Oil Closed at $129 a Barrel Tuesday - Why that's significant. [View All]

A grime milestone was reached as the price for a barrel of oil closed above $129 a barrel for the first time, Tuesday.

The significance of that number may be lost on most, but it is significant and here's why:

On September 12, 2001, crude oil closed at $29 a barrel... the day after the attacks of 9/11. While the U.S. Stock & Mercantile markets may have been closed in the U.S., the rest of the world went on without us. The price of oil rose only slightly, up just $1.55 from the day before. Oil has now risen an additional $100 a barrel since 9/11.

If you were a Republican, you might stop there and exonerate President Bush by blaming current oil prices on "9/11". But exactly 18 months later on March 11, 2003, the price of oil had climbed a mere $9 to just $37 a barrel a little over a week before the invasion of Iraq. 9/11 had NOTHING to do with the meteoric rise in gas prices that we see today.

As I noted just last month, when Texas Governor George W. Bush was still running for President in 2000, the price of gasoline hit a high of $1.49/gallon. Truckers threatened to go on strike over the high price of diesel fuel, and a petulant candidate Bush was telling everyone that if he were President, he'd tell OPEC to "open up the spigot" and increase the supply of oil to bring down high gas prices.



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There are a number of things Bush can do to PERMANENTLY drop the price of oil/fuel. I say "PERMANENTLY", because pathetic quick fixes like "halting the flow of oil into the U.S. strategic reserve", like President Bush did this past week, not knowing what else to do after the Saudi's turned him down flat, are not long-term solutions.



First off, stop devaluing the dollar by printing billions of worthless greenbacks to pay interest on the exploding National Debt

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Second, like just about everyone else, you probably noticed the price of gasoline fell dramatically just before the 2006 mid-term elections.

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$75/barrel oil and $3 gas was almost unthinkable in 2003. That was $54/barrel ago.

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($4 a gallon gas in Florida)