IBD Editors: Sarah Palin vs the '$4-A-Gallon President'

"Obama's claim that the U.S. has only 2% of the world's oil is blatantly false"
*
The editors of Investors Business Daily agree with Gov. Palin that the Obama Administration's dreams of European-style gasoline prices in the U.S. is stifling our economy, killing jobs, and keeping us dependent on unstable foreign sources of crude oil:

The former governor of an energy-rich state notes that our president as a candidate did not object to higher gasoline prices but would have preferred "a gradual adjustment." Like a 67% increase?

We recently asked if President Obama actually wanted $8-a-gallon gas, a level reached by Europeans when Steven Chu, now his secretary of energy, said in a September 2008 interview: "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe."

Notice he said "boost" and not "allow to rise, or fall, in accordance with the law of supply and demand." Of course, restricting supply is one way to "boost" gas prices, whether by designating oil-rich areas off Alaska as "critical" habitat for an abundant and growing polar bear population or by imposing a de facto moratorium on offshore drilling because one well exploded.

Sharing this view is former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. On her Facebook page Tuesday, she said the rise in gasoline prices by 67% in Obama's first two years in office was "no accident." Rather, she said, it was "accomplished through a process of what candidate Obama once called 'gradual adjustment.'"

In a 2008 interview, then-Sen. Obama complained that "we've been consuming energy as if it's infinite." When asked if gas prices, which had briefly spiked under President Bush, would help reduce demand, Obama replied: "I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment." He didn't object to higher prices, only to the fact that we use too much energy.

Indeed, candidate Obama, while campaigning in Oregon, said: "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK." He added: "That's not leadership. That's not going to happen."

Neither is drilling for more domestic energy...

[More]

- JP