LATEST RIGHT-WING FACEBOOK MEME: CRAP ECONOMICS

Saw this earlier tonight in my fb news feed:

This is pretty easy to debunk quickly, off the top of my head.

Because oil is a global market, it is highly unlikely that any US action by itself could have had such a profound impact on the price of gasoline. Of course, if you check out the dates at the bottom of the chart, you'll see that they coincide rather perfectly with the recent financial crisis, which happened to have put the brakes on the entire world economy. It doesn't take much of a brain to understand that when nobody's buying anything, producers will use a lot less fuel for production and transportation of goods; conversely, when consumers are short on cash, they're not going to be driving so much to get to the places where they would be buying things in better times.  That is, a bad economy means less oil usage.  And a really bad economy means a whole hell of a lot less oil usage.  Economics 101: a massive demand drop, with supply remaining more or less the same, necessarily equals a massive price drop. So, in the same way that the Asian financial crisis of the late 90s gave us $.80/gallon gas for a while, the crisis of 2007-2008 also gave us cheap gas for a while.  And, oh yeah, speculators.  That is, this doesn't have a damned thing to do with offshore drilling bans.

I'm really starting to believe that Republicans just don't understand economics anymore. Certainly not the economics of oil.  What's depressing is that most of us don't understand economics in the first place, which allows this voodoo shit to gain traction.  Oh well, at least you know the truth.  Impress your friends with superior knowledge when conservatives push this crap logic on you.

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