President Obama's Approach To Doing Something About Rising Gas Prices Is Only To Look Good

Let me get it out of the way at the start (again). I told you so.

President Obama's response to problems that develop is to delegate a study of it to some group - usually he gives it to a bureacracy, often to a brand new bureaucracy. Even though we already have a bureaucracy charged with the responsibility to fix such things which HE created! This kind of response usually doesn't fix anything. They'll study it do death all the while the problem gets worse. And the fix is usually more government regulation, even when it was (as it usually is) government interference that helped cause the problem or made it worse.

This is how bureaucrats fix problems and President Obama is our Bureaucrat-In-Chief. They equate talking about a problem to actually doing something about it. I don't. They equate more government bureaucracy to actually doing something about it. I don't. They equate a solution that produces more bureaucracy and government control to an actual fix. I don't.

Take the skyrocketing price of gas. (Have you noticed it's going up? You sure did when it happened under Bush.) Here's what President Obama did about that:

1. He decided to study it when the solution is obvious ... to anyone paying attention to history. The price of oil/gas has gone up before. Our government has tried things that worked and more that didn't. Why not just do what we know works and skip the 'study' thing? In a previous blog I listed the things that history tells us(!) work so why not just do those? Doing something that has worked before won't take any time at all to address the problem. A bureaucracy to study it will most certainly guarantee it'll take a while to do anything, most likely the wrong thing.
2. He has already said that by creating a bureaucracy to study it, he IS doing something. To a bureaucrat that is the very definition of doing something positive. Even when it can't possibly produce results in the timeframe needed if it can produce real results at all. He just took responsibility away from people whose job it is to fix it. That should speed up a response!
3. There exists(!) a whole bureaucracy whose responsibility is to deal with this ... which he created! So why create a new one? Because, even though a responsible bureaucracy already exists, creating a new one to do so makes him look like he's actually doing something. Appearance is everything to a bureaucrat.

Here's what The National Review just said about this mess which is pretty much consistent with what I said in a previous blog about it. http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/265582/search-petrovillains-editors

Having them validate what I said is small satisfaction. It's not particularly satisfying because I take no pleasure in being right that our leadership will fiddle while Rome burns on this matter ... ie, they will study it to death while it gets worse and they'll likely come up with a solution that either should have been obvious in the first place, won't accomplish anything or will make the problem worse.