The
Rational Argumentator
America's Red Sea
On the spending side of the ledger, the White House and Congress enacted a $700-billion financial bailout, followed by an earmark-laden $787-billion “stimulus” law and plans to ladle out $1.6 billion in federal government bonuses in 2009. Then came a $3.5 trillion “red sea” FY 2010 budget, and the prospect of $9.3 trillion in total indebtedness over the coming decade.
A March 31, 2009, Bloomberg study found that the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, FDIC, and HUD have thus far obligated generations of Americans to $12.8 TRILLION in debt. That’s 90% of our nation’s entire 2008 Gross Domestic Product, notes columnist Deroy Murdock!
It’s more accrued debt than 43 previous administrations combined. And it doesn’t include the cost of servicing this debt – or the $140-billion US share of the $1.1 trillion “global stimulus” devised by the Group of 20, to be administered by professional spenders at the International Monetary Fund.
Taxes will soar, to pay off these debts – and cover new levies on everything we do.
As 2,600 delegates flew greenhouse-gas-spewing jetliners to Bonn for another five-star-hotel UN climate change confab, envoy Todd Stern announced that the White House is “seized with the urgency” of tackling runaway global warming. Congressmen Waxman and Markey have introduced and managed to pass a hulking 648-page climate change bill that would regulate nearly every facet of our lives. Equally monstrous Senate and EPA versions wait in the wings.
President Obama wants energy prices to “skyrocket,” to coerce Americans to slash carbon dioxide emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 – to levels last seen in 1905! He says cap-and-trade will “raise” $656 billion between 2012 and 2019, to fund green energy, green job, and other government programs. The National Economic Council and other analysts put the tax bite at $1.3 to $3.0 trillion.
This is not monetary manna. It is a massive wealth transfer – extracted from every hydrocarbon-using business, motorist, and family, and doled out by Congress and bureaucrats to politically favored constituencies. These all-intrusive energy taxes will hit poorest households hardest.
Cap-and-tax will also clobber manufacturing and heavy-industry jobs. Twenty states get 60-98% of their electricity from coal. They form our manufacturing heartland, and every increase in energy prices will result in more businesses laying off workers or closing their doors, more jobs sent overseas, more homes forced into foreclosure, more families into welfare, and more school districts, hospitals, and churches into whirlpools of red ink.
And for what? Hundreds of
climate scientists say CO2 plays little or no substantive role in
climate change. They point out that even total elimination of
Thankfully, sensible Republicans and Democrats are raising red flags about these economy-killing proposals. But a White House/EPA rulemaking would require no congressional vote – and they have already dropped that bombshell.
On the revenue side, the
situation is equally irresponsible. “Lock up the best and tax the rest” is the
motto. Whether it’s oil and natural gas (onshore or offshore), coal or
coal-to-gas, shale oil or uranium, Congress and the White House are making
That means rejecting trillions in potential bonus, rent, royalty, and tax revenues that could help pay for this spending binge.
Developing
just our off-limits oil and gas resources in the ANWR, OCS,
and
The American Energy Alliance and other experts say the benefits would be even greater. And this is just conventional oil and gas revenue. It does not include trillions more in revenues from oil shale, tar sands, methane hydrates, coal, uranium, and other deposits that Congress, bureaucrats, judges, and green activists have conspired to put off limits to the American taxpayers and consumers who own them.
It does not consider the regulatory stranglehold on coal and nuclear power plant construction – and thus on jobs and revenues that those projects and their energy would provide.
This is Real Energy, Real Revenue, Real Employment.
Hydrocarbons and nuclear generate 93% of all the energy that safeguards our
jobs, health, living standards and national security. With 90% reliability,
they keep the lights on and make
But they are being closed down – to be “replaced” by pixie dust energy from wind turbines and solar panels that now meet barely 1% of our total energy requirements.
Wind turbines actually generate electricity only 2-6 hours a day, on average. They are built and operated only because of billions in taxpayer subsidies. And they require large swaths of land and prodigious amounts of concrete, steel, copper, and fiberglass: 700 tons for each 1.5 MW turbine – plus enormous additional quantities for natural-gas-fired electrical generators that kick in every time the wind dies down.
Solar energy doesn’t even make a perceptible contribution to our energy needs.
Two-thirds of Americans want our petroleum and nuclear
energy developed. They want jobs, security, economic recovery, power that works
24/7. They don’t want to see
But their rights are being trampled on, by partisan
totalitarians whose decrees violate
It’s time to say, "Enough!"
Paul Driessen is
senior policy adviser for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT),
which sponsors the All
Pain No Gain education
campaign and petition against job-killing global warming policies, and the ClimateDepot website for the latest news and views on
climate change. He is also a senior policy adviser to the Congress of Racial
Equality and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power - Black Death.
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Learn about Mr. Stolyarov's novel, Eden against the Colossus, here.Read Mr. Stolyarov's comprehensive treatise, A Rational Cosmology, explicating such terms as the universe, matter, space, time, sound, light, life, consciousness, and volition, here.