You would figure that The Holy Order of the Socialist Saviors Of The Poor who are always demanding low-cost shit and increased wages, would be happy to see that an item so important as oil to go down in price. It is not the same for a poor family to spend $60 in gas when they can spend only $30 for their regular transportation. And I won’t even get into the cheap energy resulting in lower production costs and lower prices on items.
And I thought the Socialists absolutely hated the idea of a small group of industrialists fixing the price of a consumer product to an unnaturally high price just to make a profit.
I wonder why the sudden change. Oh well, back to reality.
Yeah, like the Saudis ever did what we wanted with respect to oil production or pricing. The only time I can recall that the Saudis increased oil production was to replace lost production when Iraq invaded Kuwait. That was less in response to our request, but more of a survival move to keep European nations on their side during the war.
The local socialists just signed a $15/hr min wage hike while at the same time are pushing a 2.1 cent per mile driving tax (in lieu of the gas tax, right, sure it will go away) and a ‘progressive’ income tax that would actually increase taxes on the poor/working/middle class by 3x and 50% avg. respectively.
I drive 90 miles a day to/from work. W/ my gas mileage, I would pay 5x more in taxes (roughly $8/month to $40) and the last ‘progressive’ tax scheme would have cost me about and additional $300/yr. (after the last $500/yr jump a few years ago). Then w/ all the price increases due to the min wage hike and unlikely getting a compensatory raise, my family will be that much poorer.
But hey “free sh!t” all around.
Er, the Saudis have been cutting back production to drive prices up. It’s US production that’s been at record highs.
Venezuelan production has been in the tank because the government appointed cronies have preferred pocketing money to spending it on luxuries like maintenance.
Also with Venezuelan economy heading down the toilet, those with the knowledge, skill and ability to keep the oil flowing were smart enough to get out before the total collapse and sell their talents where they’d be appreciated, like the US and Canada.
Figured that out all by her(?)self, did s(?)he?
(BTW, serious about the gender question … I wouldn’t want to guess from the profile pic and “Bree” is how a 5th grader spells French cheese.)
Things like this make me wish there was a driving test for the information superhighway.
oil price goes up? CONSPIRACY!!!
oil price goes down? CONSPIRACY!!!
Oil price stays the same? Price fixing!
Brother, it’s cold outside! CLIMATE CHANGE!!!
Brother, it’s hot outside! CLIMATE CHANGE!!!
Socialism doesn’t work? Conspiracy! Sabotage! Wreckers!
This guy is dead wrong but we already knew that. Now I’ll explain why.
I worked in oil when everything took a shit. I suffered a 20% pay cut while legitimately 4 0% of the company was laid off. The us was hurt just as badly as venezula or Saudi Arabia, 70% of us based drilling operations closed or went out of business and took a lot of one out of ancillary oil field services companies and towns that hosted or benefited from drilling operations.
Saudi Arabia and Venezuela were especially hard hit because our is the only thing either of their economies produce. When prices took a shit their revenue stream was impacted and they could only pump more oil onto the market to stay afloat. This led to a huge excess of crude just sitting around in storage or even tankers for months because there was no capacity for it.
This guy also overlooks Russia which is also heavily dependent on oil revenue. All of the above applies to them too.
You also had new drilling technologies that allowed production from oil sands and directional drilling which reopened old well that were thought “dry” that hadn’t produced in decades because all of the easily accessible oil was already extracted. Directional drilling allowed this more difficult and in some cases previously impossible to access our to be accessed cheaply, easily, and accurately. You also have fracking. These technological improvements is what caused the us to become a net exporter and Thur increase the supply. So yes in many ways the us is responsible but it wasn’t by telling Saudi Arabia to flood the market with cheap oil to crash venezula. So it really was really more of a cutting the hand off in spite of the fingers situation except we didn’t do it out of spite…
We we’re doing lots of business with venezuala still selling them the same tech we were using and they were writing checks just fine right up until the end just like everyone else. Same goes for Saudi Arabia Russia and China. All using the same tech largely developed in and sold by companies in the us and Europe.
Finally you have demand on the international market drop off sharply. Sharp decline in Chinese demand is part of this. India played s part as well in having less demand. With demand dropping and supply already outstripping high demand, that’s why prices continued to fall even with China buying all the oil they could, the inevitable happened prices crashed and hurt anyone who relied on oil to make money.
So no it isn’t the sole fault of the us that oil prices crashed if anything I’d say we are responsible for 1/3 of it tops.
Isn’t it like insane though that venezula is the knyl country that didn’t weather it as well because like their sole revenue stream is oil and they had no cash reserves to sustain them unlike the us Saudi Arabia or Russia. Not other mention all the usual “Latin American politics” that pdvsa was involved in and wow it’s so surprising that the singualr nationalized revenue stream of a corrupt socialist country buckled under the weight of economic change /sarc.