Priming the pump

All three candidates promise to lower petrol prices.

A poll organized by Public Agenda and Foreign Affairs says that six out of ten Americans think that the national security "a great deal" could be helped by reducing energy dependence. Although global warming is a "hot" item these days, the Americans are most worried about putting cheap petrol in their cars.
This means that the immediate political imperative is to get the petrol price down.

From the three president candidates, Hilary Clinton came with the biggest promises.
She wants to suspend the federal petrol tax even as she wants to ban petrol-price “gouging” and go after “speculators” because she thinks that they are driving prices up. Another promise of Clinton is to haul OPEC before the WTO for anti-competitive behaviour.
It is now ofcourse unclear whether much of that is going on anyway. And, if it is, what effect it is having on the oil price.
So the most obvious thing the government could do is to get the petrol taxes down.
On the other hand, when you cut the petrol taxes people will drive more. And when people drive more, they pollute the environment and send more profits to the oil companies.



It seems that the recent "high" petrol prices are not the problem, but the cheap oil price in the past is the problem. People think that those prices were normal prices, but in fact, those prices were very low. The prices of today and tomorrow are quite normal prices. Ofcourse it will be difficult to explain this to the Americans...

SOURCE