Obama's "Plan C" On Oil

First President Obama told us that removing the 5% of the world’s oil supply that was provided by Iran with his “sanctions,” which are for the purpose of stopping Iran from doing something that it isn’t doing anyway, would not affect the price of oil. We all know how that turned out.

So then he went on a campaign against the oil companies and a plan to take away their subsidies because “they are doing very well” with their “record profits” and certainly don’t need those subsidies. Somehow it seems to have gotten through to people that if you raise the cost of doing business for oil companies by raising their tax rates, the price of gasoline is probably not going to go down, because he has had to drop that plan.

So now he’s on “Plan C” which has to do with speculators.

"We can't afford a situation where some speculators can reap millions while millions of American families get the short end of the stick," Obama said in brief remarks in the Rose Garden on Tuesday. "That's not the way the market should work."

Well, perhaps so, but throwing $700 billion at banks who can’t pay off their debts is not the way the market should work, either. Taking the assets and customers of small banks that have gone broke and giving them to big banks which are propped up with government money, making “too big to fail” even bigger, is not the way the market should work. Throwing money at auto manufacturers who have gone bankrupt as a result of their own stupidity is not the way the market should work. Having interest rates set at essentially zero by the Fed for several years is for damn sure not the way the market should work.

The man spends his first three years in office short circuiting and corrupting normal market functionality, and now that it’s reelection time he gets all concerned about "the way the market should work." Fabulous.