There’s no licensing for professors or economists. If your claim was true, the production in California would have increased dramatically as crude oil prices have increased, yet this report shows production dropping off rapidly over the last decade.
As a professor, you should know the short run supply curve is horizontal. The long run supply curve can only produce increased supply to if there is additional oil to extract in the state and there are not regulatory barriers to doing so. Regulatory barries and environmental concerns prevent new oil wells in CA thus you can only claim that producers will reduce proudction after the tax even though every unit they produce today will still be profitable after production.
It’s possible at the margins that a few wells that are barely profitable today, could go off line. But now we’re talking about a movement of epillson in the global supply of oil. To claim gas prices will rise, over an infinitesimal drop of in supply could be true in theory but those of us who live in the real work will never see it.
Finally your rudimentary analysis does not address the fact that the major oil producers of the world adjust their pumping to maintain a fixed range of the oil prices. Saudia Arabia does not want oil prices too low (lost profits today) or too high (lost long run profits and people move away from oil) so your shifting supply curve shifts back down.
Finally, you seem like a hack to me since you don’t have a number much less a confidence interval for your claimed increase. Of course, you wouldn’t want to produce 95% condfidence interval for your non-existant predicton since it would almost certainly include 0. Prop 87 will no more raise gas prices than me lowering my demand curve for gasoline by taking the train once a week to work will lower prices. Both effects are too small to measure but less notice at the pump and will swamped by the volatility in both oil and gas prices.
