Wow! do morons travel in herds? Apparently they do in the US house of representatives who voted to pass a bill to sue other countries in US courts. While I’m not enamored with Bush (to put it lightly) the white house is vowing to veto it.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080520/ts_nm/congress_opec_dc;_ylt=AqRpQ0TOhAlAwYO2ofZ8tYADW7oF
why is this so stupid?
1) It shows that we are willing to push around the world to try and get our way. Like the evil empire alternate universe star trek episode where they want to force the Organians to give up their di-lithium crystals.
2) At the best it makes us look stupid, demanding and bossy, the stereotype of the ‘ugly american’; at the worst it could increase our oil dependence if it really was successful, (dont’ see how it could be) or cause them to retaliate and REDUCE output. or start a war. WWII with japanese was started over resources issues.
3) this is like trying to legislate prices. it won’t and never has worked. some don’t remember but the US toyed with price controls in the 70’s when they started printing money to a great degree after going off gold standard. Companies simply created new products with higher prices and gave ‘rebates’ for whatever they wanted to so they could slowly raise the price as inflation raged (at double digits)
Look how everyone loves rebates and the hassles of not getting them back today.
4) it ignores the realities of supply and demand. chinese, indians, africans, south americans are using more vehicles and petroleum (with exception of brazil which is using more energy but less petroleum). at the current price any country that doesn’t maximize its output is losing out. they already know that and are pumping full steam anyway.
5) it is as stupid as bush asking the saudis to pump more oil. no one outside of that country has been able to know details of their oil production for 40 years. their huge fields are running dry even tho they deny it. THey are pumping 7 million barrels of ocean water a day into the underground oil fields to boost production and it is still declining. they CAN’T produce anymore, and they wouldn’t want to anyway if it would reduce prices.
6) cheapening oil will simply delay the date of our switching off or reducing greatly our oil use.
7) wild downward swings in prices will discourage US production
8) lets just SUE everyone when price is too high! $100 homes would be nice! and a $50 automobile to go with it! Everyone knows that automakers are holding back and there are only a few big companies! Let’s nationalize GM and sue Korea for not shipping enuf or cheap enuf cars here. See how ridiculous it sounds?
Where do they get these people? are the house of reps so dumb they didn’t take base economics or have common sense?
