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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Koligman who wrote (17112)	4/20/2010 10:57:10 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

OT ill it be a better time when the Saudis and others use your 'competitive advantage' to squeeze us for all they can? They can't squeeze us without causing tremendous harm to themselves. If they try not selling to the US, but sell just as much to the world it makes not difference to us. We just make up for the lost Saudi oil by buying more from other sources, while those who buy from other sources now use more Saudi oil, or alternatively we buy the Saudi oil from others after its first sale by the Saudis. If they try to massively reduce supply to the world, than they lose too much income, if they keep it up they threaten their own internal stability and generally hurt themselves more than they hurt us. Meanwhile they reduce the long term demand for their product because their action would encourage alternative supplies of oil, conservation and non-oil sources of energy and fuel. I suppose if the Saudi government acts with the mentality of a suicide bomber they could indeed hurt us, but while they are plenty of reasons not to like the Saudi government much they are usually more rational than that. And if we decide not to use imported oil, we would be causing the harm to ourselves without having to wait for the Saudis or anyone else to do it. $200/bbl oil would be less harmful than trying to replace most of our oil use with alternatives over a time scale of less than maybe half a century.