RUSH: I kid you not. ‘Oil prices…’ This is from Fortune magazine. It’s from yesterday, last night, actually. ‘Oil prices are falling sharply, and that’s good news, but not nearly as good as you might think. No doubt the drop, which is…’ Let me check and see what it is. It was down to $118 earlier. We’re at $119.61 right now. So the drop-down to $119 a barrel ‘down to $120 by mid-day Monday, gives strapped consumers relief at the gas pump. Prices have dropped below $4 a gallon and could be headed toward $3.50, going by trading in wholesale futures markets. Any decline will be welcomed by Americans struggling under the burden of falling house prices, rising layoffs and stagnant wages. But,’ dadelut dadelut dadelut dadelut dadelut, ‘falling oil prices also suggest that the recession the US has so far avoided is well on its way, as consumers pull back from the spending spree that drove economic growth earlier this decade.
‘A weakening economy will mean more layoffs, further pressuring already reduced spending. ‘There is no doubt that with gasoline prices dipping below $3.90 a gallon we have a bit of a reprieve on the energy front,’ Merrill Lynch economist David Rosenberg wrote in a report Monday, ‘but the reality is that this is a chicken and egg game because the decline is reflecting the consumer recession.’ … Americans are driving 4% less now than they were a year ago, Rosenberg writes, while energy use in inflation-adjusted terms has dropped 2% — an event he calls ‘extremely rare.” Why isn’t everybody happy about this? Isn’t everything that’s happening here exactly what we have been preached to for decades we should do? We should stop driving. We should buy smaller cars. We should use less gasoline. We should stop spending so much money, period. We should start saving; we should stop consuming.
This is what the left has been telling us. Now that it’s happening, now they say it’s causing us to head into recession. Is it any wonder that people in this country are confused about what their economic circumstances are when this kind of stuff gets reported? ‘Meanwhile, the weak economy is spurring more companies to cut back. Outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas said Monday that layoff announcements jumped 26% from a month ago in July. The unemployment rate recently hit a four-year high at 5.7%. How low can it go? One unhappy fact is that a drop in the price of oil won’t bring back many of the jobs lost over the past year to the energy-cost surge. Even were gas to fall to $3 a gallon — a move that is by no means assured — no one is going to beat a path to the dealership to buy pick-ups and SUVs that are now, in many cases, being phased out. …
‘On a happier note, there is hope that the decline in oil prices has just begun.’ So look at what we got here to start the program. We got, you can’t carry urine and poop at the Democrat National Convention. We have two arms of the Drive-By Media suggesting that Obama is actually quite brilliant and on to something by telling us to inflate our tires properly, get tune-ups, we can save as much oil (i.e., gasoline) as that we would get if we drilled — which is patently ridiculous and absurd, and yet they’re circling the wagons and doing it. Now, after how many months of stress, pressure due to the high oil price, now that it has fallen from what? What did it get up to, 148, 150? Now that it has come down, 150 to 119, all of a sudden it proves we’re heading into a recession! Now, I know what the economists are saying, and this is where I think these people get a little too smart by half.
The statics that they cite are that people are using 4% less gasoline and spending 2% less overall is a function of affordability. It’s a function of price. I told you when the barrel price got up and was flirting with $150 and everybody was predicting $200, I said, ‘The market won’t support that. The aviation industry could not tolerate that. They’d go out of business.’ Well, lo and behold, we reached a tipping point, and people started buying less, for whatever reason. So when the supply is increased because people are buying less, guess what happens? The price comes down, exactly as it should, and now we’re being told that your driving less and spending less is due to the fact that you know that we’re in a recession; when in fact it was nothing more than the high prices. Now, the high prices have come down, and they’re trending even lower. A correction is taking place. And you are probably, many of you probably excited about this. Isn’t that what this campaign has been about? The seminal issue in the presidential campaign has been the gas price and the Democrat Party’s reluctance to do anything about it. Now that the oil price is coming down and all the related good aspects to it, the media still has to tell us we’re doomed.