Do you think Democrats WANT gas prices to be high, to force people to conserve and save the planet from….?

I don’t think the gas prices are the Democrats fault.

No, we will still pay because we have to go to work in order to keep this economy from crashing more.

Thats bullshit. We’d much rather they stop inflating gas prices, and have them put more effort into alternative fuel sources and stop letting the oil companies squash any viable clean-burning vehicle.

1. The high gas prices are because of the oil companies. That’s not the democrat’s fault at all.
2. If that’s the democrat’s plan, then they’re going to be disappointed… gas prices have more than doubled in the past decade, and I don’t see much more conservation or alternative energy use.

Its not any parties fault that gas prices are high and there is little either party can do to bring down prices.

As long as we depend on foreign sources of oil, the price of oil/gas will always be out of our control. If we are not willing to increase our own production or find a reliable alternative, we will never break free from our growing reliance on foreign oil.

Remember, the US is not the only nation competing for oil the oil we buy overseas.

NO

It is simple economics: the gas prices are SET INTERNATIONALLY BY THE SUPPLY AND DEMAND

A slightly increased supply in the US wouldn´t do much against the rising demand from China and India

Yes. They think higher cost will make a difference. What they don’t realize is the difference is minimal. Know one goes for Sunday drives just for the hell of it. It’s unavoidable work-and-back driving that controls the great majority of our gas use.
It will probably kill vacations and hurt the tourism economy.
This wont even come close to saving our planet from socialism… I mean global terror….. I mean cyclical planetary warming.

factories and power plants contribute more to global warming than cars

No but oil companies want high gas prices so they can have more money

Yes! Obama even said as much last week. He said he wasn’t concerned by the high price of gas he was concerned with how fast the price increased.

right now the democrats want high gas prices because it hurts the economy. bad news for the economy is good news for their candidate

global warming is a myth – the earth’s temp has decreased a couple of degrees

Two things to consider.
1.
Oil companies now have permission to drill on government owned land.
The catch?
The governemnt wants up to 17.5 %.
That’s more than the profit earned by oil companies.
So, that has to be tacked on to the price.

2.
If oil companies could drill right now, in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast, where large oil deposits are known, it would provide gas at the pump, in one year.

Personally, I don’t think it will happen this year.
(No credit for Bush)
Maybe, more likely next year to make a hero of Obama as president.

Not for that reason, the liberals want an excuse to nationalize the oil companies.

Environmentalist loath the free market as it leaves them out of the equation. They are higher-than-thou busybodies who live in ivory towers and blindly ignore their own fallacies. Like the clumsy kid who took his football home unless he was allowed to play.

The real problems are the emergence of India and China as industrialized nations and the weakening of the dollar.

They are going through the equivalent of what we went through during the industrial revolution and that puts oil in greater demand.

Plus, our dollar has become so weak due to our massive and debt (a great deal of it owed to China) and massive spending in Iraq. Our economy is being kept afloat by artificial means.

The Bush admin. and the GOP has been disastrous for us economically. They have spent like drunken sailors on leave.

It has nothing to do with liberals, although I am sure the GOP would like people to believe that to take the heat off of them.

I think anyone who believes the drivel that Democrats want oil prices to be high, and are keeping them high, really has no clue what is making gas prices high in the first place.
This is your cause:
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=USDEUR=X#chart1:symbol=usdeur=x;range=my;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined
This will tell you what the cause is, of the above chart:
http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~jfrankel/CampbellM&CPnberNov.pdf
And this is just supporting data:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/oils-surge-centers-sliding-value/story.aspx?guid={C39476EA-069F-4921-9BED-4BB134D0E6B0}

A direct quote from Al Gore is that he said gas should cost $6 a gallon to slow people from driving…..guess who it will slow….not him and his SUV’S or private jet…or $16.000 a month electric bill…..

Liberals want it both ways.

They want to exploit the discontentment of people unhappy with gas pricing; just like Iraq, liberals had as much influence on American politics as NAMBLA, until going negative with the war suddenly validated socialism (to them only of course).

Liberals are the reason we can’t drill for oil in the USA, yet, they want to blame their opposition for relying on foreign oil

Its similar to the health care crisis- liberals support trial lawyers and their frivolous law suits and insane jury awards BUT the only bad guys in health care are only corporations- drug and insurance companies.

Possibly you give liberals too much credit, most of them just repeat whatever the NY Times and moveontosocialism.org tells them to say and think. Liberals really don’t have the ability to make objective decisions and think things through on their own. Mostly its emotional reactions, always with corporations as the problem and more government as the answer.

I think in some cases, yes. From an economics course, I once heard a very liberal minded professor express his theory that taxes are used to inflate the cost of commodities to discourage their use. The intent is- taxes are being used to alter people’s behavior. So yes- I think some democrats want high prices to help shape behavior. It also helps their chances of winning elections. High prices for all kinds of commodities draw down public sentiment. That makes their arguments seem more appealing.

i think some parties want cigarette taxes to go up so more people will try to quit (see new york state), increasing the general level of public health. i think that artificailly pricing some products higher will discourage consumers from using them as much as they did before, or at least consider alternatives.

wanting prices to be artificially high (this is what your question seems to suggest, a desire for this rather than high prices in response to market forces, supply and demand, etc.) doesn’t seem on its own merits to be worth wishing for, however if there is some benefit to be had due to the decreased use of a certain product, maybe that can be looked at as the cloud’s silver lining.

prohibition only led to consumers becoming inventive enough to concoct their own solutions… maybe there is something to be learned here.