The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
This is the Pro America Report, great to be together. And it is… Well, there’s a ton happening in Washington, DC, in the swamp, but that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about something else that has to do with… Well, I think the best indicator I can see of where the country is in terms of their frustration.
So don’t forget, by the way, visit proamericareport.com, Proamericareport.com, and there you will find all the links to these segments, as well as you will find a box to fill out and sign up for the Daily WYNK. What You Need to Know is an email that goes out at 08:00 a.m. East Coast Time, 05:00 a.m. Pacific Time, into your inbox, and you will get three or four key things. One, you’ll get some articles for the day that highlight what I think is important. Number two, you will get some links to commentary. So more, instead of stories, it’ll be editorials, opinions. And number three, you’ll get my take on one of the key issues of the day.
And that’s where we get to what we are going to do right now. I was actually preparing, you may know, I do a three minute radio commentary – runs at the end of the show – each day, I do a daily radio commentary on about 400 stations, and I have to record them about two weeks in advance. So you sort of have to guess what the issues are going to be. So if I’m recording a commentary yesterday for two weeks from now, three weeks from now, you’re kind of guessing what the future will be. But some things you can talk about that will have saliency into the future.
And so sometimes I talk a little bit more generalities on this. But one of the recordings I was working on today had to do with gas prices. And here’s what you need to know, people that don’t care at all about politics. I’m not even talking about the people that don’t care for either party or anything but still care. I’m talking about people like that I know over my life they just don’t care. They don’t want to be bothered. They’re not even thinking about it. But what they care about is building their lives. And what they care about is how things are going.
And so in the last about three weeks since right before Thanksgiving, I have had four or five conversations with people like that, friends from high school, one buddy from College, another cousin of mine. And the one issue that comes up every time in some form, not always. the first thing, is gas prices. And people now a couple of those people, my brother is one, he has a truck. And so when he fills up his truck, it’s more than $100 to fill it up. And that makes him nuts, right? But some of the other people just have a minivan for their kids. But they’ve noticed the massive increase in gas prices.
Now, what you need to know is it didn’t have to be like this, right? This is a conscious decision to change the policies of the previous administration because under Trump, and you could debate whether you wanted all of this, but the reason we got energy independent is that we had sort of an all of the above idea on energy. We did public lands where we could safely drill – go for it. We did fracking where we could figure out how to make fracking work, especially Pennsylvania and Ohio and other places – go for it. We did nuclear, there was some solar, there was some of the renewables, but primarily, we knew if we could get the regulatory framework out of the way we have in this country resources, gas, natural gas, we have oil all over in the Gulf.
Keystone Pipeline, by the way, I’ve been on record, it wasn’t my favorite thing. In some ways, the Keystone pipeline was a way for multinational companies to move product through the United States and down to the Gulf. Not necessarily benefiting us. You talk to our friends in Montana, they would say Keystone Pipeline is bad for them because it bypasses them. But be that as it may, what we were doing was trying to increase in any way with any sort of reasonable means, the amount of oil and gas in the market, out of the market, that we were selling.
And so for the first time in decades, America became an exporter of oil and gas. Biden comes in and marches through, mostly by executive order and executive management regulations that have dramatically pulled back our ability to be energy independent. This is not a supply chain problem. This is not a problem with China, the Communist regime. This is a self inflicted wound.
And here’s the real danger about it. Once you get in a position where you don’t have enough oil and gas, you have to rely on OPEC and others. And so it’s geopolitically a problem. But here’s the real rub and the reason why I think more and more Americans feel like things are off balance. If your gas prices go up a dollar, two dollars a gallon, you can’t escape that. In other words, you can if you’re rich. If you’re rich, you can travel less, or you can build it in as a business expense.
But if you’re a normal person driving your kids to school, you can’t not drive your kids to school. If you’re a normal person and you need your car for work or you need to drive to work, you can’t not drive to work. I mean, you’re boxed in. It is literally. Well, that’s not true. It’s not literally. It is figuratively, but realistically, a tax on normal people because all of us have to pay that and we can’t escape it. And that’s a conscious decision.
As I was preparing my commentary, I was reading the details, the choices the Biden administration made in just under a year. The choices they’ve made that directly cost the middle class, the lower class, the working class, small businesses. It’s extraordinary! And even in the places where say fuel prices go up, say on Airlines, on jet fuel, that still gets passed on to us if you want to travel.
So what you need to know is the decision to make our gas prices go up was a decision. I mean, no one sat there and said, let’s make go up to $5 a gallon, but they could see what they’re doing would have that impact. And it’s devastating for people. It’s devastating.
And frankly, there’s a lot of other things you can do. You can say dumb things about woke culture. You can debate abortion, all that stuff. When you start banging away on people’s wallet because of gas prices? Ask Jimmy Carter how that turns out. Doesn’t turn out well.
All right, that’s what you need to know. Got to take a break. I’ll be right back. It’s Ed Martin here in the Pro America Report. Back in a moment.
