Flashback: Obama Wants High Gas Prices

Then Senator Barack Obama, in 2008, on the prospect of $4 gas:

HARWOOD: So could these high prices help us?

Sen. OBAMA: I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment. The fact that this is such a shock to American pocketbooks is not a good thing. But if we take some steps right now to help people make the adjustment, first of all by putting more money into their pockets, but also by encouraging the market to adapt to these new circumstances more quickly, particularly US automakers, then I think ultimately, we can come out of this stronger and have a more efficient energy policy than we do right now.

The man who would become Obama’s energy secretary, Steven Chu, agreed:

“Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” Mr. Chu, who directs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in September.

Gas was about $8 a gallon in Europe when Chu said this. In three short years, gas prices have risen about 92% and threaten to continue rising. Obama and Chu are roughly half way to their goal. It’s halftime in America, indeed.

Now, look at some of the policies this regime has pursued. Note how Obama in the video singles out the US auto industry as needing to “adapt to these new circumstances.” After the bailout/takeover of GM, Obama has ramped subsidies of the Chevy Volt up to $10,000 per car. The Volt has been plagued by safety issues that the government may have covered up, and it’s a tiny car that few but the rich can presently afford. It’s impractical for most American families. The subsidy is our money being pulled out of the free economy, held by the government, and dispensed to pursue the president’s agenda of socially engineering the economy away from proven fuel sources and toward more expensive and less proven sources. He has subsidized Solyndras while the EPA has clamped down hard on coal-fired power plants and we still have not increased our oil refining capacity to meet our needs. The US has an abundance of coal, which thanks to modern technology is a cleaner power source than it was in the past. What we do not have is an abundance of dollars to spend putting more electric cars — which ultimately depend on cheap coal or oil or nuclear power themselves, along with a new infrastructure to support charging them — on the road.

The bottom line is that when fuel prices rise, the price of everything else rises too, and those at the bottom end of the economy are hurt the most. For all his talk of “fairness” and “spreading the wealth around,” this president has pursued his agenda at our expense. Every time you pay more for your daily bread, you’re paying more as a direct result of this president’s pursuit of his pet agenda.