Obama's Oil Plan Is Silly...But More Importantly, Fishy

Obama's "plan" to get tough on speculators putatively driving up the price of gas is a waste of everybody's time, it won't achieve lower gas prices. That we know. But what is extra special fishy is the $52 billion price tag reported in the press. Seriously, $52 billion? That is nearly twice the size of the entire Department of Energy's 2011 budget request and 168x larger than the 2012 budget request of the CFTC, the agency that is tasked with carrying out Obama's "plan."

Again...seriously? Did anybody in the press catch this ridiculously out-of-whack number and ask a single question about it, or did they just regurgitate the White House talking points? Seriously, Obama is going to spend twice the entire Energy Department's budget on policing a few oil traders??

We know the plan is phony, a political ploy to make Obama seem like he's doing something, but you'd think the White House would be smarter than to tack an outrageously phony number on the plan that would instantly discredit it. Or perhaps not. Perhaps these guys are such lunatic lefties that no amount of money attached to any problem whatsoever seems out-of-whack. Or perhaps they are so confident in the complicity of press to show not a whiff of curiousness or investigative instinct, that they didn't fear using the $52 billion number. Or perhaps...both. Yikes. November can't come soon enough.

UPDATE: Scratch this whole post...it comes down to CNBC's innumeracy. The number is $52 million, which, for instance, Bloomberg gets right. My bad for assuming that CNBC, the leading financial news network, could keep it's billions and millions straight.