Why must you as American taxpayers pay anyone else for oil when you have plenty of oil of your own?

Answer 1

Blame the environmentalist, we have more oil here then in the Middle East but because of our dramatic liberals we just get to use other peoples oil. well stated!!!! ...the reason the oil industry didn't build any new refineries for two decades was that they weren't needed. In fact, right up until last year oil refining was a persistently depressed business, plagued by overcapacity. In the wake of the energy crisis in the 1970's, ordinary people in the United States began conserving energy... because they wanted to save money. Cars, in particular, became much more fuel-efficient. Meanwhile the oil industry was subject to "refinery creep," the tendency of refining capacity to grow through incremental improvements even when no new refineries are built. The result was excess capacity and squeezed margins, right up to the late 1990's.