The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries hopes so. The oil cartel met in Vienna on Wednesday and decided to leave well enough alone, making no changes in production quotas and praising the current world crude-oil price of about $80 as high enough to spur new exploration and production and low enough to avoid killing the global economy’s fragile recovery.

That’s right — $80 a barrel probably won’t kill the recovery.  It’ll just keep the world’s economies on life support so OPEC can continue harvesting dollars — kind of like those science fiction movies where the humans are in a state of suspended animation while their fluids or brain waves are used as a fuel or energy source.  Thanks, OPEC, for trying to make sure that your appetite for our dollars doesn’t exceed our ability to deliver them to you.

Last year, crude-oil prices averaged $61.95 a barrel. So far this year, however, the price of West Texas Intermediate-grade crude oil — a widely used industry benchmark — has averaged more than $77 a barrel, a more expensive start than in any year other than 2008, when prices began at more than $90 a barrel and later spiked to nearly $150.

That’s right.  We experienced this kind of price trajectory with disasterous consequences just two years ago.  Good thing our political leadership is taking bold action to mitigate against another damaging spike!  Oh, wait a minute, no, they’re arguing over the best way to avoid appearing to vote on major legislation. 

Citing “persistently high” petroleum levels in the storage tanks of industrialized nations and an expected increase in oil output from non-OPEC countries this year, OPEC ministers said there is no need to boost production. At the same time, they said in a communique that there is no need to cut output, citing “serious threats” to the global economic recovery from “the mounting and potentially unsustainable public debt in the most advanced economies.”

Yes, indeed.  Here in the US, we are clearly confronted with mounting public debt, and the unsustainability is not a potentiality, it’s a fact.  A new floor of $80/barrel is going to continue helping propel us along that path:  grossly imbalanced balance of payments and ever-increasing deficits and debt — all while ensuring an anemic economic recovery continues to further depress revenue generation and our standard of living.

The day before the meeting, the oil minister from Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter and an OPEC linchpin, expressed satisfaction with the current market conditions.

And prices at the pump are rising because crude oil prices have been high, and that is likely to restrain U.S. demand for gasoline. The Energy Information Administration reported Wednesday that for the fourth week in a row, the U.S. average price for regular gasoline increased. The average moved up about four cents, to $2.79 per gallon, 88 cents higher than it was last year at this time, the EIA said, noting that the cumulative increase during the past four weeks amounts to 18 cents per gallon.

Note carefully:  gasoline prices are 88 cents higher than a year ago.  When politicians discuss gas taxes to help pay for new alternative technologies — and investment in our future — or oil import fees to enhance our energy security — or even cap and trade or carbon taxes to combat global climate change — some get hysterical about adding 10 cents to the price of a gallon of gas.  That amount would literally be lost in the noise of what OPEC (and non-OPEC market dynamics) do to the price of gasoline.  This points up the absurdity of the conventional wisdom that a gas tax or an import fee would be political suicide.  What is political suicide is for our leaders to stand by while our economic health is ever-so-slowly drained by OPEC, afraid to take a tough short-term vote to invest in our future.

China’s booming economy is one of the few sources of new demand for oil; another is in OPEC members’ economies, where fuel prices are heavily subsidized.  

That one really hurts.  OPEC actually uses our dollars to subsidize their citizens’ use of fuel — helping keep the global price higher to rake in more of our dollars.  And to add insult to injury:

Financial concerns are another key factor. Diwan said oil prices are relatively high because investors have been buying oil and other commodities because they expect the value of the U.S. dollar to decline. “There is a flight to hard assets,” he said.

Another negative downward spiral.  Investors buy oil on the expectation that the dollar will decline; higher oil prices continue to cause the dollar to decline; and so on.   We are headed for a perfect storm of stagflation, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the late ’70s.  There are a number of reasons for this, but a big one is our political unwillingness to wean ourselves off of foreign oil.

Real leadership would say to the American people:  We have a choice.  We can continue bankrupting our children in order to support an international cartel.  Or we can take prudent measures today that will provide our children a better life tomorrow — at the cost of a few cents on a gallon of gas.  Is that really a difficult choice?