Back to Basics

PHOTOS.COM

The gold market is so thin that it won’t take much buying to push the price of bullion to $2,500 per ounce.

The arrogance on Wall Street always amazes me. I have lived through three stock market crashes, one rolling recession, near hyperinflation and what was almost an economic depression. In all those cases, Wall Street was caught unaware. People who manage financial institutions were incredulous as the events transpired.

The Street’s ignorance was on full display this month when Warren Buffett’s top investment adviser Charles Munger explained that gold is a useless relic.

On May 4, the eve of the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Munger, age 88, said: “Gold is a great thing to sew into your garments if you’re a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939, but I think civilized people don’t buy gold, they invest in productive businesses.”

Munger thinks people should either be facing a Nazi occupation or else be as stupid as cavemen in order to purchase gold. If this reminds you of the Geico cavemen commercials, you won’t be surprised that Munger is big on investing in that company.

Munger said he loves Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio, which includes Burlington Northern railroad, specialty chemicals firm Lubrizol and insurance giant Geico.

“We just have a wonderful portfolio in business, if you average them out,” Munger said. “By and large they’re doing productive, useful work.”

So confident are Buffett and his associates on Burlington Northern that in 2009, Berkshire Hathaway bought the company for $34 billion. This is just one example of Buffett’s showing faith in Barack Obama’s management of America’s economy.

Buffett and Munger forgot to consider that Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio is mostly traded in U.S. dollars. Perhaps Munger slept through the past decade. Only that would explain how he missed the worst bear market ever for the U.S. dollar and one of the biggest bull markets for gold.

When I began as the editor for Outstanding Investments in the autumn of 2000, I urged subscribers to load up on gold. Bullion was then trading for less than $280 per ounce. Today, it trades at about $1,600 per ounce.

During those same years, the value of the dollar has gone to hell. The evidence in the graph below shows the greenback’s dreadful decline.

Munger doesn’t seem to understand that when the dollar declines, even against other currencies, the purchasing power of the dollar declines. Even if we accept the Federal government’s cooked books on the Consumer Price Index, what cost $100 in 2000 costs $133 today.

Burlington Northern stock has gone from $25 per share in 2000 to $100 per share now (in large part because of the spike caused by the Berkshire Hathaway purchase). But you have to discount one-third of that increase because of the declining worth of the dollar.

Another Obama Term Will Send Bullion Soaring

Munger does not understand what the dollar will face if Obama is re-elected.

In the 1970s, dollar inflation decimated Big Board stocks. The Dow Jones industrial average hit 996 in 1966. That index stood at 742 in 1980, a loss of 25 percent.

With his reelection bid just months away President Barack Obama is painting himself as a reformer who will continue to resurrect America. Below is an excerpt from an ad released last week: (WARNING, do not watch if you have bouts of common sense or are subject to episodes of depression while seeing your country go down the drain).

“On the day Barack Obama took office, America had already lost 4.4 million jobs — an economic disaster, the worst in a generation. Some said America’s best days were behind us. And like America, he (Obama) dug deep, fought back and never lost faith in our ability to meet the challenge.”

Obama’s Plan

Obama tells us that the Republican Party is the challenge because it is mired in the past. If by the past Obama means America’s wealth and greatness, then he is correct. And make no mistake, if the President is given another four years to work out his schemes and his plans, America’s greatness will be lost and a staggering superpower will be eviscerated.

It is true that the United States was in decline before Obama’s election in 2008. However, the President has managed to cut out America’s economic underpinnings and in doing that he has severely wounded the Nation’s psyche.

One hundred years ago the U.S. was quickly consolidating its position as the richest and most powerful nation. Today it is the world’s largest debtor, and well past its economic apex.

Denial is in full bloom. Obama is commanding the largest U.S. military to wage a war that cannot be won. At the same time, the President continues to spend billions in new tax dollars on unproven clean energy.

How much longer can we support this military monster? What happens when the money flow stops?

History serves up grim answers to these disturbing questions. Rome collapsed after it became overextended and could no longer afford to pay its legions to impose Caesar’s will. Spain collapsed after its vast overseas commitments broke its treasury. And England succumbed when its treasury could no longer finance its ambitions.

To say that this cannot happen to America is to ignore history. Where we are headed is a natural consequence of where we have been.

The United States is falling victim to what historian Paul Kennedy calls “imperial overstretch.” In his bestseller, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Kennedy wrote:

If a state overextends itself strategically by the conquest of extensive territories or the waging of costly wars — it runs the risk that the potential benefits from external expansion may be outweighed by the great expense of it all. This dilemma becomes acute if the nation concerned has entered a period of relative economic decline.

President Obama proclaims that the U.S. is a great power, able to force its will on the world, without regard of the cost. He has perpetuated the illusion. If you listen to the President, you would think that the United States is as much of a superpower today as it was 50 years ago.

By any measure America is in decline:

• In the 1950s and 1960s U.S.

Higher petroleum prices back up Barack Obama’s argument that renewable energy is urgently needed.

Oil at more than $100 per barrel is far too expensive. Despite President Barack Obama’s recent protestations that oil speculators are to blame for expensive petroleum, the truth is that most of the blame rests on his shoulders.

There is plenty of oil in North America. Yet Obama and his Green lobby are happy to see gasoline prices go even higher just as we hit the busy summer driving season. The reason is that higher petroleum prices back up Obama’s argument that renewable energy is urgently needed.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the famous pronouncement that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Nearly 80 years later, a Democratic President is not playing down public fears but actually fanning them. If you don’t believe me, consider the facts about North America’s vast petroleum reserves and surging production.

Canadian oil production rose to 1.6 million barrels per day (mb/d) last year. That was an increase of more than 13 percent from the year before. According to the Canadian Energy Research Institute, Alberta and Saskatchewan oil sands production will more than double to 4 mb/d in the next seven years and will reach 6.2 mb/d by 2045.

Add that in with the expected increase in both U.S. and Mexican oil production, and North America will be producing 11 mb/d by the end of this decade. That is about the same amount of oil that Saudi Arabia can produce if it opens its spigots all the way.

The 11 mb/d of oil production is a conservative estimate. Mitt Romney promises that if he is elected, he will vastly open up offshore drilling. If ever fully tapped, North America has the potential reserves to produce 14 mb/d of oil by 2020.

“North America is becoming the new Middle East,” recently wrote Ed Morse, the managing director and head of global commodities research at Citigroup.

Of course, much of North America’s energy independence will depend on who is in the Oval Office. If it is someone like Romney, who believes in free markets, I believe gasoline will be affordable again within a couple of years.

However, if Obama is re-elected and he continues to object to the import of Canada’s oil sands as well as expanded drilling within U.S. borders, petroleum prices might hit new records by the end of 2013. That will be more bad news for a shaky U.S. economy and will only further weaken America and the greenback.

After all, shortages and panics happen all the time. They certainly don’t require a U.S. President to get them going.

My First Lesson In Fear Economics

In the autumn of 1972, Alberta’s bitter cold was settling in. The engine to my mother’s Mercury was idling hard when the gasoline pump clunked to a halt. I pulled the nozzle out of the tank and pushed it back into its cradle.

I fished $10 from my wallet, enough to buy the gas and still have change left over for a coffee.

After paying, I headed for the door. Before I reached it, I was called back.

The manager asked: “Do you know about the antifreeze shortage?”

“What antifreeze shortage?”

“The one that’s coming this fall,” said the manager.

UPI

Voters must stage an intervention and kick Barack Obama out of office.

No U.S. President has spent more money and had less to show for it than President Barack Obama. Yet recent polls show Obama remains the odds-on favorite for the Presidential election in less than seven months.

That could all change if the greenback continues to weaken while U.S. stock indexes continue a major retreat for the first time in three years.

The U.S. economy is gravely ill, and the tepid recovery is living on borrowed time. The vexing question: Will Obama win before the next shoe drops?

The leading indicator of the economy is the direction of the stock market. An examination of stock charts indicates serious problems for U.S. stock indexes. That tells me that big money around the world is starting to bet against the recovery that began during Obama’s first term.

Gangster movies say you can always trust the word on the street. I don’t know much about being a gangster, but I have found that you can trust the word on Wall Street.

Meanwhile, unemployment remains far too high — even if you believe Washington’s numbers. Add in the underemployed and those who have given up looking for work, and the true unemployment rate for the United States is about 15 percent.

It is true that America crawled out of a depression that began in 2008 with hundreds of billions of dollars injected into the banks, but financial institutions have not been lending most of that money. As a result, the amount of money has been growing, but it is not circulating.

Economists call this the velocity of money. It simply means how fast money changes hands. The faster money moves, the better the economy is. In this way money is like a bullet. If a bullet has enough velocity, it will bring down an elephant. If it has hardly any velocity, it can’t kill a rabbit. With more than three years in office, the President has not encouraged people to lend or spend. The good news is his poor economic leadership puts a second term for the Obama Administration in peril.

Last week, The Washington Post wrote that while polls still favor Obama over GOP challenger Mitt Romney, the President faces a serious contest:

On the two most pressing issues of the campaign — the economy and jobs — the contest is considerably more competitive, with about as many trusting Romney on the issues as Obama. Despite positive economic indicators, Americans remain deeply pessimistic about the overall direction of the country and largely consider the economy still mired in a recession. The Romney campaign is hoping to take advantage by making the contest about Obama’s performance on these key concerns.

Obama’s overall approval rating stands at 50 percent, but he draws negative marks on how he has dealt with the economy and the recent increase in gasoline prices. Nearly half of all Americans say his handling of the economy is a major reason to oppose his reelection; far fewer see it as a big reason to support his bid.

PHOTOS.COM

In March, President Barack Obama went on a two-day, four-state energy tour, proclaiming the benefits of clean energy and the evils of petroleum.

Mitt Romney has a chance at beating President Barack Obama in the November election. Much depends on whether America will swallow Obama’s Green platform.

Obama’s renewable energy plans are as much a flight of fancy as GOP Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s idea to build moon bases. The difference is that Gingrich got caught up in a daydream. Obama’s plans are for nothing less than control over America’s future.

Last month, Obama went on a two-day, four-State energy tour, proclaiming the benefits of clean energy and the evils of petroleum. He said that the Republican candidates in the GOP primary are either misguided or simply ignorant ­Luddites.

Obama joked: “Lately we’ve heard a lot of politicians, a lot of folks who are running for a certain office — they shall go unnamed — they dismiss wind power.  They dismiss solar power.”

While the President argues that investments in green energy will ease the pain at the pump and even rebuild America, there just isn’t any evidence to support his view.

Consider this from Robert Bryce’s 2010 book Power Hungry: The Myths Of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels Of the Future:

Oil is not a perfect fuel. There is no such thing. But oil is — in nearly every case — greener than any of the alternative energy forms that might replace it. No matter whether the replacement is ethanol from corn, biomass — such as wood, straw, or dung — or biofuels made from palm oil or other feedstocks, the conclusion is apparent: Oil (and if you can get it, natural gas) simply has no peers. Oil provides consumers with both high energy density and high power density. It burns cleanly. It’s easily handled at atmospheric temperature and pressure, and the number of uses for it are [sic] essentially limitless.

The crude truth from experts doesn’t deter Obama. On March 22, at the end of his energy tour, Obama said:

The point is, there will always be cynics and naysayers who just want to keep on doing the same things the same way that we’ve always done them. We’ve got a choice. … We can keep developing new energy and new technology that uses less oil, or we can listen to these folks who actually believe that the only thing we can do is drill our way out of this problem.

Obama’s latest directive seems more about getting power for himself than it does about generating power for the Nation.

Recently, syndicated columnist and noted economist Lawrence Kudlow pointed out the flaws in Obama’s mantra on energy:

As Ronald Reagan famously said, “There you go again.”

Of course, Reagan was blaming Jimmy Carter for launching false attacks during a debate. And that line was so effective, it not only helped Reagan win the debate, but a presidential election that would change American history.

But “there you go again” can apply equally to President Obama. Once again this week, the president was out on the campaign trail bashing and oil and gas companies.

SCREENSHOT

The 1952 film “Duck and Cover” taught schoolchildren to duck and cover themselves if an atomic bomb exploded.

“It’s a lousy war, kid… but it’s the only one we’ve got.”

–James Cagney as Capt. Flagg in “What Price Glory”

In the 1986 remake of the movie “The Fly,” Geena Davis’ character, Veronica Quaife, said to Jeff Goldblum’s character, Seth Brundle: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” For half a century, that is exactly what the ruling elite have been telling ordinary people like you and me.

I am dating myself on this, but I can still remember our “Duck and Cover” drills in grade school. One day, my older brother told me it was a waste of time; no amount of ducking would save me from an atomic bomb. From that moment on, I spent lots of nights worrying about the end of the world.

That was just the way our leaders wanted it. Even today, the Federal government sells fear the way Madison Avenue sells soap.

While expensive, the Cold War certainly had its advantages. Best of all, it kept everyone on edge and got us to trust in our government. After all, the government was all that stood between us and the enemy. And we all knew who the enemy was. We even knew the enemy’s plan: world domination. Nobody objected to an absolute truth: Billions of dollars had to be spent each and every year to stop the godless Red Menace.

Just how big of a threat were the Communists? Looking back, it seems they were not the warmonger heathens our leaders told us they were.

In the late 1950s, the neocons were scaring the Nation about Soviet first-strike capabilities. President Dwight D. Eisenhower knew better because of top secret U-2 flights.

Yet people like Edward Teller, known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb,” were spreading fears of America’s imminent destruction. It reached a fever pitch in the autumn of 1957 when the Soviets launched Sputnik. Teller decried the challenge from the satellite that was about the size of a beach ball as defeat worse than Pearl Harbor.

Mainstream newspapers began to report that the United States was in a dire situation. In an editorial on Nov. 10, 1957, The New York Times indicated it hoped the United States would return to “a race that is not so much a race for arms or even prestige, but a race for survival.” On Dec. 20, 1957, The Washington Post ran a front-page story with the headline “Enormous Arms Outlay Is Held Vital To Survival.”

Politicians jumped on the story. Presidential hopeful John Fife Symington Jr. argued that the Soviets would soon have at their disposal 3,000 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that could wipe the United States off the map.

Within months, U-2 flights revealed the truth to Eisenhower; the Soviet ICBM force consisted of exactly four missiles and two launch pads. (If you want to check the facts on just how weak the Soviets really were in the 1950s and 1960s, I recommend the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, by David E.

PHOTOS.COM

The industrious Little Red Hen wouldn’t share her cake with her lazy friends.

The yoke that is the welfare state has thoroughly infected America. If voters re-elect President Barack Obama, he will brainwash all Americans into thinking they are entitled to government handouts. Most Americans don’t understand that independent people are losing their way as the President crusades to build his Nanny Nation — a country so transformed that even the oral traditions that were taught for generations have been eradicated.

To be fair, it is not all Obama’s fault. In my lifetime, the United States has been moving away from its ideals of hard work, self-sacrifice and personal responsibility.

Bedtime Stories Our Children Never Hear

Some of you may remember “The Little Red Hen,” the bedtime story of an industrious chicken that lived with an indolent cat, a lazy dog and a mouse that behaved like a sloth.

I can still remember the story from half a century ago. My dad always had a glimmer in his eye, sitting at the head of the dinner table and telling us kids the fable of the cat that slept, the dog that napped and the mouse that snoozed. They only survived, said my dad, because the Little Red Hen worked so very hard.

One day, while busy in the garden, the Little Red Hen found some seeds of wheat. The hen asked her friends the following:

“Who will plant this wheat?”

“Who will cut this wheat?”

“Who will grind this wheat into flour?”

“Who will make a cake from the fine flour?”

To each question, her friends replied: “Not I.”

Finally, the Little Red Hen asked, “Who will help me eat this cake?” The cat, the dog and the mouse all shouted: “I will.”

“No, you won’t,” replied the Little Red Hen, “for I alone did all the work, so I alone will eat the cake.”

When I was a child, The Little Red Hen was a big hit at our house. But when I told the fable to my own children, they just didn’t seem to get it.

“Why wouldn’t the hen share, Daddy?” asked my little girl.

“Because she did all the work,” I replied.

“But my teacher tells us we are supposed to share,” she said.

“Sharing is good,” I told her, “but you can’t be lazy. You have to share in the work too.”

A puzzled look spread over her face. I remember being a bit exasperated, and I asked: “Don’t you read stories like ‘The Little Red Hen’ at school?”

“Not really,” she said. “Most of the stories we read are about helping each other.”

I realized that the values held sacred by my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were not even contemplated by my children or most of their generation.

Obama is accelerating America’s welfare revolution. He is finishing what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt started when he introduced the New Deal 80 years ago. Three generations later, there are fewer Little Red Hens and far too many cats, dogs and mice.

I fear that the welfare creed has become so ingrained in our culture that America will probably never extricate itself from its growing socialist grip. That may have been FDR’s intention from the start.

UPI FILE

A U.S. Marine crosses a bridge during a security patrol in Afghanistan.

America is a declining empire trying to resurrect itself through military intervention and armed occupation.

The more than $1 trillion decade with Iraq has finally ended. But neocon dreams of democracy for Iraq did not pan out. Iraq has a corrupt, shaky and ineffective government. Thousands of people continue to die in sectarian violence as Iraq wallows in a bloody civil war.

As for Afghanistan, most of the original terrorists in al-Qaida who planned 9/11 are either dead, in prison, on the run or holed up in Pakistan. Washington tells us that Pakistan is our most trusted Muslim ally, ignoring Peter Bergen’s 2011 New York Times bestseller The Longest War: The enduring conflict between America and al-Qaeda. Bergen writes that Pakistan has consistently been found to be “one of the most anti-American countries in the world.”

It seems obvious that the continued occupation of Afghanistan — a country that has defeated the armies of the Russian tsars, the British Empire and the Soviet Union — is doomed to fail.

We Need Cronkite

What makes news today are celebrity overdoses, dirt on Presidential candidates and the best new reality series. But consider what Walter Cronkite said on Feb. 27, 1968, following the Tet Offensive: “It seems now more certain than ever, that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.”

Cronkite made this statement four years into that war. America is into its second decade of fighting in Afghanistan, and even a stalemate now seems impossible.

If the goals of victory were the killing of Osama bin Laden and the almost complete destruction of al-Qaida within Afghanistan, then victory has been achieved. But if the neoconservatives still believe we can institute a democratic government in Kabul, they are either naïve or initiating wars simply for the sake of war.

For decades, our government has been arrogant in imposing Western principals and ideals. Washington cannot understand that Afghanistan, a tribal and Muslim country, will not accept Western ideals any more than we would accept a prescript declared on us by a foreign power.

Imposing On Others

I am a peaceful fellow who is past middle age. I always tried to either walk or, better yet, run away from a real conflict. But if armed Chinese soldiers occupied and patrolled the streets of my city, I would clean the barrel on my hunting rifle. I am willing to bet that a great many of you would do the same to resist foreign occupation.

Yet Washington thinks American ideals should be welcomed with outstretched arms. Some of this has to do with the experience of World War II and how Europeans welcomed the United States as a liberator.

Here is the catch: The period 1925 to 1945 was an aberration — 20 years of dictators. Consider that before Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, much of Europe had thrived for decades with democracy.

Barack Obama must love Rush Limbaugh. The Conservative talk show host that some have called the conscience of the Republican Party went off on a tangent while ignoring Obama’s Machiavellian power grab.

Rather than leading a thoughtful discussion of Obamacare and the true aims of the President to make Big Government even bigger, Limbaugh instead made obscene and bizarre comments about a female college student.

Unless you live in a cave, I am sure you have heard the story: Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University law student, addressed a Democratic panel last month in support of contraception access paid for by the Federal government.

The left argues that poor Fluke was talking only about oral contraceptives for health reasons and not for the government to pick up the tab for her to have worry-free sex. That is a stretch. The number of women who take the pill for any reason other than to not get pregnant is small.

The liberals need to be reminded of what Senator Dale Bumpers argued 13 years ago at President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial: “When someone says it’s not about the sex, it’s about the sex.” That was Bumpers’ variation on a quote attributed to H.L. Mencken: “When someone says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.”

On this, Rush is right; and I am not giving Fluke a pass on her testimony being about anything other than sex.

But unlike Rush, I am not going to call Fluke a “prostitute” or a “slut.” Most people in her age group are enjoying a healthy sex life, and a great many of them don’t want to get pregnant. (As far as I know the only person that is going to have a problem with me saying this is the pope, and I doubt he is reading.)

I do expect a great many of Personal Liberty Digest™ readers like Limbaugh and listen to his program. So I ask this: Are you really trying to say that Limbaugh has had sex only with his wives within the sanctity of his marriages – all four of them?

I defend Limbaugh’s right to say what he wants. Like him, my career exists because of our 1^st Amendment right to free speech.

But I cannot defend this statement from Limbaugh: “If we are going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

First, he should speak for himself. I don’t want to watch anybody have sex; I expect neither do most Americans.

Second, why would he say such a thing? It is an outlandish statement.

Finally, is he saying pornography is OK, but birth control is not?

I don’t need a liberal to tell me the “yuck factor” in what Limbaugh said.

I don’t think Limbaugh thinks about much besides getting more listeners and getting paid more money. And Limbaugh either cannot make sound arguments against the left because he is not a deep-enough thinker or he does not mind another term for Obama, so he is distracting the Nation from the real issues.

I think Obama is the engineer controlling a runaway train.

“This president, systematically, is doing everything he can to raise the price of energy in this country. He’s shutting down all sorts of opportunities for us to drill for oil.”
–Rick Santorum

If you think gasoline is expensive now, just wait and see the price at the pump if Barack Obama is re-elected. His policies have steadily dragged the country toward $5 per gallon. If he gets another term in office, affordable gas will be a faint memory. And that will have Obama and his Green backers tickled pink.

The Obama Administration doesn’t seem to care that every 1 cent increase in the price of gasoline costs the economy $1.4 billion. America is becoming more dependent on Muslim oil while turning its back on a half-century energy alliance with Canada. This has been made evident by the President’s rejection of the Keystone Pipeline.

When Obama was sworn into office, the price of gasoline was $1.80 a gallon. Three years into his term, prices for some Americans are approaching $5 per gallon.

That is just the way Obama likes it. Given another four years, gasoline prices could reach $8 a gallon. This is because Obama has a greater allegiance to the Green Machine that drove home his victory in 2008 and that is fueling his chances for another victory lap come November.

The specifics of what the President promised to the environmentalists if he is re-elected remain a secret. But what we know for certain is that Obama clamped down on deep-water drilling inside the Gulf, tightened Federal restrictions for onshore oil exploration and vetoed the Keystone Pipeline, a major oil artery that would secure dependable Canadian crude to a nation thirsting for oil.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) said the evidence is in, that the Obama Administration has willfully brought higher prices to the gas pump because it has put an embargo on fresh and dependable sources of North American petroleum.

“We can’t slow down global demand for oil and gas, but we can do a lot more here at home to assure that we have the energy we need and to halt skyrocketing costs,” Hutchison said. “President Obama’s policy has resulted in an unprecedented slowdown in new exploration and production of oil and gas.”

Speaker of the House John Boehner said the President has been reckless in mismanaging the nation’s energy policies.

When added up, not passing the Keystone Pipeline and “scrapping leases for oil-shale development” makes the President responsible for $5 gasoline, read a press release from Boehner.

“The Obama administration has spent more than three years blocking efforts to expand energy production and bring down gas prices, while pushing job-crushing tax hikes and taxpayer-backed loans to companies like Solyndra.”

Boehner laid out a timeline showing Obama’s purposeful drive to sending gasoline prices higher:

• Jan. 7, 2010 – The Obama administration announces new bureaucratic hurdles to American energy production that Secretary Salazar admitted “could add delays to the leasing and drilling process.” Gas is $2.67 a gallon.
• March 31, 2010 – Instead of opening new areas to energy exploration and development, President Obama blocks deep-ocean energy production on 60 percent of America’s Outer Continental Shelf. Gas is $2.80 a gallon.
• Dec. 1, 2010 – The president re-imposes and expands the moratorium on offshore energy production. Gas is $2.86 a gallon.
• Jan.