US currently imports 13millions barrels per day. At $137 thats $650billion per year extracted from the US economy. US production is declining and demand increasing. US oil consumption per head of population is twice that of the EU countries.
Is treasure really leaving the U.S? Ink and paper are pretty cheap when the dollar bank notes are not backed up by gold reserves anymore. We'll keep printing that funny money as long as countries have real commodities to trade for it! It's pretty incredible when you think about it. The federal reserve will keep printing monopoly money and charging the U.S. gov interest for it as long as the rest of us go along with it. The loser is the worker whose buying power is nothing with all those fake greenbacks flooding the world.
It's time to get rid of the central bank. It's printing presses are killing us. I've been hearing about this phoney "oil shortage" since 1971 when they told me we only had a few years left. Guess what? They were manipulating supply to rake in profits. Thirty years later it's the same old scam. untapped oil fields lay all over the world, (the Spratley Islands, Siberia, Indonesia) but with Texas oil men in the white house there has been no incentive to windfall tax companies who have curtailed their exploration in order to drive up return.
We have enough oil to turn this place into Venus. As aircraft ops only contribute less than three percent of the global carbon footprint, Aviation operations need to receive tax-free priority and be subsidized for the public good, as they were prior the the 1978 deregulation Act (in the U.S.). Private auto transport should be the real target before Airlines are allowed to wither into shoestring outfits. We can't go on letting every ox-cart driver in the third world upgrade to a steering wheel if we want to get control of commodity markets. (no, I don't know how we're going to do that part....)
That's what I think.