A few years ago, fans of the New Orleans Saints football team attended home games with paper sacks over their heads, because the team's performance embarrassed them. They loved the team, but they felt compelled to show their displeasure.
Pass the paper bag until US elections are over.
US government executives cry that oil prices are too high. Although they no longer demand audiences with OPEC officials and plead for more production and lower prices, clearly they want OPEC to pull prices back below the US $22 to $28 band.
Members of Congress wail about gasoline prices that climbed from 90¢ a gallon to $1.50, but they seldom mention the $1.20 price before the oil-price crash or what Europeans pay for gasoline. They forget the all-time record high price at $2.47 a gallon in 1981, with inflation.
Politicians complain about oil-company profits, but they neglect to mention oil-company losses that put a lot of good men and women into the job-hunting market. Maybe, just maybe, if they had been more worried about low prices, some of the wells and fields that producers had to shut down and abandon might be producing today, providing a buffer against these high prices.
The plain truth is that anything you might hear US politicians say about lower oil prices is simply intended to curry favor in the polls - not the result of serious thought or any macro-economic expertise on the part of the speaker.
Citizens of the United States are not writhing in fiscal agony because of gasoline prices today. In 1981, prices persuaded drivers to dump big, gas-guzzling cars, load classified-ad pages with cheap 5-mile-per-gallon recreational vehicles that no one would buy and look to Japanese gas-miser transportation. But that's not happening now.
Look at the evidence. Auto sales in the first 2 months this year were 13% higher than in the same 2 months last year when gasoline prices were dirt-cheap. Light trucks still account for nearly half of all vehicle sales, and sport-utility-vehicle sales continue to set records.
Didn't President Bill Clinton, shortly after taking office, try to push through a carbon tax that would raise oil prices? And didn't Vice President Al Gore, in his book Earth in the Balance, say that taxing gasoline - higher prices - was the best way to smother consumption?
Politicians who blindly scream for lower prices while denying access to public lands and declaring unreasonable moratoria on offshore drilling are an embarrassment. Maybe they should be given the sack.