Did anyone ever think that there's one single person that has more influence on our daily lives, the strength of our economy, it's recovery and even the long-term way-of-life of this country than any other? It's no one elected to a U.S. federal office; it's not the President of the United States; it's no single leader in our Congress.

The single person who has more to say whether we have good days or bad days, whether our economy recovers or not, how high our unemployment gets, or how our standard of living can be changed virtually overnight, is King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, the 86-year old King of Saudi Arabia. He alone can decide whether to pump more or less oil, thereby changing both the price and availability of gasoline throughout the world virtually overnight. Here in the U.S. where we have more vehicles on the road than any other country and where automobiles and trucks are so fundamental to our economy, a rapid escalation in the price of gasoline can have dramatic short-term impact, moreso than any other country in the world.

Remember, when the price of oil escalates from $70 to $105 a barrel, all that means is that the Saudis (and all other oil producers) receive that much more in transfer payments, payable in U.S. dollars. Their cost of production is relatively fixed, so their profits skyrocket when the supply of oil is manipulated. And the more dollars we have to pay for oil, the larger our negative balance of payments--the more wealth we transfer out of this country, mostly to the Middle East.

King Abdullah is 86-years old and in frail health. Saudi Arabia is a conservative Sunni nation, where the most hallowed of all Muslim religious sites are located. The King's successor will be one of his many sons--which one we don't know--from the bloodline of the house of Saud. How the new king will govern, what his relationships with the U.S. will be, whether he will pump more or less oil, no one knows. A more threatening situation would be if there was an insurrection among the vast number of young, unemployed and under-educated Saudi youth. The Saudis have a strong army, but whether they could suppress a widespread attempt to overthrow the monarchy is in question.

So when the U.S. Congress continues to "kick the can down the road" in failing to develop a comprehensive energy policy, you can decide how much they are contributing to this very real threat against the U.S. If there ever was a real threat to U.S.national security, this is it.

And please, don't respond by saying "drill, drill, drill". Before you post such a shallow idea, please, please do the research and the arithmetic and see for yourself how futile broad based drilling for more oil in the U.S. would be to resolve our reliance on Saudi oil. We don't have enough oil reserves and it would take a decade or more to substantially increase the supply--nowhere near enough to meet our needs--and at a substantially higher cost of production.

Here are a couple pictures--one of the King and another with the King placing some sort of Saudi medal around President Obama's neck. People have been critical of the President bowing to King Abdullah. Guess what? With as much control as he has over the U.S., for all practical purposes, he's as much our King as he is theirs!

Then there's the Chinese.