Jimmy Carter and Hamas

WI, I never claimed Jimmy Carter was the father of price controls. You are confusing energy crises, and bringing what Nixon did in 1971 or 1973 has nothing to do with Jimmy Carter's feckless policy in 1979. They are TWO DIFFERENT discussions. Calling me wrong because I didn't muddle presidencies and shift the conversation to Nixon is ridiculous.

You'll get no argument from me. Price controls were bad idea when they were instituted by Nixon. They were also a bad idea when they were Carter's immediate response in 1979. What Nixon did was actually worse and had longer-reaching effects. But I wasn't having that discussion, so to be sarcastic and call me wrong for not giving a history of energy policy throughout the 1970s, when i am having a conversation about Jimmy Carter and 1979 is ridiculous.

Once again, though, even with your shifting the conversation and muddling 1973 and 1979, you are wrong. Carter proposed removing price controls AT THE END of his administration. It was typical Jimmy Carter: "A little too little, a little too late." It was actually Reagan who deserves the credit on this one. He removed all price controls on oil (and the whacked system that had come into place in which not all crude was priced the same). He did this in 1981. Carter was flailing away at the end, and his proposal was a response to the fact that inflation was out of control and he didn't have a clue about what to do about it.

Once again, facts are facts. When Carter came into office, the price of a barrel of crude was $14. When he left it was $35. This wasn't ENTIRELY Carter's fault. And I don't have the inclination to give you a history lesson you are going to ignore. I might bore Spnited, too. But his "energy policy" was a mess on every level and made things worse. Among other things, it include, an $88 billion synfuels subsidy program, which was enacted and amounted to $88 billion pissed away.

The guy was living in la la land, which was why things became such a mess. In the malaise speech I keep linking to, he suggested that high oil prices weren't the problem. It was American's fault for their tendency "to worship self-indulgence and consumption." That is how he came up with his conclusion that Americans suffered a "crisis of confidence." It probably never occurred to him that their president was a major source of it.

His energy policy amounted to putting solar panels on the White House and putting a wood-buring stove in the White House. Reagan got rid of both of them -- as he did the price controls (sorry, Carter was NOT the president who did this, despite some rhetoric at the end of his presidency when he was flailing away at an inflation problem) -- and allowed the market to deal with the fact that oil is a fixed commodity, we can't control the price, there is a great deal of demand, and therefore prices are going to be a function of supply and demand. Reagan was lucky because OPEC fell apart, so there was plenty of supply in the 80s, and demand actually spiked off a bit, so prices were relatively low. But it wasn't any batshit presidential policy--including a half dozen of Carter's crazier ideas that never saw the light of day--that could do that. It was the marketplace.

Carter never understood that. If you want to discuss the energy crisis of 1979, which was where we WERE--and how Carter made it worse--I am happy to. If you want to muddle history, this will drag all over the place. And I don't have the time right now, as fun as it is.

 

JR, What you quoted isn't me saying anything of the sort. I NEVER SAID that Carter was the president who first instituted price controls on oil. Never. I never would have, because I am as critical of the failed policy of Richard Nixon (and subsequently Ford and Carter who didn't end the price fixing and the Kafkaesque pricing that had different barrels of oil costing different amounts based on political backroom dealing) as anyone on earth.

But Nixon's price controls, and the problems they created, have nothing to do with the conversation that had been going on on this thread. I'd be happy to talk about Nixon, if that is what the thread had been about. But that is 1973, not 1979. And that is muddling the conversation we were having. We were talking about Carter in general, and that somehow devolved into the crisis in 1979 and Carter's response. And Carter's immediate responses were several fold. First we cut off all imports from Iran (no criticism of this). Then he instituted more price controls as a short-term solution. Then he gathered a bunch of economic advisers and started flailing. Then he made that speech, where he said, "OK, we should get rid of all price controls... but it's the oil companies that are gouging us, so we need to tax the hell out of them." In between, he had all kinds of batshit ideas that luckily Congress didn't sign off on. I could dig up a chronology of exactly what he did and how it made things worse, but as I said, the bottom line is exactly as I typed it. The price of a barrel of oil was $14 when Carter entered office. It was $35 when he left office. How much of that was actually Carter's fault is open to some debate. But he has generally been acknowledged as a failure who made things worse and *was* responsible for a chunk of that -- the skewed sample of people who dominate this board aside.

 

Someone takes four words to post bullshit? Sorry that I can't dispell it with four words.

How's this for four words: You're a swell guy.

 

Nah. I'll call you a jackass. Five words. Must be true.