The Cost of Doing Business

This country runs on gas. That's a fact. While we would love to find an alternative, it just isn't happening. Our current President set out to solve the problem, it was one of his main objectives. To support this statement, here is a quote from his "Person of the Year" interview in Time magazine, December 29, 2008.

[Time] When you look at the economic issues that you ran on in the campaign, does [all the bad financial news] change your priorities about how quickly you’ve got to act on, say, jobs vs. energy?

[President Obama] Fortunately, most of the proposals that we made apply not only to our long-term economic growth but also fit well into what we need to do short term to get the economy back on track. I have talked during the campaign about the need to rebuild our infrastructure, and that obviously gives us an opportunity to create jobs and drive demand at a time when the economy desperately needs jobs and demand. I’ve talked about a tax cut for 95% of working families, and that fits into a stimulus package, and we can get that money out into people’s pockets fairly quickly. I’ve talked about the need for us to contain health-care costs, and it turns out there’s some spending that has to be done on information technology, for example, that we can do fairly swiftly. So there’s no doubt that most of the priorities that I had are ones that will serve our short-term economic needs as well as our long-term economic needs.

The drop in oil prices, I do think, makes the conversation about energy more difficult, not less necessary. More than ever, I think, a wholesale investment in transforming our economy—from retrofitting buildings so that they’re energy-efficient to changing our transportation patterns and thinking about how to rebuild our electricity grid—those are all things that we’re going to need now more than ever. But with people not paying $4 a gallon for gas, it means it drops on their priority list. And that makes the politics of it tougher than it might have been six months ago.

The emphasis in the last paragraph I added to make a point. The pipeline from Canada was recently rejected. That is just one example of the current policies. I found the chart below on an internet source, gasbuddy.com. It shows the average price for gas in the United States between February 2007 and February 2012. I believe it shows a trend that is supported by our current administration. You can draw your own conclusions.

Oh yes, one more thing, here in California the current price is well over $4.00 a gallon and going up. I suppose that makes our President happy.