Charles Krauthammer expanded on what he says in the above video in his column today at National Review Online.
Herewith some excerpts (emphasis added):
Yes, of course, presidents have no direct control over gas prices. But the American people know something about this president and his disdain for oil. The “fuel of the past,” he contemptuously calls it. To the American worker who doesn’t commute by government motorcade and is getting fleeced every week at the pump, oil seems very much a fuel of the present — and of the foreseeable future.President Obama incessantly claims energy open-mindedness, insisting that his policy is “all of the above.” Except, of course, for drilling...
But the event that drove home the extent of Obama’s antipathy to nearby, abundant, available oil was his veto of the Keystone pipeline. It gave the game away, because the case for Keystone is so obvious and overwhelming. Vetoing it gratuitously prolongs our dependence on outside powers, kills thousands of shovel-ready jobs, forfeits a major strategic resource to China, damages relations with our closest ally, and sends billions of oil dollars to Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin, and already obscenely wealthy sheiks.
Obama boasts that on his watch, production is up and imports down. True, but truly deceptive. These increases have occurred in spite of his restrictive policies. They are the result of Clinton- and Bush-era permitting. This has been accompanied by a gold rush of natural-gas production resulting from new fracking technology that has nothing at all to do with Obama.
“The American people aren’t stupid,” said Obama on February 23, mocking “Drill, baby, drill.” The “only solution,” he averred in yet another major energy speech last week, is that “we start using less, that lowers the demand, prices come down.” Yet five paragraphs later he claimed that regardless of “how much oil we produce at home . . . that’s not going to set the price of gas worldwide.”
So: Decreasing U.S. demand will lower oil prices, but increasing U.S. supply will not? This is ridiculous. Either both do or neither does. Does Obama read his own speeches?It's been fairly obvious over the past three years that Obama has virtually no understanding of economics. He has now demonstrated that he doesn't even grasp the basic principle of supply and demand.
