Consumer Confidence Soars on Lower Gas Prices
By Pat Cleary Posted in Economy — Comments (14) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
We've heard many pollsters speak over the last few months, all of whom have remarked that they've never seen so much concern over the economy when the economy is going as well as it is. One of the reasons is that our friends in the Fourth Estate are determined to tout all the bad news and ignore the good news.
Example: When oil prices go up, gas prices go up, it leads the news. Well, we were dogged enough to catch this buried item yesterday. It notes that consumer confidence has soared. Had it gone the other way, you can bet they would've made room for it on page one.
And why did consumer confidence soar? In part because oil -- and thus, gas -- prices have dropped. We'll continue the trail of logic here: Wanna guess why prices fell? Demand fell. It's that pesky law of supply and demand that just won't go away.
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Well, most of them are. In the soundbite culture we live in, all the experts are partisan, and contradictory. Even on FOX News this morning I'm listening to the crossfire about stock tips, and the advice the "experts" were giving was as mutually contradictory as the advice women read on diets from Cosmopolitan month to month. They're all arguing for their particular school of thought, and are specialists in that school of thought. If you put 20 of them in a room together, and laid out pistols on a table, everybody would be dead within 5 minutes.
Bush and his oil buddies got together to lower the price of gas artifically so that the reaign of Nazi terror might continue unabated!
You clearly have fallen behind in your reading.
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"It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race." - Chief Justice John Roberts
Even he is having to do contortions on this issue. He truly savaged the oil companies when prices were going up and had predictions of $5/gal gas. Now that prices are going down he has shifted his blame to speculators.
Why the MSM is ignoring this: They don't want gas prices to drop simply for political reasons, but also for economic reasons. The tax-theoretic thinkers among the liberal establishment see the decline in gas prices as a catastrophe, because it will, in their minds, lead the public to buy gas-guzzling cars again. If they had had their way, gas prices would have been permanently kept high by a tax increase, defying supply and demand. They've been arguing that for years, and Katrina was seen as the Golden Opportunity to get it enshrined in law.
I repeat again: if Scientific American had had their way back in December of 2005, gas prices would never have declined to this level. In fact, they would have risen even in the absence of demand, and they would have continued rising.
The overall strategy of the environmentalists is to *increase* the cost of energy so that the "alternatives" they prefer will become economically competitive. Amortized over the lifetime of an average home, state-of-the-art terrestrial solar cells are still twice as expensive as using conventional electricity. The only way to make them competitive is to *raise* the price of energy, or magically increase the output from the sun. Guess which one they prefer to do?
is really behind ANWR, offshore drilling, and the like: making fossil fuels expensive to decrease consumption.
Because Carl Sagan would have wanted it that way.
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The Presidency is a position more easily critiqued than attained.
And say that if the MSM wanted consumers to understand the laws of supply and demand, they would be shouting the drop in gas prices from the rooftops. But in reality, I think they prefer it to be a black box that most of their viewers don't grasp very well, especially if there's a real potential for a tax hike in there if the Donks regain Congress...
But that's just me. ;)
As someone who really does want to see cars become more efficient. I'm a big Diesel fan, for instance. I think Volkswagen/Audi have done fantastic work with their TDI diesels, especially the turbodiesels.
I'm also historically in favor of *reducing* the cost of energy by really pushing to make use of the real "alternatives" -- once again: Nuclear (fission), Thermonuclear (fusion) and Exoamospheric Solar.
But in the medium term, there isn't any substitute for the security provided by domestic crude supplies and natural gas supplies. And the Donkocrats have been stalwart opponents of our initiatives to expand those. Wind and (terrestrial) solar are now, and will always be, niche products.
I think it's my favorite car ever, including my '69 Mustang (with the shag carpet and mag wheels).
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The Presidency is a position more easily critiqued than attained.
Sorry for the threadjack, but I'm waiting for Audi to give me a TDI A6/A8 that can replace my other incredible car by them, the '87 5000CS Turbo Quattro. If they build it...
I routinely get 37-40 MPG with the aforementioned car at 70MPH on the highway. And there is *nothing* I would rather drive in the winter, or in bad rain. The worse the conditions, the better the car drives, it's really amazing.
So talking about cars is defensible, I think. One little question:
I'm waiting for Audi to give me a TDI A6/A8 that can replace my other incredible car by them, the '87 5000CS Turbo Quattro. (emphasis added)
You have a special deal with them?
But seriously, I've held off on the whole SUV craze ... oh, I did have an overpriced Explorer for a while, but I divorced it. Anyway, Daimler is supposed to come out with a diesel Jeep Grand Cherokee in '07.
They had one, but the blessed fuel regulations made them stop production. Thank you, liberals, for making people use more gasoline. (Ironically, this regulation probably contributed to Michigan's economy tanking, which will probably lead to a Republican in the Governor's mansion.)
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The Presidency is a position more easily critiqued than attained.
Good luck with that while CARB has all the small diesels effectively banned in almost half the country. I just love California. The EPA regs don't help either, but it is really California that is responsible for their near non-existance.
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"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson
They had some "expert" on, saying (as best I could follow) that lower gas prices can signal a slowing of the economy, indicating lower demand and decreased confidence among consumers and the markets.
Really.
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The Presidency is a position more easily critiqued than attained.