By Rick Manning – Lost in the incredibly bungled presidential campaign launch of former Speaker Newt Gingrich and the equally bad week of the now former International Monetary Fund Chairman was the bad week suffered by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).
Reid, who graduated from Utah State University, apparently never met an economics class that he didn’t cut.
While speaking on the Floor of the United States Senate, The Hill newspaper quotes the Majority Leader as saying, “We have to do something about the exorbitant gas prices, and the best way to start with that is to do something about the five big oil companies getting subsidies they don’t need.”
In a nutshell, Econ 101 drop out Harry, is asserting that if you raise the cost of producing a product, the price to the consumer will fall.
The people of both Nevada which elected him again, and the faculty of USU must be so proud, that Harry has discovered a brand new economic theory that no one else had ever stumbled upon before. If only we could make stuff more expensive to produce through higher taxes, consumers will have prices lowered across the board.
To make matters worse for the Majority Leader, the next day he led the Senate to reject legislation that would open up opportunities for oil companies to drill new oil fields and produce more oil and natural gas domestically. Apparently, increasing the supply of domestic oil in the newly discovered world of Reidonomics would drive the price up because everyone knows that if you increase supply prices must go up.
Somewhere in the inside out, upside down world inside the Washington, D.C. beltway this economic theory makes sense, and it is perhaps the best explanation for the head-scratching decisions being made.
Our nation faces $4 a gallon gasoline and yet we remain committed to a policy of being dependent upon oil provided by people who don’t like us very much, even going so far as to have American taxpayers subsidize the development of offshore oil in Brazil by Petrobras.
Somehow it should surprise no one that Obama campaign financier George Soros owns a huge stake in Petrobras, the Brazilian oil giant which is larger than ExxonMobil according to the American Petroleum Institute.
After the Majority Leader set the nation on a path for more foreign energy dependence through his bizarre energy and economic strategy, he turned his sights on the nation’s court system succeeding in getting an Obama appointee confirmed onto the 2nd Court of Appeals who’s apparent best qualification is that she is married to the guy who writes judicial editorials for the New York Times.
While now life-time appointee Susan Carney sits one step below the Supreme Court on the same Court which produced Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Majority Leader Reid lost the most important vote of the week — the vote to bring Obama judicial appointee Goodwin Liu to the floor of the Senate.
Goodwin Liu, a Berkeley Law School Professor, espoused legal views so radical that Senator John McCain led a filibuster against his nomination.
Reid was so enamored by Liu that he praised Liu’s intellect after meeting with him saying, “The court of appeals is where law is made, and we need the finest minds in the world for that.”
Really, Harry? The court of appeals is where law is made?
Based upon Harry’s week of misadventures, clearly we don’t have the finest minds in the world working where laws are actually made — the U.S. Senate.
Rick Manning is the Communications Director of Americans for Limited Government. You can follow Rick on Twitter at @RManning957.
