Political Gas

By MA

Oh my!   Good times are coming round the corner again!  The underclass can actually afford to gas up the old junker and drive downtown to the grease parlor and get a Big Mac..  Or maybe pack a picnic basket and go visit Aunt Bea in the next country!

Trucking companies can shave a few cents a mile off their OTR rates and – if it continues – the poor consumer may even benefit a little bit at the bottom of the food chain.

Have we found more gasoline? Hmmmm!  Maybe for a little bit in Alberta and plus a few other  tar sand and shale oil locations like North Dakota and Pennsylvania.  These finds are very expensive in terms of ROI and are not sustainable in any sort of medium term.  To maintain flow you have to keep drilling more and more wells because their half life can be measured in months rather than years. The Bakken formation for example, half life of a producing well is 24 months and exhaustion after 5 years max.  Costs go way up as time passes because much more fracking is required in the later half of a shale oil well.

We are assured that pretty quick now we will become the biggest oil exporter in the world, making Saudi and Russia look like  small time operations sucking up leavings at the borders of the huge US Oil Pond…

Believe me, it is not going to happen that way.  A shale oil well has a half life of a gnat geologically speaking and very rapidly (human time scale – not geologically) the ROI (return on investment) of obtaining oil from shale or tar sands at a profit will implode for lack of investment capital which dies from ROI going through the floor.

The destruction by the Federal Reserve of all real pricing mechanisms insures that the capital markets will disconnect ever faster from reality, thus making it totally impossible to calculate ROI of anything and as a result the rapid multiplication of totally bogus and inappropriate investments will continue – until it stops!

However, back to todays’ subject.

Gasoline prices are very important to consumers (voters).  When prices go down, expenditures on toys go up.  Never mind the .2% increase in jobs or the .4% decrease in those seeking jobs (hence not unemployed) those percentage quivering figures reflect quaking finger strokes of zombies (slightly defined as “employed) at the Bureau of Lies and Scams or perhaps the massive rumor mill called the Census Bureau which daily, weekly or monthly receive memos from various underlings passing time in the Executive Branch instructing these bureaus exactly what numbers to plug in where in these totally false and useless reports.

Remember, anytime one of the Bureaus that grow, leech like, under the paving stones of Washington and issues a “.2%” this or a “.4%” that, those figures are far exceeded by the error window of the results that can be expected after so called statistical analysis of the false data. They are totally bogus and not worthy of even considering.

So we have the wonderful <sarc> situation (and have had for 50 years) where decisions are make (usually wrong), policies formed (without accurate intelligence), military action taken, thousands of lives lost, countries bankrupt, wars fought, all based on bullshit.

In the short term, however, just like printing money, issuing unbacked sub-prime paper, floating bogus bonds that will never repaid, making direct central bank purchases of bad bank debt to direct (leveraged) purchased stock market securities and other Ponzi Schemes it seems to the observant and ignorant to be working well.  Of course, the entire middle class might have a few bones to pick with that evaluation as the whole shebang will eat our lunch one day and there will be nowhere to hide.

But back to our main subject.  Gas prices.  I’ve noticed that a particular ordure saturating the air whenever I fill up my family chariot.   I drive a Prius, so I fill up about once a month whether it needs it or not.  But the ordure that issues from fume leakage from the fill cap area has a distinct characteristic about it.  The gas ordure smells exactly the same as the fragrance you notice whenever you are in close association with a politician!

How does this happen, you ask?

Dear reader, the 4th of November is rapidly approaching and since every lying, crooked politician in the country will attempt to take credit for lower oil and gas prices in order to convince stupid voters to vote for equally stupid politicians.

Either of two results may come to be.  On November 5, 2014, gasoline prices will start to rise or, all stops removed monetarily and fiscally and every effort will be made to extend the lower prices through the 2016 elections.  That result is less likely because it so far away and so many things can go wrong for a “fix” like that to succeed.

The gas price after November 4 will be interesting to watch though..

MA

Author: MuckAbout

Retired Engineer and Scientist (electronic, optics, mechanical) lives in a pleasant retirement community in Central Florida. He is interested in almost everything and comments on most of it. A pragmatic libertarian at heart he welcomes comments on all that he writes. View all posts by MuckAbout