Trump could make crashing oil prices a win for American taxpayers. Here’s how.

In these days of multitrillion-dollar federal deficits, a windfall of a billion dollars or so for the treasury may sound like a rounding error.

But a billion bucks is a billion bucks. And I’d rather have the treasury make the money for taxpayers’ benefit than for oil companies to end up with it, which is what’s going to happen if something isn’t done.

Now, let me back up a bit and explain what I’m talking about.

It involves making an unconventional use of the federal Strategic Petroleum Reserve to take advantage of the big gap between the current and future prices of U.S. crude oil.

Current prices are way down because demand has collapsed as a result of the covid-19 pandemic and because there is so much surplus oil sloshing around that there’s little storage capacity available to hold any new oil that gets produced.