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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 uh golden EIB microphone for the day for the hour, and uh then tomorrow Rush will be back here guiding the truth finders of this nation.
We've been talking uh, oh gosh, about all the way from uh 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 Kacinich uh saying don't build any refineries to uh in this uh this piece out of the Wall Street Journal that says uh in praise of gouging.
And and everybody the minute you say that people look at you like uh okay, something's wrong with this guy.
No, it's this is uh this this works, folks.
It works, and I I gave you the cereal example earlier about how serial companies raised their prices, jacked them up, and finally sales dropped off, and uh so they lowered the price.
And that's a mechanism that goes on every day in every retail outlet in America is the uh is the effort to find the right price point that you will pay.
And you know, uh you can see it on the graph.
Let me let me just draw it here on your radio.
The more you you increase the price, at some point there's that equilibrium where you raise the price one more centes instead of increasing start dropping.
So that uh trying to find that that price that price perfection is uh is an ongoing battle in the world of of retail sales.
So when the caller last hour called and said, Well, isn't how much is uh enough when's enough enough?
Well, that that's that's for you to answer.
That's 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 and that's fine, but uh it doesn't work when there's only one or two of us that don't want to pay that particular price.
But there's if there's a lot of us that don't want to pay a particular price, and once gasoline hit three bucks, I I don't know.
I mean, it was thought maybe it was that.
Maybe it was the talk that was going around last week of uh, well, if Rita does a lot of damage, we're gonna see four dollars for sure, and well, five dollars maybe.
So, you know, well, thank goodness Rita did a lot of damage, but not what people were worried about in the uh 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 and where they're testing to find out just exactly how much you will buy.
But Lundberg survey came out uh Monday, two days ago with the with the results of their survey of gasoline prices, and that's what they do.
And they run around the country and check on gas prices, and gas prices were down twenty cents in the last two weeks.
And the reason for that is uh partially partially because of the storms, but also partially because of the fact a lot of us, in fact, more than not, uh, 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, fifty bucks for a fill-up.
Ah I've got that's it.
I'm we're we're gonna we're gonna I'm just gonna do something different about uh 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, uh there was uh where is that in my stack of stuff here?
I've got uh oh yeah.
We were watching for this and nothing happened, but this latest report that's out uh says uh yep, mass transit.
American public transformation association said that um if uh in a 2002 study that if Americans use public transportation for about ten percent of their daily travel needs, we would reduce our dependence on foreign oil by more than forty percent.
Nearly the amount that we import from Saudi Arabia each year.
That sounds kind of high.
Uh but man tr mass transit is um is up.
Isn't that interesting?
So Journal says one test of of uh leadership.
One test of leadership in a 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 of the oil profiteering.
The governor of Missouri, Matt Blunt, they said uh 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, and we go around to a variety of states, some twenty 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 uh any kind of oil caps on, we had we had oil lines back in the 70s.
People were sitting in line forever.
But these, but these laws that they have on about 20 states out of the fifty typically place ceilings of between 10 and 25% on how much a company can raise prices in the wake of some sort of natural disaster.
Well, the journal says that's uh nice, but in almost all cases, they're wrong headed 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 uh Louisiana, Mississippi.
They go out into Georgia and go up into the mid-Atlantic states.
So Katrina knocks out all this production, and so and Rita does some too.
And what it what it works, what it translates to is about two million barrels a day that are not available to you and me, two million barrels a day.
Okay.
That means that somebody has to use two million barrels a day less, unless you want prices to change.
So have you I mean it's you, me, you add it all up two 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 uh in Florida, same thing happened in Louisiana, Mississippi.
So you get all these people using all this gasoline, and uh 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 250, that's it.
I'm gonna 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 there but the more the number moves up, the more people will stop buying the product or buy as 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 for 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 there's 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 could fill pages with all the ways that 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 Reed a little bit of uh kudos that Congress cannot investigate this because of the fact that uh well for different reasons than Harry Reid gave.
It's simply because of the fact that they they are they are at fault for a lot of what's wrong.
A lot of what they have done, the dentist casinics of the world have done is created higher gasoline prices.
So you're talking to Mr. Free Market here.
Now, Governor 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 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 uh clamping down on these people.
But a little bit.
I don't understand uh the governor of Missouri.
800 28282 is the phone number.
My name is Tom Sullivan.
This is the Rush Limbaugh Radio Program.
Don't you love uh don't you love the internet?
Don't you love being able to go on and uh do a search and find out something very quickly?
It uh I I uh I MC'd a program last week, uh Colin Powell was speaking.
He was talking about how he was on the phone when he was Secretary of State with Igor, his uh his his uh equal from uh from Russia.
And Igor was talking to him about uh, you know, uh UN resolution two twenty-seven, and we're not so sure we're for this.
Uh why 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 if you look at paragraph twenty-seven, the second line, I think said something about uh, and he's reading the thing off the internet.
And Igor went, oh, okay, okay, and went away.
Well, uh the caller who said that ExxonMobil made two how much did that how much uh did he say?
122 billion last year.
Profit, yeah.
Uh that's a pretty good improvement because uh the numbers are uh they made they made a lot of money.
They made 17 billion in um in 03, they made 11 billion in 02, and I've only got their fourth quarter number for 04, which was uh six billion, but two of that was a one-time gain.
So from operations four billion, so that's four times four about so they're still running about the same, about sixteen, seventeen billion dollars here.
So they oh yeah, they make a lot of money.
But uh but we can't let a caller call up and just say uh, you know, just uh where are they where where are you getting these people from today?
They're m 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'd breathe this stuff for breakfast.
Rich in um East Chester, New York.
Hello, Rich, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hey, thank you for taking my call.
Uh question that's been driving me crazy for a while is I've heard for many, many years, going back to the earlier uh oil emergencies that we have a real um a lot amount of the shale oil and it would just be cost prohibitive to produce it, but once the prices went over two or two fifty a gallon, uh 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 what happened to all of our scale oil.
Yeah, yeah, and and and and folks, for 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, uh the RAND, uh the big think tank, the RAN Group, they uh 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 uh shale rock and make it into petroleum.
Uh but they say now, yeah, uh uh uh easy.
In fact, uh in the RAN 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 uh in the Rocky Mountain states, uh Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and uh they can 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 gonna be doing?
They're gonna be going in there, and the shale uh folks is simply rock that when it's heated up, it turns into petroleum.
It's pretty it's a magic rock.
And my understanding is we have uh at least a hundred years at present production worth of shale oil uh right within our uh continental United States, which would take care of all of our foreign problems and you know whatever's going on in the Middle East.
That's right.
And and the people of uh Colorado and Wyoming and Utah, they're they're uh uh friendly to to the industry.
They're the energy industry has been there for a long time and they seem to get along quite well.
Uh but yeah, that that's the number that the RAN people said too was one hundred years worth of uh oil uh shale in the uh deposits beneath the uh the Rocky Mountains.
It's uh yeah, we're we're running out because of Dennis Kisinich and 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 change o, they have enough uh 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 or 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 uh Rich, your point well taken about uh the shale, that's just one thing.
That's just one thing.
But there's others uh we get lots of oil and gas off of uh the coast of California.
But uh California says, no, you can't drill any more 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 uh they want to go out even further, go out a couple of hundred miles and dig some more.
And 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 uh shale is one answer, but the other answer is is uh just explore where we know it already where it's already located, but nobody will let you do it.
Takes years and years and years to get there.
Phone number is 800-282-2882.
We'll be right back.
Russia's gonna 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 uh conspiracy kooks out there, I will join you, I will add myself to the to the club.
If this um I know that has nothing to do with energy.
If this if this uh ABC show commander in chief, Gina Davis, uh the woman president, if this isn't uh a message, if this isn't the old subliminal, see, see, see?
See, see how she she looks presidential and she and there's a presidential limousine and there's a see.
I'm telling you, this is all one big grand uh grand strategy.
Uh you know, this is this is uh this is good.
This is this is ABC, by the way, the show uh was the big winner last night, Niels and Reddings are in, and um it was uh big win for ABC.
Most watch show last night.
I don't know if I did not see it.
Uh I I don't know if it was any good or or not.
But uh see when Michael Moore comes at you with something, you know what it is.
I mean, it's just screams.
I know what this is going to be about.
But when ABC has this nice little uh drama with a woman president, telling you folks, I'm telling you, I'm I'm starting to sound like one of you.
Leonard in uh 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 uh fuel problem is our own.
I just see so many people that have to have the big V eight uh four-wheel drive uh monster tires to go to the mall or uh 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 uh starting to change.
They're uh they're they're starting to too little too late in my opinion.
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 stock, and they were given such rebates on them in uh you know, I have neighbors that drive to the end of the driveway to their mailbox, we've become so lazy and it just it just amazes me.
It it really has, but I think a lot of this Well okay.
But Leonard, let me let me come over to your house and 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 wheeled a four-wheel dive, Dodge Durango to go get her nails done?
I mean, it's ridiculous.
Why don't you go buy her?
I mean, come on, come on.
You you're I got two Honda Civics.
I fill them up probably every second week.
Um good.
But I'm uh you know, uh there's uh why is it I I understand your point.
You're saying, look at a lot of people are not being we're we're not being conscious of our of what's going on.
But we are.
The pocketbook will the soccer mom will will wind up going, uh it cost me more than fifty bucks to fill this thing up, I don't have enough left over to go get my nails done.
Right.
So soccer mom's gonna say, you know what, let's go get something a little bit cheaper.
The it always will work its way out.
I'm such a market man.
You gotta you've got to believe and trust the market will fix all of this.
Now, does it work instantly?
No.
Did people that bought these things?
But if you're old enough, Leonard, do you remember back in the 70s?
Were you old enough for that?
Uh I was young, but I do remember it.
Could you you remember station wagons?
Yeah.
Yeah, they had the big old honky Ford Chevrolet Buick station wagons.
But fuel was seventy cents a gallon.
I know, but then fuel went from thirty-five to seventy, and guess what?
People started going, I'm dumping this station wagon because it got nine miles to the gallon, and they so they got they they lost, you know, what on it?
They they couldn't get give them away.
They they could not sell those big old things, and that's how the Japanese car makers made their entry into the 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 and you and all those soccer moms will do the same thing again this time.
They're gonna go, I don't have enough left over to get my nails done.
I'm gonna go buy something a little bit cheaper.
You watch, uh uh I'll talk to you in a year and you'll find out that the marketplace will take will take uh to care of all of this.
Uh I just don't want to tell people how to live their lives.
This is America.
We get to 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.
Ah, thank you so much for having me on.
Um 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 if 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 ten years and three billion dollars 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 in as far as suppliers are concerned.
Well, yeah.
So uh that's why I say when Congress holds the hearings, they've got to put a mirror up and and and talk to themselves about what all the things that have created uh the uh excessive cost to be able to get a gallon of gas into your into your car.
I uh I understand your point.
Uh oil is not uh, you know, you can you can decide whether or not you want to have cereal or not a lot easier than whether you need to 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.
Uh but it's real hard, first of all, to define what constitutes gouging.
What when does gouging actually take place?
And then it's even further harder to prove what 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 uh that uh that I've got to explain to you is I've I've long been a defender of the of the retailer, the person that you're buying the gas from.
And I've 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 uh they have to buy the product and they put on their three to five cents, and that's uh uh for them and it pays the light bills and the postage and the payroll, and 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 I've been fascinated by the 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's uh three cents more than the last guy.
In the last couple of weeks, I have seen prices twenty, thirty cents different.
Which makes me my my curiosity goes up uh goes up and says something's wrong with the pricing here.
But guess what happens?
I I I I'm one of these guys that I've been blessed with uh with good enough financial fortune to where I just I don't pay attention to uh daily commodity prices.
I have no idea what a loaf of bread costs.
I don't know.
Fifty 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.
Um I I don't know.
And so I don't pay much to much attention to in 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 this when my tank starts getting back down to the E, I'm gonna go, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a station over there on First and Maine.
That's where I'm gonna go buy so all so the marketplace I'm I'm leaving the guy that's th uh thirty cents higher than everybody else.
He's not getting my business.
Pete in uh Houston, Texas.
Hello, Pete, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hey Diddle's Tom, thanks for taking my call.
You're welcome.
Hey, forget my ignorance on this, but um you said this country had three hundred some odd refineries thirty years ago, and today's country has about a hundred some odd.
Yes, sir.
Um my question is, whatever was done with those two hundred some odd refineries that were closed.
Were they demolished or did they uh 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 it to meet all the current regulations to bring it up to speed, it wouldn't be worth their while.
So uh I forget which company it was.
I th I I don't want to guess because I can't I can't remember the name of the company.
But it was one of the big oil companies, and what they did was uh they were they were gonna just gonna shut it down.
And the people in the community riled up and said, Hey, no, no, no, no, no, no, 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 talking 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 I can't answer your question, Pete.
I don't know if ten percent of them are still sitting there or 90% of them are still sitting there, but uh but along the line, the uh the number has gone from three twenty-five down to one forty-eight, and uh 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 uh 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.
Uh Tom Sullivan in for Rush Today.
He'll be back tomorrow, uh talking about we uh we've done a lot of uh this is the the energy show today, it sounds like uh we we've been talking about oil, we've been talking about gasoline, but the one uh big bugaboo that is uh nobody's talking about in these prices have gone through the ceiling is natural gas prices.
And uh for you know, the I'll tell you uh this winter is gonna be rough.
Whatever you paid last year, there there's 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 uh natural gas, it also same same uh same drill, most of it comes out of the area where the storms have uh blown through, and so the question is how much of that is uh disrupted and how much of it's been damaged and how much have it has not been.
But natural gas is also something that you can uh import.
Uh you can bring it in by ship.
Uh it's 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 uh there's the I I can't remember the name of the 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 gotta look around and go y you we're talking double to triple the price of natural gas.
We've got 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 uh Jackson, Mississippi.
Hello, Scott, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hey, Tom, thanks for taking my call.
You bet.
listen, uh, you know, I have my doubts also as to whether or not it's truly a free market uh that we have our gas uh being sold in.
And I'll 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 gap on the gas for say about two forty, two forty-one 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 two eighty-nine, two ninety a gallon.
Oh, 50 cents difference?
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 is different why.
Uh two things.
Wha one of them is uh is somebody dinking around with it, probably, uh, because of the fact, like I said, it the 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 to have that real estate in the what did you call it, the not so affluent section of town?
So it's 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'll point to also when the uh government officials were pointing to the uh 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 you should your prices stayed the same in Jackson.
Uh well, no, the difference between the two areas if you go to one area or the other, that that fluctuation was the same uh even though it you know across the board I don't know.
I don't know.
I I know everything.
I have my suspicions too.
And like I said, I've been a big defender of the retailer for a long, long time, but uh in this particular case, there's like I 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 gonna 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 was um where is that, Michigan?
Hi, uh Mark, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hey, how are you today?
Doing great.
Um listen, I just wanted to chime in on something that one of your uh collars earlier was talking about.
You know, as long as it's cheaper to buy uh fuel or to buy oil from the from the Middle East as opposed to producing it in the United States, I think you know U.S. policy towards um energy uh is still on the right course because uh you know, just just the way I see it, I don't see how we can um produce oil cheaper than we can buy it from the Middle East.
Well, at some point we can if we uh if we are able to find like uh the supply of of this uh shale up in the up in the Rocky Mountain states, if they can get that out and make a profit at thirty bucks a barrel, and then and it's at sixty-five dollars a barrel today, well then for a long time they can still keep uh pumping that shale and turn it into petroleum.
But but you are right, obviously, the money will go.
You you you we're all good consumers.
And and so are companies, and they will go if it's cheaper to get it from the overseas, they'll get it from overseas.
If it's if they can make as much or more by 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 uh the price is way, way up, uh, 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 uh 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 this is coming at us from uh just about every direction.
It is an amazing story.
Uh what's interesting, I was thinking about this the other day, HR.
Uh last time I was on, I don't know, three months ago.
I did a whole show, a whole hour of big in-depth thing about the big social security debate.
Where'd that go?
Where'd that story go?
Well, we're all about uh the the gas uh in our in our gasoline.
Yeah, I know the gas at the pump.
And uh, if the president makes one more trip to New Orleans, I'm gonna scream.
Russ will be back tomorrow.
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