Bill O'Reilly Has Grown

For several days now, Bill O'Reilly has been lambasting "Big Oil" for exporting oil products like gas and diesel at world market rates instead of selling them for less at home, so as to offer some relief to consumers. It boggles the mind how many different ways that O'Reilly's assumptions are wrong, but let's focus on a few:

- At $110 per barrel (42 gallons), every gallon of oil converted to gasoline contributes roughly $2.60 to the cost at the pump. That leaves about a buck at current prices to be divvied up by the companies who refine, store, transport, wholesale and retail the gas, all of them expecting to turn a profit so as to stay in business. That doesn't exactly strike me as a scenario for the windfall margins O'Reilly presumes are available to Big Oil.

- O'Reilly assumes that domestically-produced oil is being processed and shipped wholesale to other countries. That is just factually wrong. America's oil fields don't produce enough oil to even begin to provide for our own needs for gas, deisel and other refined products. In fact, other countries ship us millions of barrels per day, most of which we then process for our own use.

- O'Reilly simplistically conflates oil producers, which are the real source of the skyrocketing cost of gas, with everybody else in the supply chain. If O'Reilly got his wish and domestic refineries were forced to sell their product locally at below market rates, America's refineries would be driven out of business, leaving us to the tender mercies of, say, Chinese refiners. O'Reilly is strangely silent on the sense in killing one of the few growth export industries that America has left.

He either doesn't understand how the world economy works, or is so enamored at the prospect of his next appearance on The View that he doesn't care. Either way, it appears as if the heavy lifting required to defend capitalism and conservatism are beyond - or more likely beneath - him.