And Why Do You Suppose Energy Prices — and Inflation — Now Are Through the Roof? - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
And Why Do You Suppose Energy Prices — and Inflation — Now Are Through the Roof?
by

Energy prices are up 18 percent. Is that high enough to be called “inflation”?

Why do things like this happen? Why do such bad things happen to good people?

It is not about theology or philosophy. Rather, idiots sometimes need to look within themselves to find the roots and seeds of their own demise. Biden is president. Pelosi runs the House. The conservative Republican Trump economy was reversed. Policy changes like those have consequences.

Trump opened limited isolated parts of Alaska to new energy production. No one lives in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The caribou there actually do better amid energy exploration. Trump opened parts of the eastern seaboard. He expanded hydraulic fracturing. He deregulated the energy industry. He OK’d the Keystone XL pipeline. As a result of Trump’s enormously bold and successful energy initiatives, American energy production expanded so much that we reversed course from being a net importer of energy to an energy net exporter.

The Left always likes to talk about how “the science is settled.” (Except when discussing, let’s say, the science that now is settled — but was not yet settled during the Roe v. Wade days — confirming now that human life exists in the womb.) Another settled science is the law of supply and demand. It is science. When the world has only 100 widgets to sell and prices them at one dollar each, but then suddenly the world uncovers 1,000 more widgets to sell, the price goes down. It always goes down because, if the sellers of the first one hundred will not lower their prices, the consumer now can go elsewhere to the sellers of the other thousand. This likewise is one reason why a Picasso or a Rembrandt costs more than, uh, a Hunter Biden — and why art works accelerate even higher in price when the artist dies — because the increasing supply stops. With the artist’s death, that’s all the Rembrandts there ever will be. Even for baseball card collectors, we always knew that the companies issued limited numbers of the Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, and Henry Aaron cards. They increased the value by limiting the supply.

When Biden entered office, he had no idea what was going on, what he was doing. Not because of Alzheimer, but because of Biden. For fifty years in public life, he always has been wrong — except when he plagiarized others, which he did, sometimes further choosing wrongly. He came in and stifled Trump’s energy program. He was so proud: “See what I have done with my executive orders?”

Now the idiots who wanted him as their president see what the other half of us saw before the election: the Democrats would screw up a good thing, would turn the order at the border into chaos, would weaken law enforcement and police backing, would continue exacerbating race relations in a country where there was no institutional race problem, would mess up our foreign standing, and would drive the economy into a mess.

In only the first half year since Biden’s executive orders, gas prices rose more than $1 a gallon, crude oil prices more than doubled, natural gas prices are now close to double. When a fossil fool like Biden fuels an end to fossil fuel, it is facile to fail. That is the science.

We now have half the oil rigs in operation that were drilling one year ago. Entrepreneurs are in business to make money. Therefore, now they leave the oil subterranean for a brighter day when the next conservative Republican directs the economy. Less supply now means higher prices. Economic expansion depends on outside venture capital, investment in research and development. That is true whether discussing Elon Musk’s Tesla, Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, or the latest hi-tech invention. Banks and other energy investors have reduced their capital investments in the energy industry as they watch the Democrats go after oil and gas, while also aiming to increase taxes on investors. Capital accordingly moves overseas and waits to come back home on a brighter day that will come.

Even an Ocasio should consider: If the whole point is to cut down on pollution, how does the earth come out cleaner — whatever that means — if, while America bans the Keystone XL pipeline, the Biden administration greenlights the Nordstream 2 pipeline between Putin Russia and Germany? Or if, in the face of reduced American energy exploration and production, we revert to buying dirty oil from Arab Muslim sheikhdoms that lack anything comparable to our clean-energy rules?

That is what Biden has brought on: huge inflation resulting from a sharply reduced energy supply. As oil and gas costs surge, it costs more to transport food to market, so consumers pay more not only at the gas pump but at the coffee syrup pump. It costs more in electricity and related energy to grow tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce. It costs more to manufacture anything not made exclusively by hand. And then those costs fuel other price increases. Restaurants cost more. Business lunches cost more. Medical supplies cost more. Diagnostic tests cost more. Service providers charge more.

As taxes go up, the people on handouts do not pay directly. Rather, the middle class get squeezed. That squeeze then trickles down, not up. The rich do not pay it because they legitimately, legally, hire brilliant tax attorneys and financial advisors who direct and guide them to alternative legal financial schemes that delay tax consequences for a few years until a more conservative low-tax economic regime comes in. Thus, Warren Buffett supports an Obama by arguing that he feels we need a socialist who will spread the wealth by changing tax laws so that Buffett’s secretary pays less than he does. Then we get eight years of Obama — and, thirteen years later, Buffett still pays less in taxes than does his secretary because Buffett can get the kind of advice she cannot.

So we are at 6.2 percent inflation now, the worst in thirty years. It took Biden and Pelosi only one year to get us there. Gasoline prices are up 49.6 percent from a year ago. Overall prices rose 0.9 percent from September to October, tying June for the biggest one-month increase since the Great Recession. Eggs are up 29 percent, milk up eight percent, existing homes up 16 percent. All predictable.

Next year Republicans can flip the House, less certain whether the Senate can be flipped in light of the Democrats’ half century of targeted voter-replacement efforts in states like Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado. But it is possible that Republicans might take Senate seats in Georgia and Nevada, maybe in Arizona, tougher in New Hampshire now that Sununu has decided not to run, but the flip requires only a net of one. To that end, the GOP will have to hold some seats like those in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Time will tell.

So this is where America now is. Violent crime soaring. Critical Race Theory and transgender bathrooms in the schools. An economy out of control. Foreign policy chaos like the Afghanistan evacuation. Utter anarchy at the Mexican border. America’s troubles today are self-inflicted. Jimmy Carter told us forty years ago that our day had ended. Ronald Reagan then restored morning in America. Biden and Pelosi have brought us back to the Carter crater. The American electorate is somewhat evenly split between fools on the Left and those who helped make America great again on the Right. The great center of independents, suburban moms, and Americanized Hispanics and Asian Americans will decide whether we return again to morning in America or end up mourning for America.

Dov Fischer
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Rabbi Dov Fischer, Esq., is Vice President of the Coalition for Jewish Values (comprising over 2,000 Orthodox rabbis), was adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools for nearly 20 years, and is Rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California. He was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review and clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit before practicing complex civil litigation for a decade at three of America’s most prominent law firms: Jones Day, Akin Gump, and Baker & Hostetler. He likewise has held leadership roles in several national Jewish organizations, including Zionist Organization of America, Rabbinical Council of America, and regional boards of the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation. His writings have appeared in Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Federalist, National Review, the Jerusalem Post, and Israel Hayom. A winner of an American Jurisprudence Award in Professional Legal Ethics, Rabbi Fischer also is the author of two books, including General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine, which covered the Israeli General’s 1980s landmark libel suit. Other writings are collected at www.rabbidov.com.
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