Former Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta told Newsmax on Monday that Saudi Arabia's plans to curb its oil output will cause "trouble for our economy."
Saudi Arabia recently announced plans to cut oil production by a further 1 million barrels per day. Acosta said on "National Report" that Saudi Arabia cutting back oil production is "not only trouble for oil prices, but it's trouble for our economy."
He added that "one of the reasons [inflation] has been coming down is because the cost of energy has been decreasing.
"If all of a sudden the cost of energy starts increasing because of what Saudi Arabia and others may be doing, we're not just talking about gas being more expensive, but we're talking about inflation possibly going up, and that, in turn, could impact what the Federal Reserve does at their upcoming meeting."
Asked how this could affect air travel this summer, Acosta said that supply chain issues "will impact commercial flights ... the airlines and the private sector worked very hard to address the supply chain issues and they did a pretty good job, and they were incentivized to do that because that's how they make money. It's called capitalism.
"And the problem we have here is that the government has not done its part. We don't have enough air traffic controllers, and that was predictable coming out of COVID as air travel increased. We should have been increasing the number of controllers and we did not do that."
Acosta also commented on the apartment building collapse in Iowa that killed at least three people, according to local law enforcement.
When asked if the federal government will play a role in investigating the collapse, Acosta said: "There are any number of government agencies that can play a role in this investigation, from OSHA to potentially even criminal charges if there's evidence of any fraudulent communications about the structural integrity or the safety of the building."
He added: "Iowa has a deep interest in correcting this tragedy, in finding out who is responsible and why. And so you know, I would think that the federal authorities would go hand-in-hand with the authorities in Iowa to investigate this."
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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