Larry Kudlow writes King Dollar Will Cut Oil Prices in Townhall.  While he writes about higher oil prices actaully being a mere reflection of a weaker dollar, he also notes how we are falling prey to bad information that is both believed and disseminated from our highest officials with no challenge from a gullible media.

Excerpt:

What’s particularly galling about Obama’s riff is his constant use of a false statistic. The president argues that America uses more than 20 percent of the world’s oil, although “even if we drill in every square inch of this country, we still only have 2 percent of the world’s known oil reserves.”

This is just patently untrue. According to the Institute for Energy Research, when you include oil shale, the U.S. has 1.4 trillion barrels of technically recoverable oil. That is enough to meet all U.S. oil needs for about the next 200 years, without any imports.

With the technology revolution in the energy business, including horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking, the old idea of proved oil reserves that Obama keeps using is replaced with the new concept of recoverable resources. Many thanks to Investor’s Business Daily for its story that the U.S. now has 60-times more recoverable oil reserves than Obama claims. And that doesn’t even include the natural-gas shale revolution, which has already slashed electricity prices for homes and businesses and will eventually be used more and more in transportation.

HKO comments:

There is a pattern of bad economic polices emanating from bad data.  The health insurance police was based on a high number of uninsured that has turned out to be much lower.  The call for a more equitable income distribution is also based on skewed and misleading data.  Our leaders pollute data with political expectations.

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