around 95-97% capacity. Not much room for error if you ask me. So when a hurricane comes through and damages 10 refineries the other can not bump up production to meet the loss. We need to have refineries running at most 75% capacity. We also need the refineries spread out more, to where if a hurricane hits the gulf of mexico it will not put a large number of refineries at risk. Think about it. If you had numerous refineries along the east and west coasts and a large hurricane hit the texas area and wiped out 1/2 of the refineries (which majority of refineries are located in texas). What would happen? We would be out of gas in an instance with supply not regulating itself for months, even upwards of a year. What would you spend on gas then? Look at the gas rationing era in the 70's, that would be a walk in the park compared to this scenario. So if they are spread out around the country, then a disaster in one area would have minimal effect to the nationwide market.

So this is our next fighting point. We need to fight for more refineries. We need to fight to have the red tape removed from companies building new refineries. We need to fight for the futures market be shut down for oil.

We have to fight now, especially since this was just a election year ploy by the politicians to buy the publics votes, by making it look like they cared for the situation.

Viva Liberty!