LET US RID OURSELVES OF THE FICTION. . .
"Let us rid ourselves of the fiction that low oil prices are somehow good for the United States" said Dick Cheney back in 1984 while proposing an import tax designed to prop up oil prices. Brian's Knee-Jerking Left Wing Blog sees a direct parallel to Kerry's desire to raise gas taxes at the pump by 50 cents.

Cheney was trying to prop up the domestic oil industry when world oil prices had fallen dramatically. The intent was to stabilize the oil economy so that producers, suppliers and others could make plans for the future...which is hard to do in a remarkably unstable oil market as we had at the time. Businesses cannot plan for research or for development when income and expenses cannot be reasonably estimated. A side effect of Cheney's plan would have been increased development of alternative energy sources, which get no attention when prices are low. Gore would have liked that.

This was also at a time when my father, who was employed by the oil industry, became a nomad for work, moving almost yearly because no oil company wanted to take on long term or significant projects because of the low oil prices. It was no longer cost effective to spend the money to develop new oil sources by, for instance, extracting oil from shale. In fact, my father was in Cheney's Wyoming at the time, which was hurt by the low oil prices, so Cheney was looking after his constituents.

So, it is more complex than a simple desire to raise gas taxes at the pump by 50 cents when oil prices weren't low as a method to simply reduce the national debt, as Kerry wanted. But it was also a bad plan that Cheney proposed, because it was nothing more than a subsidy, like those used now to prop up prices of sugar or tobacco (I guess Kerry is opposed to those too, eh?). The question for both Kerry and Cheney today is, do you still believe those were good ideas?