fossten
Dedicated LVC Member
You forgot to emphasize "force." Fixed it for you.
/runs off to speculate on alcohol stocks
Oil, the REAL Problem.
- Thread starter Calabrio
- Start date
/runs off to speculate on alcohol stocks
SO your in favor of eliminating all gov mandated fuel economy standards then?
Interesting that's the only part you picked out of the whole article.
I see how well the private market forces are dealing with gas prices. A few are making millions and billions, while we all pay for it.
Interesting that's the only part you picked out of the whole article.
I see how well the private market forces are dealing with gas prices. A few are making millions and billions, while we all pay for it.
ford nut
Local nut case
The market will drive fuel standards.
The goverment didn't tell ford to stop the truck line.
The goverment didn't tell ford to stop the truck line.
MonsterMark
Dedicated LVC Member
Let's say I can make 1,000,000 widgits year and I sell all I make.
I sell them for $1 each.
Suddenly, somebody wants 1,100,000 widgits. I don't have the extra 100,000 so the guy offers me $1.20 for each widgit.
Why wouldn't I sell those widgits for $1.20 then.
Supply and Demand. A really basis tenet of economics. There is just enough current supply to get by but not enough future supply to meet future demand. Therefore, the price goes up as people compete for the oil that is currently available.
Simple solution. Increase supply or decrease demand.
fossten
Dedicated LVC Member
Wrong, Joey. We're paying for the incompetence and interference of the last 15 Congresses, not to mention some Presidents INCLUDING Billy Jeff. It just so happens that some speculators are taking advantage of it. LEGALLY.
Please stop hating businesspeople and recognize the true evil here - government looters.
O'Reilly has the focus square on where it needs to be; the speculators. However his solution is absurd, almost as bad as the windfall profit tax. Increasing fuel standards will only hurt the consumer in the short term, and result in crappy cars for quite a while. His solution doesn't fix the problem anyhow, it is more a reflection of his environmental ideology.
What we have is an artificial market of speculators inflating oil prices. That is the problem that needs to be fixed. The CTFC needs to start regulating this again, and regulate it heavily; effectively out of existence as an artificial market powerful enough to inflate prices.
Increasing gas standards is foolish, windfall profit taxes are foolish. At least drilling will have a positive effect, while the other two won't.
Congress needs to do what they are constitutionally mandated to do under Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution and regulate interstate commerce.
fossten
Dedicated LVC Member
Windfall-Profit Nonsense
by John Stossel
Posted 05/28/2008 ET
Updated 05/28/2008 ET
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama want to raise the price of oil, as well as most everything else, and lower the value of the pension and mutual funds that union members and retirees depend on.
Of course, they don't describe their plan that way. Instead, they call for a windfall-profits tax on the oil companies.
But it's the same thing.
Taxing a "windfall" sounds appealing, but stock prices are based on expected profits. Throw a new tax on profits, and retirement portfolios of regular people take a hit.
"Hillary will impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies and use the money to temporarily suspend the 18.4 cent per gallon federal gas tax and the 24.4 cent per gallon diesel tax during the upcoming peak summer driving months," says her website.
"They sure can afford it," she told an audience in Indianapolis.
Whom does she think "they" are?
Obama says: "It isn't right that oil companies are making record profits at a time when ordinary Americans are going into debt. ... That's why we'll put a windfall profits tax on oil companies..."
Taxing "windfalls" is politically rewarding, but in the final analysis, only people pay taxes. When a corporation is taxed, the burden falls on workers (through smaller raises), consumers (through higher prices) and shareholders (through lower stock prices).
Do Clinton and Obama really want to tax these innocent people just to spite oil executives for high profits?
Anyway, what is a "windfall"? Any answer is arbitrary. Obama says it's the profit made off oil that's priced above $80 a barrel. Why not $70? Or $90? Did he pull that number out of a hat?
At least he's honest enough to call his tax a windfall profits "penalty." But why do the companies deserve to be penalized? Have they behaved badly?
It's not their fault that demand for oil skyrocketed because of booming economies in China and India, and that tensions in the Middle East pushed prices up. It's not their fault government regulation keeps them from drilling in promising locations like Alaska and offshore, and harasses them when they want to build new refineries or expand old ones. It's not their fault the dollar has deteriorated dramatically.
Being in the oil business is profitable, but not as profitable as you may think. Last year, average earnings in the industry (net income divided by sales) were 8.3 percent. (They are lower this year.) Other industries have done better. Beverage and tobacco firms had returns of over 19 percent.
Yes, oil company profits have surged as the price of oil rose, but bigger profits are good for America. The vast majority of the money goes not to the pockets of oil executives, but to exploration for new oil. If you take the money away, who is hurt?
We don't have to speculate because we have experience to draw on. "We tried this windfall profits scheme in 1980," The Wall Street Journal writes. "It backfired. The Congressional Research Service found in a 1990 analysis that the tax reduced domestic oil production by 3 (percent) to 6 (percent) ..."
Repeating that would not be a good thing for the harried working families Clinton and Obama claim to champion.
Spiking prices and profits encourage investors to take risks to find more oil, develop oil substitutes and increase efficiency. We don't need a "national energy policy" because we already have one. It's called the free market. When oil prices rose a few years ago, old fields with hard-to-reach oil in Oklahoma were suddenly worth operating.
Economics 101: incentives matter. Now that the price of oil has reached a new high, oil companies and other entrepreneurs have more incentive to find new sources of energy.
Only that -- letting the profit-motive work -- will bring the price of oil down.
Interfering with markets may be good for politicians, but it's bad for everyone else.
by John Stossel
Posted 05/28/2008 ET
Updated 05/28/2008 ET
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama want to raise the price of oil, as well as most everything else, and lower the value of the pension and mutual funds that union members and retirees depend on.
Of course, they don't describe their plan that way. Instead, they call for a windfall-profits tax on the oil companies.
But it's the same thing.
Taxing a "windfall" sounds appealing, but stock prices are based on expected profits. Throw a new tax on profits, and retirement portfolios of regular people take a hit.
"Hillary will impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies and use the money to temporarily suspend the 18.4 cent per gallon federal gas tax and the 24.4 cent per gallon diesel tax during the upcoming peak summer driving months," says her website.
"They sure can afford it," she told an audience in Indianapolis.
Whom does she think "they" are?
Obama says: "It isn't right that oil companies are making record profits at a time when ordinary Americans are going into debt. ... That's why we'll put a windfall profits tax on oil companies..."
Taxing "windfalls" is politically rewarding, but in the final analysis, only people pay taxes. When a corporation is taxed, the burden falls on workers (through smaller raises), consumers (through higher prices) and shareholders (through lower stock prices).
Do Clinton and Obama really want to tax these innocent people just to spite oil executives for high profits?
Anyway, what is a "windfall"? Any answer is arbitrary. Obama says it's the profit made off oil that's priced above $80 a barrel. Why not $70? Or $90? Did he pull that number out of a hat?
At least he's honest enough to call his tax a windfall profits "penalty." But why do the companies deserve to be penalized? Have they behaved badly?
It's not their fault that demand for oil skyrocketed because of booming economies in China and India, and that tensions in the Middle East pushed prices up. It's not their fault government regulation keeps them from drilling in promising locations like Alaska and offshore, and harasses them when they want to build new refineries or expand old ones. It's not their fault the dollar has deteriorated dramatically.
Being in the oil business is profitable, but not as profitable as you may think. Last year, average earnings in the industry (net income divided by sales) were 8.3 percent. (They are lower this year.) Other industries have done better. Beverage and tobacco firms had returns of over 19 percent.
Yes, oil company profits have surged as the price of oil rose, but bigger profits are good for America. The vast majority of the money goes not to the pockets of oil executives, but to exploration for new oil. If you take the money away, who is hurt?
We don't have to speculate because we have experience to draw on. "We tried this windfall profits scheme in 1980," The Wall Street Journal writes. "It backfired. The Congressional Research Service found in a 1990 analysis that the tax reduced domestic oil production by 3 (percent) to 6 (percent) ..."
Repeating that would not be a good thing for the harried working families Clinton and Obama claim to champion.
Spiking prices and profits encourage investors to take risks to find more oil, develop oil substitutes and increase efficiency. We don't need a "national energy policy" because we already have one. It's called the free market. When oil prices rose a few years ago, old fields with hard-to-reach oil in Oklahoma were suddenly worth operating.
Economics 101: incentives matter. Now that the price of oil has reached a new high, oil companies and other entrepreneurs have more incentive to find new sources of energy.
Only that -- letting the profit-motive work -- will bring the price of oil down.
Interfering with markets may be good for politicians, but it's bad for everyone else.
fossten
Dedicated LVC Member
Krauthammer nails this one, and it's loaded with facts.
McCain's Oil Epiphany
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, June 20, 2008; A19
Gas is $4 a gallon. Oil is $135 a barrel and rising. We import two-thirds of our oil, sending hundreds of billions of dollars to the likes of Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. And yet we voluntarily prohibit ourselves from even exploring huge domestic reserves of petroleum and natural gas.
At a time when U.S. crude oil production has fallen 40 percent in the past 25 years, 75 billion barrels of oil have been declared off-limits, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That would be enough to replace every barrel of non-North American imports (oil trade with Canada and Mexico is a net economic and national security plus) for 22 years.
That's nearly a quarter-century of energy independence. The situation is absurd. To which John McCain is responding with a partial fix: Lift the federal ban on Outer Continental Shelf drilling, where a fifth of the off-limits stuff lies.
This is a change for McCain, but circumstances have changed. When the moratorium was imposed in 1982, gasoline was $1.20 and oil was $30 a barrel. Since the moratorium was instituted, we've had two wars in the Middle East, and in between a decade of garrisoning troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE to preserve the peace and keep untold oil riches out of the hands of the most malevolent of our enemies.
Technological conditions have changed as well. We now are able to drill with far more precision and environmental care than a quarter-century ago. We have thousands of rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, yet not even hurricanes Katrina and Rita resulted in spills of any significance.
McCain's problem is that he's only able to go halfway on energy production because he has locked himself into opposition to the other obvious source of domestic oil -- the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
His fastidiousness on this is inexplicable. "I believe that ANWR is a pristine area," he explains. Is it more pristine than the ocean, where he now wants to drill? More pristine than the Arabian Desert from which we daily beg the Saudi princes to pump more oil?
The entire Arctic refuge is one-third the size of the United Kingdom (which includes Scotland and Wales). The drilling site would be one-seventh the size of Manhattan Island. The footprint is tiny. Moreover, forbidding drilling there does not prevent despoliation. It merely exports it. The crude oil we're not getting from the Arctic we import instead from places like the Niger Delta, where millions live and where the resulting pollution and oil spillages poison the lives of many of the world's most wretchedly poor.
Our environmental imperialism does not just redistribute pollution to people who can least afford it. It generally increases the total overall damage because oil extraction in the wealthier and more technologically advanced United States is far more environmentally sensitive.
McCain's unwillingness to include ANWR lacks even political logic. His policy on offshore drilling is a flip-flop from his past positions. Perfectly justified, but a reconsideration nonetheless. If you are going to take the hit for flip-flopping and for offending environmentalists, why go halfway?
The oil crisis handed McCain an unexpected and singularly effective campaign issue. A majority of Americans now favor drilling in the Arctic and offshore. Democrats stand in the way of increased production, just as they did 13 years ago when President Bill Clinton vetoed drilling in ANWR. Domestic oil production would be about 20 percent higher today if the Republican Congress had been allowed to prevail.
As expected and right on cue, Barack Obama reflexively attacked McCain. "His decision to completely change his position" to one that would please the oil industry is "the same Washington politics that has prevented us from achieving energy independence for decades." One can only marvel at Obama's audacity in characterizing McCain's proposal to change our policy as "old politics," while the candidate of "change" adheres rigidly to the no-drilling status quo.
McCain is a lot of things, but the man who opposed ethanol in Iowa -- as Obama shamelessly endorsed the most abysmally stupid of our energy policies -- is no patsy of the energy producers. Americans know that increased production is needed to complement reduced consumption as the only way to get us out from oil shocks, high prices and national security blackmail.
Alas, McCain's proposed reform is only partial. Still better than Obama, however, who refuses to deviate from liberal orthodoxy. But that is the story of his campaign, is it not?
McCain's Oil Epiphany
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, June 20, 2008; A19
Gas is $4 a gallon. Oil is $135 a barrel and rising. We import two-thirds of our oil, sending hundreds of billions of dollars to the likes of Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. And yet we voluntarily prohibit ourselves from even exploring huge domestic reserves of petroleum and natural gas.
At a time when U.S. crude oil production has fallen 40 percent in the past 25 years, 75 billion barrels of oil have been declared off-limits, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That would be enough to replace every barrel of non-North American imports (oil trade with Canada and Mexico is a net economic and national security plus) for 22 years.
That's nearly a quarter-century of energy independence. The situation is absurd. To which John McCain is responding with a partial fix: Lift the federal ban on Outer Continental Shelf drilling, where a fifth of the off-limits stuff lies.
This is a change for McCain, but circumstances have changed. When the moratorium was imposed in 1982, gasoline was $1.20 and oil was $30 a barrel. Since the moratorium was instituted, we've had two wars in the Middle East, and in between a decade of garrisoning troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE to preserve the peace and keep untold oil riches out of the hands of the most malevolent of our enemies.
Technological conditions have changed as well. We now are able to drill with far more precision and environmental care than a quarter-century ago. We have thousands of rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, yet not even hurricanes Katrina and Rita resulted in spills of any significance.
McCain's problem is that he's only able to go halfway on energy production because he has locked himself into opposition to the other obvious source of domestic oil -- the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
His fastidiousness on this is inexplicable. "I believe that ANWR is a pristine area," he explains. Is it more pristine than the ocean, where he now wants to drill? More pristine than the Arabian Desert from which we daily beg the Saudi princes to pump more oil?
The entire Arctic refuge is one-third the size of the United Kingdom (which includes Scotland and Wales). The drilling site would be one-seventh the size of Manhattan Island. The footprint is tiny. Moreover, forbidding drilling there does not prevent despoliation. It merely exports it. The crude oil we're not getting from the Arctic we import instead from places like the Niger Delta, where millions live and where the resulting pollution and oil spillages poison the lives of many of the world's most wretchedly poor.
Our environmental imperialism does not just redistribute pollution to people who can least afford it. It generally increases the total overall damage because oil extraction in the wealthier and more technologically advanced United States is far more environmentally sensitive.
McCain's unwillingness to include ANWR lacks even political logic. His policy on offshore drilling is a flip-flop from his past positions. Perfectly justified, but a reconsideration nonetheless. If you are going to take the hit for flip-flopping and for offending environmentalists, why go halfway?
The oil crisis handed McCain an unexpected and singularly effective campaign issue. A majority of Americans now favor drilling in the Arctic and offshore. Democrats stand in the way of increased production, just as they did 13 years ago when President Bill Clinton vetoed drilling in ANWR. Domestic oil production would be about 20 percent higher today if the Republican Congress had been allowed to prevail.
As expected and right on cue, Barack Obama reflexively attacked McCain. "His decision to completely change his position" to one that would please the oil industry is "the same Washington politics that has prevented us from achieving energy independence for decades." One can only marvel at Obama's audacity in characterizing McCain's proposal to change our policy as "old politics," while the candidate of "change" adheres rigidly to the no-drilling status quo.
McCain is a lot of things, but the man who opposed ethanol in Iowa -- as Obama shamelessly endorsed the most abysmally stupid of our energy policies -- is no patsy of the energy producers. Americans know that increased production is needed to complement reduced consumption as the only way to get us out from oil shocks, high prices and national security blackmail.
Alas, McCain's proposed reform is only partial. Still better than Obama, however, who refuses to deviate from liberal orthodoxy. But that is the story of his campaign, is it not?
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDJhYjQxOWRkNGEyOTk4YTVlNjFiNTdkNjhlZDI1ZmE=&w=MA==
That ‘70s Show
A lot has changed since Barack Obama was 13.
By Jonah Goldberg
You may have noticed that denouncing the “failed policies of the past” has become the official catechism of the Democratic party.
Heck, it wouldn’t surprise me if at DNC headquarters “gesundheit” is out as the polite response to a sneeze and tsk-tsking the rise in nose-tickling particulates thanks to the bankrupt policies of the Bush administration is in.
So, you’d think if everything Bush has done is wrong, then a reversal of his position would be right.
Wrong again. We didn’t hear applause from Democrats this week when President Bush “reversed” his “longstanding position” (in the words of the New York Times) on offshore drilling.
Nearly 30 years ago, Jimmy Carter’s windfall-profits tax kicked in, making domestic oil exploration more difficult and expensive. In 1981, Congress passed a moratorium on offshore drilling that has stayed in place ever since. In 1990, the first President Bush signed an executive order reinforcing the ban on coastal oil exploration. And, until this week, the current President Bush supported the ban.
And yet, no cheers for Bush when he abandoned his failed policy of the last eight years. Instead, Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid sniffed that these were more of the same “old ideas.” Odd.
And when John McCain similarly reversed himself, the Democrats whistled the same tune again.
“John McCain’s plan to simply drill our way out of our energy crisis is the same misguided approach backed by President Bush that has failed our families for too long and only serves to benefit the big oil companies,” declared the Obama campaign.
Now, it’s fair to say that more drilling is the approach President Bush wanted. And it’s even defensible for Obama to call it misguided. But the salient fact is that Bush didn’t get what he wanted because he was constrained by the real failed policies of the past.
Indeed, we constantly hear we can’t drill our way to lower gas prices, but how does anybody know when we haven’t even tried?
Despite enormous improvements in extraction technology, the amount of oil produced domestically in America went down in the last eight years. It went down in the 1990s. It went down in the 1980s. In fact, it’s been trending down since the 1970s, back when Barack Obama’s “new” ideas seemed fresh coming from Jimmy Carter. Today, we produce about as much domestic oil as we did in the late 1940s, even though we keep finding, but not utilizing, more proven reserves.
That hardly sounds like a country that’s been dedicated to “drilling our way” to anything. The issue isn’t just oil. Gas prices largely hinge on refining capacity. But, as John McCain observed this week, “There’s so much regulation of the industry that the last American refinery was built when Jerry Ford was president.”
A lot has changed since Barack Obama was 13. No one knew what an iPod, e-mail address, web browser, CD, DVD, or Post-It Note was. Fax machines were cutting edge, the space shuttle was a pipe dream, and cloning was science fiction. Global cooling, not warming, was the fashionable doomsday scenario.
And yet, we act as if technology has remained frozen since the days when it made sense to “dial” a phone number.
So much for the supposedly failed policies of the past. What of the winning policies of the future?
When they want to seem mainstream, anti-carbon crusaders insist that we must achieve “energy independence” to “end our addiction on Middle Eastern oil.”
This makes it sound like their real motive is common sense or national security. We’re not anti-oil, we just don’t want to fund our enemies. That sounds reasonable, and it is a legitimate position — it’s just not the one they actually hold.
If energy independence were their real goal, not only would oil, coal, and nuclear be on the table, but you’d hear more lamentations about our “addiction” to Canadian oil — a bigger source than Saudi Arabia.
Instead we are treated to an endless stream of intellectual jibber-jabber and nonsensical argy-bargy. We need to be energy independent, but we can’t use the energy sources we have. We need to switch to ethanol fast, but we can’t import cheaper ethanol from Brazil. We must increase gas taxes to wean ourselves from fossil fuels, but when gas prices go up for any other reason, it’s a crisis, even a crime. We’re told we’ll get nowhere drilling our way to independence or lower prices, as if windmills will do the job (stop laughing).
We shouldn’t fight “wars for oil,” but the self-imposed embargo on our own oil makes us even more dependent on the foreign oil we’re allegedly going to war over. And, of course: We’re told to reject the failed policies of the past, when the policies that have failed are the real old ones merely being sold as new.
That ‘70s Show
A lot has changed since Barack Obama was 13.
By Jonah Goldberg
You may have noticed that denouncing the “failed policies of the past” has become the official catechism of the Democratic party.
Heck, it wouldn’t surprise me if at DNC headquarters “gesundheit” is out as the polite response to a sneeze and tsk-tsking the rise in nose-tickling particulates thanks to the bankrupt policies of the Bush administration is in.
So, you’d think if everything Bush has done is wrong, then a reversal of his position would be right.
Wrong again. We didn’t hear applause from Democrats this week when President Bush “reversed” his “longstanding position” (in the words of the New York Times) on offshore drilling.
Nearly 30 years ago, Jimmy Carter’s windfall-profits tax kicked in, making domestic oil exploration more difficult and expensive. In 1981, Congress passed a moratorium on offshore drilling that has stayed in place ever since. In 1990, the first President Bush signed an executive order reinforcing the ban on coastal oil exploration. And, until this week, the current President Bush supported the ban.
And yet, no cheers for Bush when he abandoned his failed policy of the last eight years. Instead, Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid sniffed that these were more of the same “old ideas.” Odd.
And when John McCain similarly reversed himself, the Democrats whistled the same tune again.
“John McCain’s plan to simply drill our way out of our energy crisis is the same misguided approach backed by President Bush that has failed our families for too long and only serves to benefit the big oil companies,” declared the Obama campaign.
Now, it’s fair to say that more drilling is the approach President Bush wanted. And it’s even defensible for Obama to call it misguided. But the salient fact is that Bush didn’t get what he wanted because he was constrained by the real failed policies of the past.
Indeed, we constantly hear we can’t drill our way to lower gas prices, but how does anybody know when we haven’t even tried?
Despite enormous improvements in extraction technology, the amount of oil produced domestically in America went down in the last eight years. It went down in the 1990s. It went down in the 1980s. In fact, it’s been trending down since the 1970s, back when Barack Obama’s “new” ideas seemed fresh coming from Jimmy Carter. Today, we produce about as much domestic oil as we did in the late 1940s, even though we keep finding, but not utilizing, more proven reserves.
That hardly sounds like a country that’s been dedicated to “drilling our way” to anything. The issue isn’t just oil. Gas prices largely hinge on refining capacity. But, as John McCain observed this week, “There’s so much regulation of the industry that the last American refinery was built when Jerry Ford was president.”
A lot has changed since Barack Obama was 13. No one knew what an iPod, e-mail address, web browser, CD, DVD, or Post-It Note was. Fax machines were cutting edge, the space shuttle was a pipe dream, and cloning was science fiction. Global cooling, not warming, was the fashionable doomsday scenario.
And yet, we act as if technology has remained frozen since the days when it made sense to “dial” a phone number.
So much for the supposedly failed policies of the past. What of the winning policies of the future?
When they want to seem mainstream, anti-carbon crusaders insist that we must achieve “energy independence” to “end our addiction on Middle Eastern oil.”
This makes it sound like their real motive is common sense or national security. We’re not anti-oil, we just don’t want to fund our enemies. That sounds reasonable, and it is a legitimate position — it’s just not the one they actually hold.
If energy independence were their real goal, not only would oil, coal, and nuclear be on the table, but you’d hear more lamentations about our “addiction” to Canadian oil — a bigger source than Saudi Arabia.
Instead we are treated to an endless stream of intellectual jibber-jabber and nonsensical argy-bargy. We need to be energy independent, but we can’t use the energy sources we have. We need to switch to ethanol fast, but we can’t import cheaper ethanol from Brazil. We must increase gas taxes to wean ourselves from fossil fuels, but when gas prices go up for any other reason, it’s a crisis, even a crime. We’re told we’ll get nowhere drilling our way to independence or lower prices, as if windmills will do the job (stop laughing).
We shouldn’t fight “wars for oil,” but the self-imposed embargo on our own oil makes us even more dependent on the foreign oil we’re allegedly going to war over. And, of course: We’re told to reject the failed policies of the past, when the policies that have failed are the real old ones merely being sold as new.
I still think that drilling is only half the battle. It is a big part of it, but we need to take care of that artificial market of speculation that is controlling prices more then the supply and demand forces of the actual oil market.
Congress needs to regulate this artificial speculation market so it doesn't have that effect. The have the power under the constitution to do so (unlike say, the power to create and fund entitlement programs, or regulate business); specifically under Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 which states "The Congress shall have power . . . To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes".
The founders understood "commerce" to mean "trade" , as Madison's said in an 1828 letter, "Constitution vests in Congress expressly...'the power to regulate trade.'" As used in the Constitutional Convention and the Federalist Papers, "commerce" can be substituted with either "trade" or "exchange" interchangeably while preserving the meaning of the statements. So, even under a strict, narrow definition, congress has the power to regulate transactions, which is all this speculation market ultimately is.
Dick Morris spells out the problem with the speculators and the speculation market well in this article.
Congress needs to regulate this artificial speculation market so it doesn't have that effect. The have the power under the constitution to do so (unlike say, the power to create and fund entitlement programs, or regulate business); specifically under Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 which states "The Congress shall have power . . . To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes".
The founders understood "commerce" to mean "trade" , as Madison's said in an 1828 letter, "Constitution vests in Congress expressly...'the power to regulate trade.'" As used in the Constitutional Convention and the Federalist Papers, "commerce" can be substituted with either "trade" or "exchange" interchangeably while preserving the meaning of the statements. So, even under a strict, narrow definition, congress has the power to regulate transactions, which is all this speculation market ultimately is.
Dick Morris spells out the problem with the speculators and the speculation market well in this article.