The Republican majority in the house is busy working on legislation to make sure Americans can get back to work.  One example is this piece of legislation reaffirming the National Motto of “In God We Trust”.

What??

Yup, instead of working to make sure Americans can compete in the global economy or to reign in needless government spending, your newly elected Rethuglican representatives are busy pushing God down our throats.  I think they’ve forgotten the actual National Motto of “E Pluribus Unum”, which was there long before the one they’re pushing.  In fact, it was adopted in 1782 and if you didn’t know, it means “out of many, one”, signifying the joining of the states into a union.  A much more fitting motto than the more recently adopted “In God We Trust”.

In God We Trust was installed as a national motto in the 1950′s as part of the McCarthy Communism scare.  We had to prove we were different than the damn dirty Atheist commies by institutionalizing God into our nation to the point of printing it on our money and in many cases engraving it into the walls of our national and state legislatures.

And now, apparently, we need to be reminded of this.  I’m sure glad our elected officials are working hard on our behalf.  This crappy piece of legislation has no less that 56 co-sponsors.  Well, if nothing else, it gives me a lost of douche-bags who have no right to be in office.

Along with everyone, I’ve noticed the large spike in gas prices recently and have listened to the news reports blaming the turmoil in Libya and increased demand as the causes.  But something doesn’t seem right, so I decided to do a little digging for myself to see just how much oil Libya produces.  Here’s what I found.

Reports indicate that under normal conditions, Libya produces 1.2M barrels of oil per day for export and that during this recent turmoil output is down to around 500,000 to 700,000 barrels per day, so a drop of about 0.5M barrels per day for the entire world.

Now, the United States imports oil from many countries, including Libya, where during the month of December 2010 we received about 68,000 barrels per day of the nearly 11.5M barrels per day we import.  This works out to about 0.6% of the United States oil imports.  So assuming the amount coming from Libya has dropped by half, then we’ve lost about 0.3% of our oil imports.

The data came from this site:  US Oil Imports for December 2010

So, the amount of oil coming into the U.S. hasn’t really changed that much or for the entire world for that matter.  Libya just isn’t that big of a supplier.  But what about the other factors, worldwide demand and fear.  Sure, demand is increasing, but it hasn’t spiked.  We’ve all heard about the increasing demand from countries like China and India as they modernize and their middle class populations grow.  But this is a gradual thing, there’s no evidence demand has suddenly increased.

So there’s really no explanation for the large increase in oil prices and hence gasoline prices other than fear and greed.  It seems every time oil spikes and gas prices with it, we get the same rhetoric from the media, as if to placate us into believing the markets are efficient and everything is reacting as it should, instead of doing some analysis and realizing that there might just be some over-reaction in the markets and potential price gouging by the oil companies.

I for one remain skeptical.