Earlier this week Michele Bachman made
this rather implausible assertion:
“Under President Bachmann you will see gasoline come down below $2 per gallon again,” she said in Greenville. “That will happen.”
Left unsaid was what magic would be used in a Bachmann administration (shudder) to accomplish such a feat. I can imagine many ways to do it, but all of them seem rather challenging. We could redefine what we meant by "gallon", or what we meant by "dollar." Perhaps Bachmann will introduce a new currency, known as Bachmann Bucks, and they will be like dollars but much more awesome and God-fearing. They will have pictures of Michele and Marcus Bachmann on one side and Jesus on the other, they will play snippets of Randy Travis songs when you take them out of your wallet, and every one will smell like freedom and tar sands.
Other alternatives: genetically re-engineer dinosaurs, breed them by the billions, then bury them in the ground and wait for them to turn to oil. The problem with that is not just the inefficiency of it or questionable biology/chemistry/geology involved, but that we'd first have to get widespread agreement that dinosaurs actually existed, and that would probably be filibustered in the Senate. We could simply drill everywhere (say, on the baseball fields of every public school in America) and hope that we get lucky, and oil really is everywhere, like the skeptics say. But that seems a bit too much like government intervention in the free markets.
It turns out there's almost certainly a simpler solution: the single absolute best and easiest way to get gasoline under two dollars would be to simply collapse the economies of all the industrialized nations. Now that would get the price of gas down in a hurry. No manufacturing! No jobs to commute to! Nothing to do but sit back and wait for the Rapture to come save the worthy. Bonus: raptured people won't be driving anywhere either, and I understand from the Prosperity Gospel that the most holy and God-loved people usually drive the most expensive, gas-guzzling cars. So hey, free luxury cars.
I can only imagine that Bachmann's version of global economics involves some nasty person or country in charge of setting the price of oil, and as president all she has to do is find that person and tell them to knock it off, in a really stern voice, and that will be the end of it. Mind you, I'd be all for that, but as a theory it seems a bit lacking. We've tried bombing countries before, under the premise that after we stopped bombing them they'd be so happy with us that they'd give us a few bajillion barrels of free oil or something, but it has yet to work out quite as intended.
So let's hope Michele Bachmann elaborates on this stupendous energy policy she has that will reduce the price of gasoline to under two bucks, and that it doesn't require us collectively selling our immortal souls to whatever it is Bachmann's got living in that head of hers. Hopefully this isn't something like John McCain's secret plan to end the wars, where we only get to hear the actual plan after America votes, and we don't get to hear it at all unless McCain Bachmann wins. I think if you've got a surefire plan that would singlehandedly solve the nation's oil problems, it seems pretty tacky to say you're not going to tell anyone unless you first get to be leader of the free world.
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