Carefully Selected Quotes,
by Ye Editor
... Democrats entered the White House on January 20, 2021, a day that will live in infamy. Biden immediately issued executive orders. He canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and issued severe green-climate regulations restricting exploring for oil and gas. No more Arctic National Wildlife Refuge drilling.
He announced he is hell-bent on putting the oil-and-gas industry out of business. A week into his presidency, he issued Executive Order 14008: “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad — Putting the Climate Crisis at the Center of United States Foreign Policy and National Security.”
Soon, Pelosi and Biden orchestrated a $1.9 trillion climate-change and social-spending cash infusion into the economy: “The American Plan.”
Looking back, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, has observed: “The American Rescue Plan was a major policy error that haunts us to this day. Biden signed it into law when the economy was growing 6.5%. There was no need to sign that.”
2. Easy Money Ain’t
As trillions in paper money filter in, each person finds his bin laden with cash. People on unemployment receive more for staying home. We feel richer and eager to spend. We’re in the money.
I own a house. I ask $100,000. I have received five purchase offers, all below my asking price. bAs the “American Rescue Plan” is enacted, one couple among the five potential buyers discuss their bid privately and decide, now that they have more cash, to increase their offer. When they call, I share with them that all the others also now have upped their offers because everyone has more cash. I end up selling for $112,000.
My neighbors also are selling. They planned to ask for $100,000 as I initially did, but now learn I sold for $112,000, so they up their ask(ing price).
... Word spreads that “prices are rising, and buyers are paying. It’s a ‘Seller’s Market.’ ... This phenomenon spreads throughout the neighborhood, city, and country.
... This explains partly how government cash infusions fuel inflation. When everyone has more cash, sellers know it — so they charge more. People either have to pay the increases or lose the opportunities to purchase because others with the added cash will pay the increases. Runaway inflation always accompanies runaway government “stimulus” spending.
Meanwhile, at work, employees demand
new raises because they know employers
have more cash. ...
Unlike the Trump years, when “real wages” rose faster than inflation — because those wage hikes were fueled by a rise in productivity and by reduced taxes and regulations — workers now actually fall behind despite a bigger payday. ...
3. Tilting at Windmills and Outta Gas
I also own an oil and gas company. We have several government leases to explore for oil, but I still need permits to drill. I finally get a permit, but I still may not drill because new green-climate regulations stymie me.
Furthermore, a green activist group gets an Obama judge’s injunction restraining my drilling. That litigation will tie me up for three years. When— if — I ever get my permit, defeat the injunction, overcome the regulations, and finally can drill, I must invest the enormous costs of drilling. After all that, my drilling comes up dry. I need to explore another parcel. “Better luck next time.” Maybe.
It is called “exploring” because it is not guaranteed. My bankers have gone bonkers, concerned about lending to me because Biden announces he will destroy my industry. Therefore, because lending to me suddenly entails increased risk, the interest rates on my bridge loans for drilling rise.
I pass those increases to the consumer because, like everyone else, I am in business to feed and house my family, not to run a charity. That is why Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, and Buffet remain rich. Taxes on billionaires? They will pass them to me. Mom-and-Pop will pass them to you at the pump.
So Biden has me drilling less. Also, I need pipelines to transport any oil I find. But he is denying or restricting pipelines. My costs go higher as I seek transport alternatives, and I pass those costs to you, too.
Fortunately, we have devised an amazing new method to extract fossil fuels out of shale by hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”). We inject a mixture of water, chemicals, and sand at intense pressure into the ground to shatter bedrock formations, thereby releasing embedded oil and natural gas.
Fracking means seriously reduced costs to obtain fossil fuel, dramatically less pollution here and throughout our planet as we extract it, and we have enough in our terrain to render us energy independent — with so much excess that we can emerge as the world’s largest net exporter of fossil fuels.
We thus can lower our consumer prices, improve our trade balance, and replace Putin and Iran’s ayatollahs as Europe’s and Japan’s key energy sources. But we still need pipelines. And Biden’s regulations aim at replacing us with windmills and solar panels. All’s well does not end well when there are no wells.
... As we reduce our supplies by over-regulating, we have to import energy from dictatorships like Venezuela and Arab Islamic sheikhdoms. We ultimately need to raid our emergency National Petroleum Preserve, our life-or-death supply if ever facing perilous shortages amid world war. We deplete one-third of the emergency supply — say, 180 million barrels — for the self-imposed shortage we have foisted onto ourselves.
Thus do Biden’s helter-skelter green-energy policies cause prices to rise.
... Those costs and increases ultimately get passed along to you at the pump. Blame Putin for war crimes but not for pump shock. Inflation and soaring energy prices already had erupted in Biden’s first months, fueled by his green agenda, executive orders, and “rescue plan” — well before Putin’s invasion.
AOC majored in economics at Boston University where she graduated with honors. Must have missed class that day."
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