Ron Wyden Quotes

The Bush administration did stop filling the reserve in 2002 when it helped the oil industry. Now they should do it to help the consumer.

When I go down in my state, I see virtually none of the independent oil producers for [President Jimmy] Carter … We’ve gotten higher drilling rig counts, more dollars being spent, more activity, more profits being made by oil people than ever before. But do they like Carter? Oh no. they hate him because of his rhetoric.

We went into a recession in 2008 because of gasoline prices. The bubble burst in housing because people couldn’t pay their mortgages because of $4 a gallon gasoline.

People really feel that, when they go to the gas pump now, that the oil cartel is holding them by the legs and tipping them upside down and shaking money out of their pockets.

I don't think anyone can speculate what will happen with respect to oil prices and gas prices because they are set on the global economy.

There are growing concerns that oil companies are making too much in profits at the expense of consumers.

I think we have to ask this administration, and the President specifically, about using their political capital now to stand up for the American consumer who is getting clobbered by these gasoline and oil prices.

Fuel prices are at the center of our lives. They affect our ability to travel, stay warm, and feed ourselves.

Let us rid ourselves of the fiction that low oil prices are somehow good for the United States.

The doubling of oil prices ... is creating a more difficult environment in which to act.

This morning, prompted by increasing concerns about terrorism, oil prices reached a record high as the cost of a barrel of crude is a whopping $44.34. Wow, it seems shocking that a product of finite supply gets more expensive the more we use it. Now the terror alert means higher oil prices, which oddly enough means higher profits for oil companies giving them more money to give to politicians whose policies may favor the oil companies such as raising the terror alert level. As Simba once told us: "It's the circle of life."

The significant collapse of oil prices shows that it was previously way too high.

I think there's a point to regulating, because there are snake oil companies.

If President Barack Obama had not been in the White House, we would not have the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau today.

If we continue to print new paychecks at the rate we've been adding them, that mitigates a lot of the damage of higher gasoline prices.

A product is usually created to improve people's lives; otherwise, why buy it? I'm no genius, but I am an American, and gosh-darnit, I consume, so I know what I'm talking about.

Sellers of all fuels, whatever their conflicts, can stand in harmony on the platform of high oil prices.

If you had wanted to alienate every prominent citizen in every major town, you couldn't have done a better job—insurance salesmen, funeral directors, doctors, dentists, used car dealers— if the [Federal Trade] commission had chosen to get everybody up in arms, it did exactly the right thing.

The reason you have high oil prices in the United States is that you do not have enough refineries to refine the oil. Do you know that there has not been a refinery built in America in 15 years.

... the rising costs and risks of these fossil fuels are undercutting the security and prosperity they have enabled. Each day, the United States spends about $2 billion buying oil and loses another $4 billion indirectly to the macroeconomic costs of oil dependence, the microeconomic costs of oil price volatility, and the cost of keeping military forces ready for intervention in the Persian Gulf.

The Federal Trade Commission is not an enforcement agency.

Dodd-Frank represents the greatest regulatory burden on our economy, more so than all the other Obama-era regulations combined.

The government has a key role in regulating and making sure there's an even playing field and protecting consumers. No question about it.

Trump's trade and immigration policies will deliver an economic shock to states like Texas where trade produces a substantial share of the jobs, and which depend on high oil prices.

From 1859 to 1971, the U.S. oil industry grew virtually continuously, in the process serving mightily to drive our economy and win our wars. But that growth was stopped dead in 1971 and sent into decline thereafter, as the advent of the EPA and the accompanying National Environmental Policy Act made it increasingly difficult to drill.