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Sept. 28, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:25
September 28, 2005, Wednesday, Hour #3
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Back behind the golden EIB microphone for the day, for the hour, and then tomorrow Rush will be back here guiding the truth finders of this nation.
We've been talking, oh gosh, about all the way from FEMA and money for the Gulf states and everybody wanting to get their money and helping people out, but not helping the corrupt politicians, to high gas prices, to Dennis Kucinich saying don't build any refineries to this piece out of the Wall Street Journal that says in praise of gouging.
And the minute you say that, people look at you like, okay, something's wrong with this guy.
No, this works, folks.
It works.
And I gave you the cereal example earlier about how cereal companies raised their prices, jacked them up, and finally sales dropped off.
And so they lowered the price.
And that's a mechanism that goes on every day in every retail outlet in America, is the effort to find the right price point that you will pay.
And you know, you can see it on the graph.
Let me just draw it here on your radio.
The more you increase the price, at some point there is that equilibrium where you raise the price one more cent and sales instead of increasing start dropping.
So trying to find that price perfection is an ongoing battle in the world of retail sales.
So when the caller last hour called and said, well, isn't how much is enough, but when's enough enough?
Well, that's for you to answer.
That's for you and me together to answer.
Yeah, there's people out there that do their own little silent protest about something, and that's fine, but it doesn't work when there's only one or two of us that don't want to pay that particular price.
But if there's a lot of us that don't want to pay a particular price, once gasoline hit three bucks, I don't know.
I mean, maybe it was that.
Maybe it was the talk that was going around last week of, well, if Rita does a lot of damage, we're going to see $4 for sure.
And, well, $5 maybe.
So, you know, well, thank goodness Rita did a lot of damage, but not what people were worried about in the oil and gas industry.
And so as a result, we did not see four.
We did not see five.
Maybe we will someday.
Maybe that's what we're going through is a process in where they're testing to find out just exactly how much you will buy.
But Lundbrook Survey came out Monday, two days ago, with the results of their survey of gasoline prices.
And that's what they do.
They run around the country and check on gas prices, and gas prices were down 20 cents in the last two weeks.
And the reason for that is partially because of the storms, but also partially because of the fact a lot of us, in fact, more than not, most of us don't live where the storms were.
We somehow started thinking about, gosh, this is costing a lot of money.
Do I want to do it?
And maybe you can afford three bucks, but it's the idea that gets you.
You go, oh, 50 bucks for a fill-up.
That's it.
I'm just going to do something different about the way we, I don't know, maybe you take car drives on weekends.
Maybe you and the family go out driving around.
Well, maybe you don't now.
Maybe instead you take bike rides.
Maybe some of you in fact, there was, where is that in my stack of stuff here?
I've got, oh yeah.
We were watching for this and nothing happened, but this latest report that's out says, yep, mass transit.
American Public Transportation Association said that if in a 2002 study that if Americans use public transportation for about 10% of their daily travel needs, we would reduce our dependence on foreign oil by more than 40%, nearly the amount that we import from Saudi Arabia each year.
That sounds kind of high.
But mass transit is up.
Isn't that interesting?
So the journal says one test of leadership.
One test of leadership in a national crisis is whether the leaders, the politicians, can keep cool enough to resist populist furies.
And sadly, that's what we're seeing in the current demagoguery over the oil profiteering.
The governor of Missouri, Matt Blunt, they quoted him as saying, price gouging is unconscionable and illegal and should be rooted out and punished.
And in Georgia, the governor there, in Illinois, the governor there, also in Kentucky, I mean, you can go around to a variety of states, some 20 states, most of them in the South, have anti-price gouging laws on their books.
And what they normally say with their really, their price controls, and every time there's been wager price controls, and by the way, the last time it was done on a national basis, it was a Republican who did it.
It was Richard Nixon, and it led to a disaster, an economic disaster.
And the last time they put any kind of oil caps on, we had oil lines back in the 70s.
People were sitting in line forever.
But these laws that they have on about 20 states out of the 50 typically place ceilings of between 10 and 25 percent on how much a company can raise prices in the wake of some sort of natural disaster.
Well, the journal says that's nice, but in almost all cases, they're wrongheaded because they exacerbate the supply problems by short-circuiting the price system that matches the supply with the demand.
And as infuriating as you get about higher gas prices, there is one economic certainty.
If governments will not allow the price system to ration the demand for gas, a new price system will emerge called gas lines.
And we are getting gas lines in various parts of this country, especially for those of you that rely upon the pipelines coming out of Louisiana, Mississippi.
They go out into Georgia and go up into the mid-Atlantic states.
So Katrina knocks out all this production, and Rita does some too.
And what it works, what it translates to is about 2 million barrels a day that are not available to you and me, 2 million barrels a day.
That means that somebody has to use 2 million barrels a day less unless you want prices to change.
So have you, I mean, it's you, me, have you added all up, 2 million barrels a day less that we're using?
Well, that did not happen.
So what happens?
Demand stays the same or goes up, especially when you get millions of people in Houston and Galveston getting in their cars and fueling up to go get out of the way.
Same thing happened in Florida.
Same thing happened in Louisiana, Mississippi.
So you get all these people using all this gasoline.
And what it really does is that if you just let the price go wherever it will go, the market achieves a reduction in consumption through a higher price.
There will be some of you that will say at $2.50, that's it.
I'm going to change my driving habits at three bucks for others.
Maybe it's four bucks for others.
I don't know what the number is, but the more the number moves up, the more people will stop buying the product or they'll buy less of it.
And that's why they say let gouging go, because it is the market mechanism that is actually going to reduce the demand.
And if you don't let that happen, then there is no disincentive.
If we keep the prices low artificially, there is no reason for you to curtail your use of it.
So artificially holding down the price of gasoline makes conditions worse.
And yet that's what the politicians are talking about.
So the journal says, are the gas sellers guilty of profiteering?
Price gouging laws say companies cannot charge significantly more than their cost.
But what matters for wholesalers and gas stations isn't what they paid for the last tank of fuel that's sitting in the tank under the ground.
What matters for them is what's the next tank when it pulls up, the tanker truck pulls up.
What are they going to charge me for the next one?
That's called replacement cost.
And if prices do not increase, then you and I have received a signal that we don't need to change anything about our consumption.
The signal that you and I are getting from these high prices is that we need to do something about our consumption.
But if you keep them low, then we're going to be right back to where we were before.
And after the 1970s, all this business, Jimmy Carter, the fireside chats, everything else, turn up the make your house colder in the winter.
And so we went through this whole process and they passed a bunch of laws and they said, okay, build solar panels and build wind farms and do all that.
And so some of it got started.
And as you go around the country, you can see solar panels and wind farms, but they're not producing very much because why?
Because the price of gasoline came back down again.
And everybody said, I'm taking off the sweater.
I'm jacking up the heat in my house.
And I'm not going to build another, I'm not going to invest in another one of those wind farms.
So White House Council of Economic Advisors, 2004 report to the President said, if prices do not increase, consumers do not receive a signal to cut their consumption.
And so the journal says we can fill pages with all the ways the government has undermined energy security and raised production costs.
And they include the reformulated gas mandates, prohibitions on offshore and Alaska oil drilling, environmental regulations, and price controls that go a long way to explaining why not a single oil refinery has been built in this country since 1976.
I know Congress cannot, I mean, that's where you got to give Harry Reid a little bit of kudos that Congress cannot investigate this because of the fact that, well, for different reasons than Harry Reid gave, it's simply because of the fact that they are at fault for a lot of what's wrong.
A lot of what they have done, the dentist Kuciniches of the world have done is created higher gasoline prices.
So you're talking to Mr. Free Market here.
Now, Governor Matt Blunt from Missouri wrote a letter back to the journal and said, yeah, well, you didn't get it quite right.
I believe my actions have been responsible and appropriate.
Some politicians take the easy road by calling for price caps.
I have consistently opposed such price caps.
Market forces should be allowed to set the price.
And then he goes right from there and he says, while I have directed the Attorney General to enforce Missouri's price gouging law in the event that illegal behavior is substantiated, well, which is it?
Let the price go where it's going to go, governor, and you will find out that the market forces truly do work.
But what you're saying is, well, we've got the price gouging law, we're going to enforce that.
So a little bit of price gouging is okay, but if there's too much price gouging, then I'm all for clamping down on these people.
But a little bit, I don't understand the governor of Missouri.
800-282-2882 is the phone number.
My name is Tom Sullivan.
This is the Rush Limbaugh Radio Program.
Don't you love the internet?
Don't you love being able to go on and do a search and find out something very quickly?
I emceed a program last week.
Colin Powell was speaking.
He was talking about how he was on the phone when he was Secretary of State with Igor, his equal from Russia.
And Igor was talking to him about, you know, UN Resolution 227, and we're not so sure we're for this.
It says such and such and such and such.
And so Colin Powell says he's sitting at his desk at the State Department and he gets on his computer and he bangs out UN Resolution 227.
Poof, there it is.
And he starts pretending like he's doing from memory.
He says, I don't know, Igor.
I think, you know, if you look at paragraph 27, the second line, I think, said something about, and he's reading the thing off the internet.
And Igor went, oh, okay, okay.
And went away.
Well, the caller who said that ExxonMobil made two, how much did he say?
$122 billion last year.
Profit.
Yeah.
That's a pretty good improvement because the numbers are, they made a lot of money.
They made $17 billion in 03.
They made $11 billion in 02.
And I've only got their fourth quarter number for 04, which was $6 billion, but two of that was a one-time gain.
So from operations, $4 billion.
So that's four times worse.
So they're still running about the same, about $16, $17 billion a year.
So they make a lot of money.
But we can't let a caller call up and just say, you know, where are you getting these people from today?
We got these people calling up, making up all these wild numbers.
The guy who's trying to tell me how much of a return on investment you get from the SP, I breathe this stuff for breakfast.
Rich in Eastchester, New York.
Hello, Rich.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hey, thank you for taking my call.
A question that's been driving me crazy for a while is: I've heard for many, many years, going back to the earlier oil emergencies, that we have a real amount of the shale oil, and it would just be cost-prohibitive to produce it.
But once the prices went over $2 or $2.50 a gallon, it would be worth to produce it.
And ever since this new emergency arose, I've never heard anybody say anything about shale.
And I'm just wondering what happened to all of our shale oil.
Yeah, yeah.
And folks, for those of you listening in your little itty-bitty car speakers, he's not talking about shell.
He's talking about shale, oil shale, right, Rich?
Yes, that's correct.
Yes.
And from the rock.
Yeah, well, the RAND, the big think tank, the RAND group, they came out with a study just a couple of weeks ago that said exactly what you're saying is that now that prices are as expensive as they are, because at one time it just wasn't feasible to go in and get this shale rock and make it into petroleum.
But they say now, yeah, easy.
In fact, in the RAND survey, they said that we have at least three times the amount of oil in shale rock than Saudi Arabia has locked up.
At least three times that of what Saudi Arabia has locked in oil shale deposits.
And where it is, is in the Rocky Mountain states, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah.
And all it is, all they do is just go in there and get, well, we're running out of oil if you keep going with what we've currently got.
That's why you've got to get more.
You've got to find, you've got to explore.
And with the higher prices, guess what they're going to be doing?
They're going to be going in there.
And the shale, folks, is simply rock that when it's heated up, it turns into petroleum.
It's a magic rock.
And my understanding is we have at least 100 years at present production worth of shale oil right within our continental United States, which would take care of all of our foreign problems and whatever's going on in the Middle East.
That's right.
And the people of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, they're friendly to the industry.
The energy industry has been there for a long time, and they seem to get along quite well.
But yeah, that's the number that the Rand people said, too, was 100 years worth of oil shale in the deposits beneath the Rocky Mountains.
We're running out because of Dennis Kucinich and his crowd, because they won't let anything new.
You can't dig a hole.
You can't build a refinery.
You can't do any of that.
And yet, if you let the free market work, presto changeo, they have enough profit now to make it worth their while to go in and get this stuff, and that adds to the supply.
And again, I don't know if the supply would outstrip the demand, but if it does, prices would go down.
But the other part of the pricing mechanism is if we don't have any way of getting more than what we currently are working with, and 95% of our, excuse me, our refineries are running at 95% of capacity, and our demand is going up, something's got to break.
And what's breaking is we're getting more and more of what we use from over there.
And over there isn't good.
So, Rich, your point well taken about the shale.
That's just one thing.
That's just one thing.
But there's others.
We get lots of oil and gas off of the coast of California.
But California says, no, you can't drill anymore off the coast, even though there's oil rigs out there.
Go out to Santa Barbara and go out to that area, and you'll see them sitting out there.
You can see them from the road.
But they want to go out even further, go out a couple hundred miles and dig some more.
And the geologists tell us about the fact that there's these volcanoes of oil that go off on a regular basis underneath the ocean surface all over the world on a fairly regular basis.
So we really are in a position to where we, yeah, it spills into the ocean.
And somehow, ladies and gentlemen, we still wind up with a clean ocean and with fish and all the other good things that come from marine life.
So shale is one answer, but the other answer is just explore where we know it already, where it's already located, but nobody will let you do it.
It takes years and years and years to get there.
Phone number is 800-282-2882.
We'll be right back.
Rush is going to be back tomorrow.
I'm Tom Sullivan sitting in on the Rush Limbaugh Radio Program.
You're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Podcasting Network.
All right, for all you conspiracy kooks out there, I will join you.
I will add myself to the club.
If this, I know that has nothing to do with energy.
If this ABC show, Commander-in-Chief, Gina Davis, the woman president, if this isn't a message, if this isn't the old subliminal, see, how she looks presidential, and there's a presidential limousine, and there's a, see?
I'm telling you, this is all one big grand strategy.
This is good.
ABC, by the way, the show was the big winner last night.
Nielsen Readings are in, and it was a big win for ABC.
Most watched show last night.
I did not see it.
I don't know if it was any good or not.
But see, when Michael Moore comes at you with something, you know what it is.
I mean, it just screams.
I know what this is going to be about.
But when ABC has this nice little drama with a woman president, I'm telling you, folks, I'm starting to sound like one of you.
Leonard in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Hello, Leonard.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Yes.
Hello, and thank you for taking my call.
I just wonder how much of this fuel problem is our own.
I just see so many people that have to have the big V8 four-wheel drive monster tires to go to the mall.
I'm in the auto repair business, and I just, I used to see people driving little Honda Civics and something fuel efficient, but now everybody has to have these big monstrous.
Well, it started, see, but once again, the marketplace is already starting to change.
They're starting to.
Better than never.
I have a friend that sells cars, and he says, you know, for the last four or five years, they couldn't keep the big Ford excursion to stock, and they were given such rebates on them.
And, you know, I have neighbors that drive to the end of the driveway to their mailbox.
We've become so lazy.
And it just amazes me.
It really has.
But I think a lot of this.
Well, okay.
But Leonard, let me come over to your house and look around and see if there's something that you do that I don't like.
And then I'll tell you how to live your life.
Right.
But, you know, does a soccer mom really need a four-wheel drive Dodge Durango to go get her nails done?
I mean, it's ridiculous.
Why don't you go buy your car?
I mean, come on.
I got two Honda Civics.
I fill them up probably every second week.
I'm good.
But, you know, there's why is it?
I understand your point.
You're saying, look, a lot of people are not being, we're not being conscious of what's going on.
But we are.
The pocketbook will, the soccer mom will wind up going, it cost me more than 50 bucks to fill this thing up.
I don't have enough left over to go get my nails done.
Right.
So soccer mom's going to say, you know what?
Let's go get something a little bit cheaper.
It always will work its way out.
I'm such a market man.
You've got to believe and trust the market.
We'll fix all of this.
Now, does it work instantly?
No.
Do people have bought these things?
But if you're old enough, Leonard, do you remember back in the 70s?
Were you old enough for that?
I was young, but I do remember it.
Do you remember station wagons?
Yeah.
Yeah, they had the big old hunky Ford Chevrolet Buick station wagons.
But fuel was 70 cents a gallon.
I know, but then fuel went from 35 to 70.
And guess what?
People started going, I'm dumping this station wagon because it got nine miles to the gallon, and they lost, you know, what on it?
They couldn't give them away.
They could not sell those big old things, and that's how the Japanese car makers made their entry into the U.S.
So what happened?
Did anybody say what to do?
Did somebody send a letter marching orders for everybody to do that?
No.
We're smart consumers.
And all those soccer moms will do the same thing again this time.
They're going to go, I don't have enough left over to get my nails done.
I'm going to go buy something a little bit cheaper.
You watch.
I'll talk to you in a year and you'll find out that the marketplace will take care of all of this.
I just don't want to tell people how to live their lives.
This is America.
We get to choose what we want to buy.
And I guarantee you, there's something in your house that I would find and go, what are you doing buying that for?
Why, do you know?
Edward in Cincinnati.
Hi, Edward.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Thank you so much for having me on.
I think it's a real mistake to defend gouging in the case of the oil market because while I agree you can't gouge in a free market, we don't really have a free market as it relates to oil.
Consumers can choose to buy less oil, but suppliers can't choose to re-enter to enter the market and to sell oil.
When it takes you 10 years and $3 billion to get by environmental regulations and make a new refinery, it's impossible for anyone to enter the market and increase supply.
Gouging is possible in the case of the oil market because the government has put this block on entry as far as suppliers are concerned.
Well, yeah.
So that's why I say when Congress holds the hearings, they've got to put a mirror up and talk to themselves about what all the things that have created the excessive cost to be able to get a gallon of gas into your car.
I understand your point.
Oil is not, you know, you can decide whether or not you want to have cereal or not a lot easier than whether you need to use your automobile to get from point A to point B or you buy something that has plastic in it, some sort of petrochemical.
But it's real hard, first of all, to define what constitutes gouging.
When does gouging actually take place?
And then it's even further harder to prove that somebody is in fact gouging.
Now, one of the things, I'll tell you something, as much as I sit here as a big free market guy, and another part that I've got to explain to you is I've long been a defender of the retailer, the person that you're buying the gas from.
And I've done this on my local show in California where the retailers call up and say, people come in and they scream at them, they're yelling at them.
Come on, don't shoot the messenger.
These people are just business people like you and me, and they don't make a lot of money running a gas station.
But they have to buy the product and they put on their three to five cents, and that's for them, and it pays the light bills and the postage and the payroll, and they wind up taking some money home for their families.
Nothing to begrudge them on all of that.
But lately, as much as I've been a big defender of them, and you can go through the whole supply chain, and I've always defended these retailers, lately, I've been fascinated by usually gas prices have been two, three cents.
You drive down the street, this one over here is two cents cheaper than that guy, and this one over down the street is three cents more than the last guy.
In the last couple of weeks, I have seen prices 20, 30 cents different, which makes me, my curiosity goes up and says, something's wrong with the pricing here.
But guess what happens?
I'm one of these guys that I've been blessed with good enough financial fortune to where I just don't pay attention to daily commodity prices.
I have no idea what a loaf of bread costs.
I don't know.
50 cents?
Two bucks?
I don't know.
You go down the grocery store aisle, you take the loaf of bread, you put it in the cart, and you check out.
I don't know.
And so I don't pay much attention to the daily prices of things, of living.
But lately, even me, Mr. No Pay Attention, has been actually watching the prices of gas as I drive down the street.
So I know that when I need, when my tank starts getting back down to the E, I'm going to go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a station over there on First and Main.
That's where I'm going to go by.
So the marketplace, I'm leaving the guy that's 30 cents higher than everybody else.
He's not getting my business.
Pete in Houston, Texas.
Hello, Pete.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hey, Ditto's Tom.
Thanks for taking my call.
You're welcome.
Hey, forgive my ignorance on this, but you said this country had 300 simod refineries 30 years ago, and today this country has about 100 simod.
Yes, sir.
Well, my question is, whatever was done with those 200 simod refineries that were closed?
Were they demolished?
Are they just standing there with the doors locked?
I don't know.
I know that I know of one story, I believe in Bakersfield, California, where there was a refinery that the company said was old, and because of all the stuff that they had to do to meet all the current regulations, to bring it up to speed, it wouldn't be worth their while.
So I forget which company it was.
I don't want to guess because I can't remember the name of the company.
But it was one of the big oil companies.
And what they did was they were just going to shut it down.
And the people in the community riled up and said, hey, no, Come on.
Let's keep this thing going.
It provides all these jobs and everything else.
And they said, well, if you want to keep it going, go find somebody to buy it from as well, sell it then.
And sure enough, another company did come along and buy it.
And man alive, talk about good timing because with the high price, obviously now they could afford to do whatever they needed to do to get that thing up to speed as far as the current regulations go.
So I don't know if some of them, I can't answer your question, Pete.
I don't know if 10% of them are still sitting there or 90% of them are still sitting there.
But along the line, the number has gone from 325 down to 148.
And if they're still sitting there, at this price, there should be some people going back and, like you said, polishing off the knocking the rust off and opening up the gates.
But I don't know what that situation is.
I don't have the numbers.
We'll take a short break and come back.
Tom Sullivan with you on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Welcome back.
Tom Sullivan in for Rush Today.
He'll be back tomorrow talking about we've done a lot of this is the energy show today, it sounds like.
We've been talking about oil.
We've been talking about gasoline, but the one big bugaboo that nobody's talking about and these prices have gone through the ceiling is natural gas prices.
And for, you know, I'll tell you, this winter is going to be rough.
Whatever you paid last year, there's warnings out that you'll pay double, maybe triple what you paid to heat your home last winter.
You'll pay more this winter, especially people who heat with gas.
And natural gas, it also, same drill.
Most of it comes out of the area where the storms have blown through.
And so the question is how much of that is disrupted and how much of it's been damaged and how much has not been.
But natural gas is also something that you can import.
You can bring it in by ship.
It's liquefied natural gas.
They bring it in just like the shale rock.
They heat the rock up, it turns into petroleum with the liquefied natural gas.
They take the liquid out.
You got natural gas.
They put it in the pipeline.
But there's all kinds of, I can't remember the name of the congressman, but having a cow about the fact that why they need to build more ports for these liquefied natural gas LNG ships to come in.
And so in order to stall it for his environmental buddies, he's calling for a study as to do we need more ports.
And you've got to look around and go, we're talking double to triple the price of natural gas.
We've got disruptions of supply.
We've got a choke point of it.
And you're wondering whether we have a need?
You have to do a study.
Scott in Jackson, Mississippi.
Hello, Scott.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hey, Tom, thanks for taking my call.
You bet.
Listen, you know, I have my doubts also as to whether or not it's truly a free market that we have our gas being sold in.
And I point to one thing that I've noticed is that on the depressed side of town here in Jackson, Mississippi, you could go get a gallon of gas for, say, about $240, $2.41 a gallon.
You go to the rich, affluent neighborhood on the same day, and three or four gas stations all on the same corner will all be selling it for $289, $290 a gallon.
Oh, 50 cents.
Well, in the store, if you walk in the store, they're not selling Cokes for more than they do at the other place down in the depressed part of town.
It's only the gas.
Why?
Two things.
One of them is: is somebody dinking around with it?
Probably, because of the fact, like I said, the constant battle going on in retail is trying to find that point of perfection.
But the other point behind it is the cost to have that real estate in the, what did you call it, the not-so-affluent section of town?
In the depressed part of town.
So it's, yeah, it's cheaper.
You can do business cheaper.
You can buy a piece of property cheaper in the depressed part of town than you can over in the high-end part of town, right?
Well, yes, but I point to also when the government officials were pointing to the oil company saying, help us out during the hurricane, for example, and they said that they were, you still had the same price differences even during that natural disaster, that emergency, where they said they were helping us out.
They were helping you out by not raising the prices.
Your prices stayed the same in Jackson?
Well, no, the difference between the two areas is when you go to one area or the other, that fluctuation was the same, even though across the board, I don't know.
I know.
I have my suspicions, too.
And like I said, I've been a big defender of the retailer for a long, long time.
But in this particular case, I still go back to if you're paying rent as a gas station proprietor on the corner of Depressed and Eeyore, then you're going to pay a lot less rent every month than the person that's over on Goldilocks Drive.
So, you know, your costs are going to be different.
They just are.
Mark in Indian River, where is that, Michigan?
Hi, Mark.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hey, how are you today?
Doing great.
Listen, I just want to chime in on something that one of your callers earlier was talking about.
You know, as long as it's cheaper to buy fuel or to buy oil from the Middle East as opposed to producing it in the United States, I think U.S. policy towards energy is still on the right course because, you know, just the way I see it, I don't see how we can produce oil cheaper than we can buy it from the Middle East.
Well, at some point we can.
If we are able to find the supply of this shale up in the Rocky Mountain states, if they can get that out and make a profit at 30 bucks a barrel and it's at $65 a barrel today, well, then for a long time, they can still keep pumping that shale and turn it into petroleum.
But you are right, obviously, the money will go.
We're all good consumers, and so are companies.
And they will go.
If it's cheaper to get it from overseas, they'll get it from overseas.
If they can make as much or more by drilling a hole in the ground here and finding a big supply that they can use to keep selling to us for a long period of time, they'll do that.
Same answer: the marketplace still prevails.
We'll be back on the Rush Limbaugh Radio Program.
Oh, yeah, and the other part I forgot to tell you was this natural gas stuff, not only are the price is way, way up, and we have to do a study that'll take many, many years to figure out if we need any more ports to bring the stuff in, but throw on top of that the fact that guess where most of the electric plants, how do they fire up an electric plant?
That's right, boys and girls.
Natural gas.
So, I mean, this is coming at us from just about every direction.
It is an amazing story.
What's interesting, I was thinking about this the other day, HR.
Last time I was on, I don't know, three months ago, I did a whole show, a whole hour, a big in-depth thing about the big social security debate.
Where'd that go?
Where'd that story go?
Well, we're all about the gas in our gasoline.
Yeah, I know, the gas at the pump.
And if the president makes one more trip to New Orleans, I'm going to scream.
Rush will be back tomorrow.
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