Cut Out the Middleman
Why don’t we cut out the middleman and just have Big Oil pay for our Mideast military adventures?
The math is something like this:
- The US consumes about 22MM barrels of light sweet crude daily.
- Back in 2003, oil was selling for around $45/barrel. After two wars in the region (and promise of a third as Big Dick works his magic), it is now $85/barrel. Same stuff, same production, but it costs more.
Rather than attempt to compute the volume-weighted average price of oil over the past 4-5 years, I think we can conservatively estimate an average price increase is at least $20/barrel over the last 4 years.
- That’s a 44% price increase just for fear.
- So what would have represented $1,445 billion in revenues at $45/barrel (22 million barrels, 365 days/year for 4 years) cost instead $2,088 billion, or an extra $642.4 billion.
So let me count the ways. First, we are paying for this wild-eyed military adventurism in diminished international stature, loss of moral compass, and and encroachment on personal freedoms — hey, it’s wartime! Second, we are paying at the pump. Third, we are asked, nay, required to pay for the wars with our taxes and our children’s and grandchildren’s taxes.
That’s triple-dipping, all from the same victims.
And the $642.4 billion looks suspiciously close to what Congress has been asked to rubber stamp to pay for the wars, so it really is just a Shell game (there’s a good pun) to extract money from Americans to pay for a war that backfills piles of windfall profits to the oil companies.
So let’s cut out the middleman. It’s Big Oil’s war. We’ve already given them the money. So let Big Oil pay the costs directly.
And if we’re ever able to reclaim the American judiciary, we’ll sue them to recover the overcharges.