Kerry announces plan to control cost of gas
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — With gasoline prices at a record high, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is calling for the government to stop pumping oil into its emergency stockpile.
Kerry says that’s one of several steps President Bush could take to slow the soaring cost of gasoline, which reached a national average of $1.80 a gallon in the past two weeks, according the private Lundberg Survey.
“If it keeps going up like that, folks, Dick Cheney and President Bush are going to have to car pool to work together,” Kerry said at a fund-raiser Monday night in San Francisco. “Their approach to the solution to these high gas prices is just to make sure that nobody has a job to drive to.”
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said last week that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve must have enough resources to respond to an emergency disruption of oil supplies. He said the government would not stop filling the reserves, located in Texas and Louisiana, just because of high oil prices.
He renewed the White House request that Congress pass an administration-supported energy bill designed to provide new tax breaks and other incentives to spur exploration and production.
Kerry’s campaign aides said the Democratic candidate wants the United States to pressure the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to increase production and apply diplomatic pressure to the member nations to reduce prices.
If elected, Kerry also would seek to enact a national fuel strategy aimed at reducing price disparities across the country, the aides said.
Kerry was unveiling his gas price reduction plan Tuesday at the University of California, San Diego. San Diego has the highest gasoline prices in the country, averaging $2.12 for a gallon of regular unleaded.
Bush’s campaign charges that if Kerry had his way, gasoline prices would be even higher. Vice President Cheney said in a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington on Monday that Kerry once supported a 50-cent-per-gallon increase in gasoline taxes. Kerry now says he opposes such a tax increase.
Current gasoline prices are at record levels in constant dollars, but not when inflation is taken into account. Using today’s dollar, motorists paid the equivalent of $2.90 a gallon in March 1981, the government has said.
Typically high demand during summer could drive prices even higher, although they could drop as demand eases going into the fall when Americans are most paying attention to the election.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, at a Senate hearing in Washington last week, disputed claims by several Democratic senators that the diversion of 150,000 barrels of oil a day into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has added to economic pressures that are causing crude and gasoline costs to increase.
While some economists have cited such a link, others conclude that the amount of oil being taken off the market “is fairly negligible” in a global oil market of 86 million barrels a day, Abraham said.
Abraham said that filling the oil reserve to its maximum 700 million barrels was “a critical national security objective” that Bush has determined should not be interrupted. The reserve currently contains about 645 million barrels.
The San Francisco fund-raiser brought in about $3 million for Kerry’s campaign, according to John Roos, a finance co-chairman for his California campaign. Kerry spoke for about 25 minutes, criticizing Bush’s record on the economy, foreign policy and civil rights.
“I think it is a disgrace that this president and his party traffic in prejudice against gays and lesbians and others in this country,” Kerry said, winning big applause in a city that conducted thousands of same-sex weddings this year before being ordered by a court to stop.
Kerry says gay couples should have all the legal rights of married couples, but would stop short of allowing them to marry.
After discussing gasoline prices and the economy Tuesday, Kerry was to lunch with donors in San Diego before attending a gala at the Los Angeles home of billionaire supermarket mogul Ron Burkle.
Ben Affleck, Leonardo DiCaprio and Barbra Streisand were expected to attend, with singer James Taylor performing.
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