The irony of your comment is that, by the time of the election, 95 % of the electorate will realize that drilling in Anwar and off the Gulf coast, by itself, would drop the price of a gallon of gas by about 20 cents .... 15 years from now.
If we want the price to come down short-term, we need to:
1) Deal with a weakening dollar, and right now. Do you even know how, why or what the ramifications might be?
2) Regulate futures commodities in oil trading. (Even saying we are going to do that will kill off some of the steam there).
Regulation is the last thing that we need in commodities trading. It is what it is and regulation would only make it worse. The day we are arguing for less capitalism is the day we are damaging a market.
3) Stabilize the situation between Israel and Iran. Why?
4) Announce bold new objectives for reduction in use of oil as an energy source (again, the announcement alone affects the speculators). Don't disagree, but such pronouncements are simply garbage. If another plan is economically viable, it will come to the fore.
5) Consider a windfalls tax on Big Oil. They'll bitch, but they'll happily pay a few percentage points to look like they are helping out and, again, the perception is the key to the futures traders.
Socialistic trash of this nature pretty well undermines any reason for taking your points seriously.
6) Announce goals for improved refining and transportation, realistic ones for a few years out. Again, announcements of goals are just worthless and become more worthless the loftier the goals become
