Gasoline prices are soaring through the stratosphere, and the Federal Trade Commission, which is supposed to be standing up for the consumer, ought to stop playing footsie with the oil companies and take steps to protect the American people.
The drilling idea is spherically senseless - it's senseless from whatever point of view you look at it. It'd take 10 years to bring any oil online, and it would probably go to Japan. It sure wouldn't help gasoline prices here. All the economists say gasoline is still too cheap in the United States anyway. So here we're having this huge debate over offshore drilling that is just straightforward nonsense, which won't surprise you.
Today's gasoline prices are taking a severe toll on Americans' pocketbooks. Consumers are anxious.
If you look - look at - I mean, look at what's going on with your gasoline prices. They're going to go to $5, $6, $7 and we don't have anybody in Washington that calls OPEC and says, 'Fellas, it's time. It's over. You're not going to do it anymore. '
In the richest country in the history of the world, this Obama economy has crushed the middle class. Family income has fallen by $4,000, but health insurance premiums are higher, food prices are higher, utility bills are higher, and gasoline prices have doubled. Today more Americans wake up in poverty than ever before.
We went into a recession in 2008 because of gasoline prices. The bubble burst in housing because people couldn’t pay their mortgages because of $4 a gallon gasoline.
The only way people are going to change their car buying habits, and the only way government will get behind alternatively fueled vehicles, is if gasoline prices continue to go up.
But It doesn't make sense for us to have a continued reliance on a supply of oil where whenever there is unrest in another part of the world, gasoline prices jump up. We need a renewable fuel industry that's more than corn-based, of course, and there are a whole series of great opportunities here.
If the Administration does nothing, high gasoline prices will continue to increasingly burden our economy, taking millions of dollars out of the hands of families and putting it straight into the pockets of OPEC.
People who are running for office mislead the American people by saying that there's a three-point plan or a bumper sticker kind of way of bringing down gasoline prices. The fact of the matter is that nobody can do that. The price of oil is set on the global economy. People who have looked at this closely and hard know that's the case.
Short cycle business are being impacted by credit, and are being impacted by gasoline prices, food, distribution businesses, chemical business.
Along with you, I have witnessed the unfortunate rise in gasoline prices that has accompanied the summer driving season and the more recent spike in prices due to Hurricane Katrina.
