Rising Gas Prices and My Solutions if I Were the President

I have decided to post a little bit about today's insane increases in gas prices and what I would do to fix them if I were the President.

The national average for a gallon of gas is approaching $4.  In fact, the average gas price has risen about 86 cents since the end of January.  That's basically a 30% increase in 3 months.

This rapid rise in oil prices may derail an already fragile economic recovery (the reason being that we Americans use oil and oil derivatives in everything: fuel, lipstick, plastics, etc).  I believe it would make sense if our government took strong action now in order to preserve our recent economic gains.  To help our overseers out, I have proposed a list of options that I would take if I were President that would cut gas prices and aid the American people.

First, I would remove the federal fuel tax (which is 18.4 cents per gallon).  Then I would pressure all the states to remove their fuel taxes as well.  These two changes will save almost 50 cents per gallon of gas.

To balance that loss in revenue, I propose a cut in government spending (shutting down operations in Afghanistan would be a good place to start).

There are other ways to ease the pain at the pump.  For example, if I were the President, I would "ask" Iraq to produce more oil.  According to government estimates, Iraq has about 120 billion barrels of oil in known reserves (that amount could run the USA for approximately 15 years or so).  Additionally, Iraq is supposed to have an additional 100 billion barrels in untapped reserves, so we could have the Iraqis produce even more.

Furthermore, I would lift the ban on offshore drilling in the Gulf.  Make no mistake: what happened with BP's oil spill was awful.  But, an accident should not stop us from doing what is best for our nation in terms of energy provision.

Finally, if I were the President, I would get the oil shale industry going.  The USA is supposed to be sitting on 2 trillion barrels of shale oil deposits.  From what I have gathered, it appears the only reason why we are not more invested in this industry is that oil shale processing releases too many pollutants.  However, Royal Dutch Shell has a mining method that heats the oil shale while it is still in the mine and then pumps out the resulting oil and gas which is then refined on the surface.  Right now Shell gets about 3.5 units of energy for every 1 unit of energy it uses to extract the shale oil.  And it's only going to get better.

As I hope you can see, most of these policies are simple, common sense solutions to our troubles.  Hopefully, our leaders will come up with similar approaches to solving our gas issues.