Hey Pelosi - Drill This!

I'm pretty close to putting the phrase "We can't drill our way out of this problem" onto Bobby's Official List of Things That Will Get You Immediately Punched In the Face. The shear ignorance of the statement is enough to make me immediately stop listening to whatever the speaker has to say - good or bad.

The simple law of supply and demand dictates that if you increase supply (drill), demand (and therefore price) will drop. Granted, there are varying opinions on exactly how long it will take to get the oil out of the ground and onto the market. The Democrats like to say it will take 10 years and even then it will only drop the price of gas by 1 cent.*

And on the other extreme, I read something the other day that said there's hundreds of wells already drilled in the Gulf that have been capped and are simply awaiting a drilling platform to extract the oil and gas - a process that will only take 6 months to take the product to market. Both positions are moot in the case of this argument.

Because I'm not a student of economics, I'm unable to effectively explain why it doesn't matter how long it would take to get America's oil to market. However, Martin Feldstein, a professor at Harvard and former Reagan economic advisor, can.

The Wall Street Journal featured his Op-Ed a few weeks ago.** Feldstein does a very effective job of explaining exactly how starting the process of drilling here in the states now will have an immediate effect on the price of oil now, absolutely regardless of how long it takes that oil to get on the market.

As much as I would like to think that the Democratic party is nothing more than a ship of fools, the fact of the matter is that there are a number of highly intelligent people who gladly don the jackass pin. They understand the principles set forth by Feldstein, but they simply elect to ignore them for political expediency or because the nut-job wing of the environmental movement has them by the short and curly's. I'll let you determine which is the case.

Established economic theories tells us that drilling will certainly help the current price of gasoline, which is more than I can say about Obama's plan to check every driver's tire pressure.

* - This Democrat talking point drives me crazy. To project the rate of inflation, the demand of oil, and the hundreds of other factors that would go into determining the price of gasoline 10 years from now is pointless. No one knows the answers to those questions, so to extract the price of gasoline from a myriad of unknowns is nothing short of a miracle.

** - Feldstein's article was found via Joel Alicea's column on National Review Online.