Gene Epstein of Barron’s devotes his latest “Economic Beat” column to some key reasons he’s thankful as 2014 winds down.
I also give thanks for an oil price that fell below $70 a barrel Friday, mainly because it bodes well for general prosperity, especially for low- and middle-income households—and yes, because it vindicates my forecast early this year (“Here Comes $75 Oil,” March 31).
Amy Jaffe, executive director of energy and sustainability at the University of California, Davis, is thankful for lower oil prices’ “Robin Hood effect.” She says it is redistributing income to people of limited means from “Saudi princes and oil billionaires”—and, we might add, from billionaires like Vladimir Putin. While Jaffe notes that cheaper oil is hardly welcome news to many folks in oil-producing states, selling oil for $70 does not spell hard times. “It will be more like going from swimming in champagne to just drinking it,” she says.
Citigroup’s global head of commodity research, Edward Morse, says a $70 price is unlikely to slow U.S. oil production very much. As he declares in a recent report: “Many current assessments of U.S. shale costs could be wildly underestimating the robustness of U.S. oil production growth.”
GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY economics professor Donald Boudreaux gives thanks for “social media that exposes to wide audiences the behind-the-scenes politics of social engineers such as Jonathan Gruber.”
If you haven’t seen the video that went viral, you owe it to yourself to catch the YouTube of MIT economist and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber candidly admitting that the selling of the Affordable Care Act grossly violated truth-in-labeling standards. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” observes Gruber, “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”
While the Leonard Davis Institute, under whose auspices Gruber made these remarks, tried to pull the video, others made sure that it became available for public consumption, for which we should give thanks.