To the editor:
In the last 27 months we have seen the price per gallon of gasoline rise from $1.83 to almost $4, oil has gone from $41 a barrel to more than $100, gold has risen from $853.00 per ounce to $1500, corn has gone from $$3.56 to more than $6 per bushel, the number of food-stamp recipients has increased from 32 million to 43 million, and those receiving unemployment benefits has increased from 2.6 million to 6.4 million.
During this same time frame the U.S. federal government has run up deficits of $3.5 trillion, 27 times the historic level of federal-deficit increases in the entire history of the country prior to January of 2009.
Roughly $800 billion of this new debt was added as part of the "American Recovery And Reinvestment Act" of 2009 at a time when the unemployment rate was 7.2 percent. As of March 2011 the official unemployment rate is 8.8 percent although that number does not include those who are still unemployed but have exhausted their benefits.
The person who is responsible for issuing new oil drilling leases is the Secretary of The Interior Ken Salizar who, as a senator from Colorado in 2008, the last time that gas prices were $4 per gallon plus, objected to allowing any new drilling on America's outer continental shelf "even if gas prices reached $10 per gallon."
Our current Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, a former professor of physics from the University of California, Berkeley, and champion of green energy, was quoted in 2007 saying: "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe."
During the 2008 campaign, then candidate Obama was quoted saying: "Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket." And went on to say: "So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can, it's just that it will bankrupt them.'
At this same time, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has been spending $600 billion to buy Treasuries in the hope that that money will end up in the pockets of those that might spend it.
So it should come as no surprise that the U.S. dollar continues to lose value, that oil and commodity prices continue to rise and the U.S.'s role as the world's preeminent superpower continues to be diminished, it is a matter of policy.
D.M. Juhl
Marshall