Investors worry stocks could plunge 40 percent if Bernie Sanders wins the White House
UBS Wealth Management senior portfolio manager Alan Rechtschaffen breaks down the numbers.
Are you upset because you have too much money and don’t know what to do with it all? Would you be happier if you could spend a lot more cash to fuel your car, heat and cool your home, keep the lights on and run everything else that requires energy to operate? Would you like the cost of everything you buy to jump dramatically?
Are you angry because too many Americans hold jobs? Would you like to send billions of dollars more from American consumers to foreign countries so they could create jobs for their citizens and strengthen their economies?
If you answered yes to all of the above questions, socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. – a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination – is supporting legislation that would make these nightmare scenarios a reality. A bill sponsored by Sanders and socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., would ban hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, by the year 2025.
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If Sanders becomes president, you can bet that he would work hard to turn this destructive legislation into the law of the land.
Fracking is the key to the energy revolution that has turned America into an energy powerhouse and drastically reduced our need to import oil and natural gas from other countries.
America gets half its oil and two-thirds of its natural gas from fracking. The abundance of our domestic energy – responsibly and safely produced through fracking – undergirds our entire economy. That’s because everything manufactured, grown and transported requires energy.
Fracking is a process by which a combination of water and fluids is injected into rock thousands of feet underground, releasing the hydrocarbons (oil and natural gas) trapped within. The fluid is so safe that former Colorado governor and unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate John Hickenlooper, who is a geologist, actually drank it. A publicity stunt, sure, but it made the point.
Fracking is not new. Americans discovered it during the Civil War and it became common in the 1930s. But in recent years we’ve gotten really good at it. We’ve perfected the technology, and now we produce more oil and natural gas than any other nation on Earth. This could not have happened without the widespread use of fracking.
Taking more than 50 percent of our energy out of production would be a disaster. Basic economics tells us what happens to the price of something when the demand stays constant and the supply is drastically cut. Prices would skyrocket for everything requiring energy to produce – meaning everything we buy, not just energy itself.
Let’s go back to 2008 when oil prices hit $146 a barrel and the average gasoline price was $4.11 a gallon. These expensive prices weren’t limited to filling up your car. The cost of food went up. The cost of manufactured goods went up. We vacationed less. The economy was in a nosedive.
We survived, and have rebounded under President Trump’s watch. It seems the progressive left didn’t learn any lesson, and Democratic politicians in Washington are proposing to do this again. Only deliberately.
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“The science is clear,” Ocasio-Cortez recently said, falsely claiming that fracking is a national danger and “is destroying our land. It is destroying our water.”
Sanders, who has the same scientific background and foundation in engineering as AOC – meaning none at all – added that fracking is “highly explosive.” This makes as much sense as saying the Earth is flat, the moon is main of cheese, and humans will never be able to fly.
We have roughly 2 million fracked oil and natural gas wells operating right now in America. There is no evidence that fracking is dangerous or harmful. As with all things, fracking has not gone absolutely perfectly 100 percent of the time, but problems have been few and far between.
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More than 4 million people in the U.S. work directly in fracking. Many millions more are employed indirectly because drilling equipment needs parts, workers need food and towns need doctors. Entire communities that are not hotspots for campaigning Democratic politicians and jet-setting eco-conscious activists are thriving because of fracking.
In rural communities that neither Sanders nor AOC will ever visit asking for votes – places like Artesia, N.M., and Williston, N.D. – there is fracking that generates opportunity and prosperity. There are families building lives, raising kids, forming communities.
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Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez should meet the people whose incomes depend on fracking – on their turf – and tell them how the ban on fracking that would destroy their livelihoods would be absolutely wonderful. And I invite them to tell the people of our nation why they want to make life immeasurably more expensive and difficult for all Americans.
As he campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination, I call on Sanders to tell the truth: tell American families that if he is elected he will pick their pockets to send their money abroad to countries willing to use fracking and other techniques to produce the energy we need and sell it to us. Because whether he admits it not, this is what he wants to do.
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