Mr. VITTER. Madam President, I rise to talk about one of the most pressing challenges Louisiana families--indeed, most American families--face, and that is the price at the pump and the enormous hit that is to their family budgets, their pocketbooks, their wallets. It is really making life very difficult in the midst of a very weak economy.

A few years ago the price was $1.84. That was on the day Barack Obama was sworn in as President of the United States. Now it has more than doubled; it is $3.80-plus. It seems to be rising every day, and that is a real crisis to a lot of American families. We should be committed here in the Senate, here in Washington, to connecting with the real world and focusing on real problems and real crises. For millions of Louisiana and American families, that is absolutely it.

Unfortunately, I don't see real solutions and a real policy to address that coming out of the President or some of my colleagues on the Senate floor. Right now, to the minute, as we speak on the Senate floor, the President is speaking at the White House, and he is laying out his proposal to raise taxes on domestic energy companies and domestic oil and gas production. That is not a policy that is going to help Louisiana and American families with the price at the pump. In fact, it is a policy that is going to make it worse and not better.

Folks get it in the real world. They certainly do in Louisiana. When we increase taxes on something, those are costs that almost every business, if they possibly can, is going to pass on to consumers. That is pushing prices up, not down.

It is also the first rule of economics, as my colleague from Georgia said, supply and demand. If we tax something more, we get less of it. If we increase taxes on domestic energy producers, on domestic oil and gas, we will get less of it. Less supply means the price goes up. So those are two compelling reasons this proposal is not going to help Louisiana families and American families with their struggles with the price at the pump. It is going to make it even worse, when it has been getting worse on its own for a lot of related reasons, very dramatically. So that is not a policy. That is not a commonsense or a real-world solution.

Likewise, one of the few other things I have heard from the President in terms of this matter is essentially begging other countries to increase their production. I don't think that is a policy worthy of America either. I think the perfect symbol for that approach is the President bowing to the princes of Saudi Arabia. It is a symbol of his approach of trying to deal with the price at the pump, and it is not good enough and it is not worthy of the American people.

Other folks have also adopted this approach. Senator Schumer, our colleague in this Chamber, recently wrote Secretary of State Clinton on February 28, 2012, just a few weeks ago: To address this situation-- Meaning the price at the pump-- I urge the State Department to work with the government of Saudi Arabia to increase its oil production, as they are currently producing well under their capacity.

Begging Saudi Arabia is not an adequate solution, and it is not a policy worthy of America.

President Obama's own Energy Secretary Secretary Chu said even more recently, on March 20 of this year: We're very grateful that Saudi Arabia has extra capacity and it feels confident that it can fulfill any potential deficits, at least the way the current markets are now, the current demand I should say, are now.

Again, begging Saudi Arabia, begging the Middle East, begging other countries, that is not an adequate policy and it is not a policy worthy of America.

President Obama has done a world tour doing some of this in other countries. Notably, on March 20, 2011, when my part of the country was still struggling with the de facto moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico, a permit logjam blocking us from producing good, reliable American energy, putting Americans, Louisianans to work, the President went to Brazil to beg them to produce their resources and to promise them that the United States would be a great customer. Quote: We want to help you with the technology and support to develop these oil reserves safely. And when you're ready to start selling, we want to be one of your best customers. At a time when we've been reminded how easily instability in other parts of the world can affect the price of oil, the United States could not be happier with the potential for a new, stable source of energy.

He means drilling in Brazil. I have to say this was like rubbing salt in the wound to most Louisianans. As I said, this was March 2011, a year ago, and we were still suffering from a continuing de facto moratorium that the President had imposed following the BP incident. So he was going to Brazil and urging them to drill, urging them to explore, committing America to that, and refusing to do it in America in the Gulf of Mexico. That is not a commonsense solution. That is not a real-world policy.

That is not a policy worthy of America. None of this begging is.

Other countries do have an energy policy, and it is not begging; it is developing. It is controlling their own future. Very recently in the press there have been reports that PetroChina has now become the leading company publicly traded in terms of production of oil, far surpassing Big Oil and all the other companies that have been demonized by my colleagues on the left on the Senate floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have the press report printed for the Record.