the real reason gas prices soared (they're lying)

Today I'd like to speak about my top economic priority, fighting inflation. Gas prices at the pump, energy and food prices account for half of the monthly price increases since May.

Hey, we made a mistake. Here's how we're gonna fix it. Which the government is horrible at doing.

They've raised it by 1,000%, a sevenfold increase in one year.

It's the most powerful country on the planet. Why in the world would they do that?

Every once in a while, something you learn makes you viscerally angry. Like if you had the person in front of you, you'd want to pop them.

No, I really mean it makes me mad.

Hey everyone, my name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 90 locations around North America. And today I'm talking about something that impacts all small business owners. Over the past several months, as we've seen gas prices soar, I've seen the margins and the profits of small business owners and home improvement companies and industries dramatically decrease in massive compression in the amount of profits that is coming to small business owners. This is somewhat alarming when the jobs report comes out from ADP and from the government both saying the same thing, that is small business owners, Small businesses are actually firing and laying off employees at a very high clip right now, while these massive companies on the stock market are hiring all the new jobs that are being touted by the politicians. Now, a lot of these, this margin compression is due to inflation and inflation is simply the cost of goods and services going up dramatically. And we've seen record highs over 40 year, 40 years. We have never seen inflation like this. And a lot of that inflation has to do with energy prices, energy prices, meaning fuel and gas and etc. And a lot of that has to do with geopolitical things like the war in Ukraine, as well as a lot of other things I want to talk about today because this is what I'm very concerned about. Not so much the fact that we are seeing margin compression, we're going to a recession, anything like that. I'm actually mostly concerned about the form of leadership that is being portrayed from our government. President Biden recently stood up in front of everyone, wrote an open letter also to the oil and gas companies of the United States and basically said that they should be producing more oil right now because hey, we're going through a hard time as a country and you should produce more oil. And you guys are being greedy because you're making more profits now than you have for a very long time. And specifically stated that they are making more above the acceptable profit margin for their companies. Tom, let's talk about those record gas prices. Just this morning, the President taking aim at oil companies. What can you tell us about that?

The President writing a letter to the CEOs of seven oil companies, specifically saying that Vladimir Putin deserves the credit for this spike in oil and gas prices.

Today's inflation report confirmed what Americans already know. Putin's price hike is hitting America hard.

But he is also calling on oil companies to explain their profits and specifically their refining reduction. Here's what the President writes. At a time of war, refinery profit margins are well above normal and being passed directly on to American families. And that's not acceptable.

Several things I want to talk about, and this is beyond politics because I'm actually talking more about the leadership side of things in comparison to just the political side, because from a political side there's definitely things to be said here. Now this is the thing. When President Biden says that, he's basically trying to push blame off onto someone else other than himself. Now, do I believe that President Biden in and of himself could change the gas prices? Not really. But this is what I want to make very clear. Recently in one of my videos, someone stated that the oil and gas, it's because the gas companies are trying to make money and they're making all these profits and it's horrible. And that is what's being trying to be portrayed from our government currently, because that's what's right politically. But in my opinion, this is the actual truth of the matter when it comes to gas prices and why they are so high. And why does the do these gas and oil companies, why don't they produce more oil? Why don't they just go ahead and slash their prices so we can all get a cheaper tank of gas at the pump? Well, first and foremost, I want to ask the question this, what is above an acceptable profit margin? This is like some socialist, communist type stuff where we start telling business owners and privatized business where they can set their prices and what is too much money to be making. And it's very, very alarming because in a free market these type of price issues don't happen. Because see, one thing that the government has to realize, they cannot control the profit margins or the prices of individual companies. But what they can do and they have not done is allow the free market to work. They have not allowed the drilling of new oil. They have not allowed for gas and pipelines to be built. In a free market society, if that was being done and you were making all these profit margins, guess what would be happening right now when a company makes way too much profit margin? You know what happens in a free market? Competition enters the market. Competition comes and brings that price down because there's more people willing to offer that oil for a lower price, and therefore the prices come down. But what you have done at the government level is talk about clean energy. And we're gonna penalize these oil companies so much. We're not gonna allow infrastructure, we're not gonna allow drilling, we're not gonna allow these pipelines. And that's what that has done is not allowed any new suppliers to come into the market. No one else wants to compete in the oil and gas industry. When you're trying to penalize them, make them look stupid. Stupid. And when they should be your biggest ally, your biggest partner in solving this whole oil and energy crisis is get more suppliers, make it easy to drill oil, make it easy to be able to move and transport, transport that oil. Take us off the reliance of Saudi Arabia and Iraq and Russia, for crying out loud. Who's the third largest oil producer in the world. So if you're going to cut them off, yeah, realize that you're going to have an increase in prices of oil. But if you actually want to take ownership of a problem which the government is horrible at doing, which is actually admitting, hey, we made a mistake, here's how we're going to fix. Why not just admit the fact that we need to make sure that we are energy independent in the United States? We have the resources, we have the oil. Why not just make sure that we have the free market? Rain. If you allowed and allowed legislation and allowed the rules and regulations that are keeping suppliers from starting to drill, starting to actually compete with Chevron and Shell and these other massive companies, if you took away that red tape, you would have a free market that would bring the price down. We would be energy independent. We wouldn't rely on Russia and the people in the middle, Middle east to bring us oil. And this is what makes me really unhappy, is because there is absolutely things as a leader we cannot control. The government, I don't feel like theoretically they cannot control in the micro, a war in Ukraine, that's like outside of them, they could put blame on that, that's fine, whatever. But you have to realize that things are going to happen all the time. Things outside of your control are going to happen all the time in your business, in your family and your relationships. But you have to ask yourself, what can I do. What can I do to take ownership of the fact that I can make a change in this situation? Because if you can't, you become a victim and you become constantly the person pointing at companies and people and bosses and other people in relationships and pointing always their fault. And that's a very horrible place to be because you become the victim and you have no control over your life. And so if we as the United States, the most powerful country on the planet, are going to point fingers at each other and say, oh, that person's making too much money, well, what can you do about it? You can reduce regulation and you can make it easier for there to be increased supply. The ultimate goal of the government is we need a higher supply of oil. So instead of going into the oil companies like you guys are making too much money, you need to make more oil and drill more oil and you're artificially not pumping more oil. Instead of doing that, take control of what you can do. And that is let's reduce regulation, allow new suppliers to enter the market, thereby allowing the free market to take place. If you actually believe in free market capitalism, which built this country, you'd allow more suppliers to come into the oil and gas industry and that would bring the prices down. But you're not going to get it because no one wants to enter into this legislative red tape mess that we've created. Where we're going after solar and, and wind energy and batteries, which is all fine and good, but makes up such a tiny, tiny, tiny part of the amount of energy we need in this country. We need to realize that that goal of getting energy to be, you know, eco friendly or whatever is literally decades down the road. And we can strive towards it, but in the meantime, we've put ourselves in an economic and political and really just a geopolitical like issue here with other countries that are literally our adversaries and people that we hate and hate us and we're trying to bargain with them about gas. We could become independent of this. But again, this just takes ownership. This takes a leadership that says, hey look, I was wrong about this, we jumped the gun on clean energy and we're going to allow regulation to be cut, we're going to allow new suppliers to enter the market and we're going to allow the free market to actually bring these prices down and increase supply. This is simply a demand and supply equation. We have high demand right now, everyone needs gas and people are traveling and all the rest of it while supply. We are literally cutting out Russia, our third, the Third largest oil created in the country, in the world. We're cutting them out. And then we're also reducing supply by not allowing us to drill in the United States and actually get more supply. And we're making it harder and harder for new competition to enter the market, which also would increase supply. So if you're going to push supply down and down and down at the same time that you bring demand up and up and up, if just look at a supply and demand curve, you're going to have price shock, you're going to have a massive discrepancy as the supply goes down and the demand goes up. So this is crazy in my mind, the fact that we just push blame, and it just makes me really mad as a business owner and a capitalist, the fact that our government would come and say what an acceptable profit margin is when just a couple years ago in 2020, when those same companies were losing billions of dollars and the cost of a barrel of oil was negative. It was negative. There was no one rushing to the oil companies, giving them stimulus and giving them bailouts. That was not happening. There was massive layoffs. And why in the world would they put infrastructure of hundreds of millions of dollars into refineries and building pipelines when in the next four years or the next administration, someone would come along and just cut right away? Why would they invest and invest in making more supply and creating these buildings and infrastructure? Why in the world would they do that? Makes me mad. I think it's something we can all learn from as leaders to take ownership of what we can actually control in our businesses, what we can actually control in the organizations and the relationships we have, instead of constantly pushing off blame to other people, instead of taking ownership and just making things happen ourselves. That is when you can take control of an organization, a business, a family, and that ultimately is what leads to success. And unfortunately, that's not something that's echoed in the White House.