The Democrats’ Last-Ditch Energy Plan is a Temper Tantrum.

What is wrong with Nancy Pelosi? This is her unhinged little rant on drilling for domestic oil:

This call for drilling in areas that are protected is a hoax, it’s an absolute hoax on the part of the Republicans and this administration…It’s a decoy to punt your attention away from the fact that their policies have produced $4-a-gallon gasoline.”

Yes and if “ifs and buts” were candy and nuts, we’d all have a Merry Christmas, too.

Her tantrum makes no sense. The Republican Party has had little to nothing at all to do with current gasoline prices. They’ve been in the minority and have had every single solution they’ve propose get shot down on the floor or killed in committee. Only the most rabid partisan, or the MSM (but I repeat myself, yes?) could seriously blame this on anyone but the Democratic majority which has watched gas prices go from $2.33 when it took over in January, 2007 to somewhere around $4.10 today. Pelosi’s little foot-stomping poochy lip routine doesn’t hide her abject failure one little bit.

Alas, that’s about all the Democrats have done in the past 18 months. But what do you expect them to do with economic geniuses like this?

“If they [the oil companies] were showing in good faith that they were drilling on some of the 68 million acres they have now, it might change some of our attitudes,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).

Apparently, McCaskill is under the delusion that the oil companies aren’t getting all the oil from their leases they can get because…well, I don’t know. Maybe she believes that these oil companies are waiting for their profit, which is somewhere between 8 and 11 percent, to magically increase. Except it doesn’t work that way.

Oil companies don’t make their money on big profits like the government does. They make their money by selling a lot of oil. If you sell a few million barrels of oil and you only take a little bit of each barrel, you make a whole lot of money. That’s better than taking a lot from each barrel and pricing yourself out of the market because you have to jack up your prices to cover the necessary expenses that getting that oil to market cost you. This isn’t advanced economics, though. That’s they stuff I learned in the first month of Business 101.

The thing is, more oil won’t put a dent in demand. It will bring down prices somewhat, which will cause the oil companies to earn less in profit, by a couple of percentage points, but they’ll be selling even more oil at the lower price which means lots and lots of money for them.

The reason oil companies aren’t drilling on the leases they have is because there either isn’t an appreciable amount of oil there or the oil that is there is hideously expensive to extract. Private companies are not charities, no matter how much the Democrats want them to be. They have shareholders who expect them to make money. Millions of retirement plans and stock portfolios held by people just like you and me and our parents and grandparents depend on the money they make.

But hey, who cares about all that? The Democrats have tantrums to throw.

Other Posts of Interest:

• John McCain, Just As Unserious and Marxist as Obama on Energy
• Democrats Vote to Drive Gas Prices Higher
• Shut Up and Drill!

Tags: Democrats, Energy Policy, Nancy Pelosi

Category: Our New Democratic Overlords, Thinking About Energy