Best of Right Opinion

• Gary Bauer: ‘Iran Lied’
• Rich Lowry: Hold the Nobel Peace Prize
• Stephen Moore: Goodbye, OPEC
• Dennis Prager: Fear of the Left: The Most Powerful Force in America Today
• Tony Perkins: Correspondents’ Dinner Dishes Up Controversy

For more of today’s columns, visit Right Opinion.

Opinion in Brief

Stephen Moore: “We are getting very close to the day when America returns to becoming a net exporter of oil. This would reduce our trade deficit by more than $200 billion a year. Saudi Arabia is still a major player in the market that can move the world price by turning on and off its spigots. The recent spike in gas prices to more than $3 a gallon is due to Russia and Saudi Arabia’s production cuts. But the OPEC nations can no longer hold the world hostage, as they did in the 1970s when we had gasoline lines and price controls and had to bow to the Saudi oil sheiks. What a difference a president makes. Trump has been all in on encouraging fossil fuel production. He’s freeing up federal lands in places such as Alaska for drilling, allowing permits for new pipelines and relaxing some of the anti-fracking regulations that were enacted in the Obama years. … One idea that is floating around on Capitol Hill now is to use the royalties and lease payments from drilling on federal lands to reduce the trillion-dollar annual budget deficit. This is essentially free money to Uncle Sam, and by some estimates these payments could exceed $1 trillion over the next decade. Why not? Only a few years ago, Barack Obama told the nation that we ‘consume 20 percent of the world’s oil, [but] we only have 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves.’ He was only off by well more than an order of magnitude on our nation’s share of world supplies. Trump has always had a much more optimistic and realistic worldview. He says he wants to ‘make America energy dominant,’ and after a little more than a year of his presidency, we are on our way.”