The Solution to Expensive Gas: Make it More Expensive!

Congressional Democrats have been keying into the country’s rising gas prices, attempting to use them as a political issue. Take a look, for example, at Hillary Clinton’s recent speech in Indiana, in which she mentions the cost of gasoline at least three times.

So you’d think they’d be offering policy proposals designed to lower gas prices. But no, according the AP, Senate Democrats are proposing “a temporary windfall profits tax on oil companies and a rollback of $17 billion in oil industry tax breaks as part of an energy package.”

This is, quite simply, nuts. Making it more expensive to produce and distribute gasoline is simply going to make gas prices go even higher. That’s not rocket science, or complex mathematics; it’s basic economics. The two best ways to make something less expensive are to drive down production costs and increase the available supply. Yet it increasingly seems like our country’s liberal politicians don’t care, or don’t know, or are actively opposed to the actual facts of our energy situation. They’re pushing policies that make gas more expensive to produce, and at the same time refusing to enact policies that would increase domestic supply – offshore drilling, exploration in ANWR, etc. It’s pretty blatant doublespeak: Gas prices are too high, they say – and in the same breath propose to make them more expensive.