Wednesday, May 19, 2004
Cato: Democrats are right
This week, the Cato Institute released a statement agreeing with Senate Democrats that President Bush should release oil from the Strategic Oil Reserves.
Jerry Taylor, Cato Institute Director of national resource studies gave the following statement:
"The Democrats are right -- with gasoline and world crude prices surging, it only makes sense to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to the greatest extent possible. The SPR is an expensive insurance policy against a very low probability event -- a catastrophic interruption in U.S. crude imports. While the case for an SPR is dubious because private insurance is easily available (if anyone wants to insure against such an event, the petroleum futures market is always there), if we're going to have an SPR, we should manage it to maximize its returns to the taxpayer. And that means making the SPR available during more likely events such as the temporary but very real price surge we're experiencing at the moment."
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Jerry Taylor, Cato Institute Director of national resource studies gave the following statement:
"The Democrats are right -- with gasoline and world crude prices surging, it only makes sense to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to the greatest extent possible. The SPR is an expensive insurance policy against a very low probability event -- a catastrophic interruption in U.S. crude imports. While the case for an SPR is dubious because private insurance is easily available (if anyone wants to insure against such an event, the petroleum futures market is always there), if we're going to have an SPR, we should manage it to maximize its returns to the taxpayer. And that means making the SPR available during more likely events such as the temporary but very real price surge we're experiencing at the moment."
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