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Is President Obama’s oil policy actually just a means to an end?

Judging Barack Obama’s policies on drilling for oil under the lands and waters of the United States evokes words like “incoherent,” “confused,” and “bizarre.”

While Mr. Obama decries our dependence on foreign oil, his administration cripples oil producers’ efforts to harvest oil reserves from US lands and waters through regulatory excess, administrative mischief and outright bans. In the Gulf of Mexico alone, 2011 will see 130 million barrels less production than the Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicted last May, and that number will grow to 200 million barrels in 2012. Those numbers represent a third of the Gulf’s total capacity and more than 10 percent of total US domestic production.

Even if the administration removes the obstacles and issues leases and permits, EIA Administrator Richard Newell notes that it takes several years before real production results, so the administration has decreased American oil production for years to come.

And now, after incapacitating much of his country’s oil production, the President of the United States went to Brazil to encourage it to drill for oil off shore, and the US would acquire some of that oil through a trade deal, while huge supplies of domestic oil lie undisturbed, and the US oil industry waits helplessly for red tape to be removed and new leases and permits to be issued.

As the various agencies of the government block production of domestic oil that reduces our dependence on foreign sources, the President publicly offers to help another country drill for its oil. Does that sound incoherent, confused, and bizarre?

The president told officials in Brazil, “We want to work with you. We want to help with technology and support to develop these oil reserves safely, and when you’re ready to start selling, we want to be one of your best customers.”

And then – incredibly – Mr. Obama said, “At a time when we’ve been reminded how easily instability in other parts of the world can affect the price of oil, the United States could not be happier with the potential for a new, stable source of energy.”

“It is beyond comprehension the administration would encourage trade for Brazilian oil while obstructing U.S. oil and natural gas development, eliminating related jobs here at home, and decreasing oil and natural gas revenues to the U.S. Treasury when the government is trillions of dollars in debt,” said American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Jack Gerard. “The message from the White House to America’s oil and natural gas workers: we’re going to outsource your job.”

Mr. Gerard then went on to point out the obvious, or what should be obvious to anyone: “What makes sense for Brazil also makes sense for the United States. Like every other nation, we should be developing our own oil and natural gas resources. It’s good for energy security, good for the economy, good for jobs, and it will help bring down our deficit.”

But the President then told the Brazilians exactly what is behind his incoherent policy: “In the United States, we’ve jump-started a clean energy industry, and we’ll soon have the capacity to produce 40 percent of the world’s advanced batteries,” he said. He could have added, “whether it makes any sense, or not.”

Mr. Obama’s oil policy looks like part of a plan to force enough fuel price discomfort on the American people that they will start walking, riding bicycles or taking the bus to work, and helps to justify high speed trains of which he and the other statists are so enamored.

We shouldn’t be surprised, though, because the Secretary of Energy in-waiting, Steven Chu, said as much back in 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” he declared. Indeed, we are well on our way toward reaching that goal. Gasoline has more than doubled in price since Mr. Obama took office, from $1.65 per gallon to around $3.50 per gallon. This is the steepest rise in gasoline prices since the Carter administration, and the Obama administration’s decrease in domestic oil production definitely will help increase prices.

Mr. Obama doesn’t mind ramping up oil drilling, so long as it’s not our oil, and he doesn’t mind keeping oil workers on the unemployment line and hurting local economies, even when America is desperate for job creation, so long as it advances his ideological agenda. “Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead,” the saying goes.

The central planners in the Obama administration and Congress have it all figured out, and if we pesky personal liberty proponents and free market capitalists would just shut up and wise up, they would set up a command economy like the former Soviet Union’s, North Korea’s, and Cuba’s, and our omnipotent government would solve all our problems and take care of us from cradle to grave.

That’s what far too many of our so-called leaders and an increasing number of the American people want. But they should understand the wisdom of this thought, attributed to several great Americans from Thomas Jefferson to Ronald Reagan: “a government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take from you everything you have.”

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Technorati Tags: Oil, Politics, Liberalism, Energy

How would we Americans survive without the United States Congress?

The United States Congress is one branch of our tripartite government, the one through which the people have the most direct input into how their government operates, through elected representatives.

Congress looks after us and tends to our needs, and assures that we don’t do crazy things that will hurt us, and let’s thank our lucky stars that it does. And without the insight of our elected public servants we would not have had banks making home loans to unqualified buyers, toilets with mandated water use standards, or unwary UPS shippers going to jail for putting the wrong sticker on packages. Can I get an “amen?”

We should also thank members of Congress who, in their infinite wisdom, determined that Thomas Edison’s wildly successful incandescent light bulb that we are so accustomed to and have used for so long is no longer good enough for us, and have decreed that a newer design is better. The Compact Fluorescent Light (CFL) bulb became the bulb of choice back in 2007, when the ban on incandescent bulbs was enacted and put on course for full implementation by 2014, at which time Mr. Edison will be forced into Congress-induced irrelevancy.

It was a stroke of genius, and our Congresspersons really earned their large salaries and generous benefits on this one. Now we have longer lasting bulbs that use less energy. And, they are new! That’s all good, right? Besides, they are made in China, so every bulb we buy supports that struggling economy, and that may prevent the Chi Coms from foreclosing on their portion of the enormous debt that Congress ran up.

But wait. As USAToday reported recently, not everything is glowing brightly in Bulb Land. “Now that more people are using CFLs, the bulbs' shortcomings are giving some consumers pause,” and it pointed out some of them:

• They cost $3 to $10 each, compared with about 50 cents for incandescent bulbs.

• They don't start out at full brightness, and don’t work well in cold temperatures.

• They put out a “dingy” light that some folks object to, and they “flicker,” which sets off epileptic seizures in some people.

• The brighter CFLs are bigger and won't fit in many lamps and fixtures, and many CFL bulbs don't work well with dimmer switches and three-way light fixtures.

• And last – but certainly not least – they contain mercury, a highly toxic substance, and that makes disposal an issue.

So how the heck do you dispose of a burnt-out CFL bulb? Don’t worry; it’s a simple process, really.

To dispose of a burnt-out bulb, energystar.gov tells us: “If your state or local environmental regulatory agency permits you to put used or broken CFLs in the garbage, seal the bulb in two plastic bags and put it into the outside trash, or other protected outside location, for the next normal trash collection.” But if this is not permitted, we aren’t told how to dispose of the defunct bulb.

In the unfortunate event that your kid or the cat knocks over a lamp, or your mother-in-law drops a CFL and breaks it, here’s what you have to do:

1. Have people and pets leave the room for 15 minutes or more, and don't let anyone walk through the breakage area on their way out. Shut off the central forced-air heating/air conditioning system, if you have one.

2. Carefully scoop up glass fragments and powder using stiff paper or cardboard and place them in a glass jar with a metal lid or in a sealed plastic bag. Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small glass pieces and powder.

3. Wipe the area clean with damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes. Place towels in the glass jar or plastic bag.

4. Do not use a vacuum or broom to clean up the broken bulb on hard surfaces.

And there are special processes for other potentially hazardous situations, such as clean-up steps for carpeting or rugs; for clothing, bedding, etc.; disposal of clean-up materials; and future cleaning of carpeting or rugs.

Every good idea is at some point replaced by a better one. Or in the case of CFLs, a good idea has been replaced by a worse one. But environmental activists in and out of government are not dissuaded from shoving half-baked or un-baked ideas down our throats, all justified by the unproven and hotly debated theory that human activity is doing irreparable harm to the environment.

This environmental mania is behind the drive to replace perfectly good technology with a problem-causing “green” idea that is worse than the problem it is supposed to solve.

Former Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter correctly noted that "the Constitution was not written in order to right every wrong [or to] allow every federal do-gooder and busybody to impose his notion of clean living, safe working, or pure thinking on individuals. It was written to restrain government from interfering with … the freedom of the individual to pursue happiness."

If only our public servants understood this.

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New 'Toons from Bones

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Self-annihilation: Watching as America methodically kills itself

Of the interesting comments about democracy is this one attributed to Scottish historian Alexander Fraser Tytler: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse (money-benefits) from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years."

Alas, those are not Mr. Tytler’s words, but it is nonetheless germane today.

The United States of America is about 230 years old, depending upon exactly where you begin counting, a few years longer than that prediction allows. Evidence abounds, however, that our representative democracy is collapsing around us, and for exactly the same reasons the statement noted: the people have realized that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.

Credit the exceptional foresight of our Founders for setting up a democratic form of government that allowed the US to evolve into the greatest economy and strongest nation in history. It’s a pity that we haven’t had the intelligence and self-discipline to hold fast to their brilliant format. Instead, we’ve succumbed to the self-serving behavior of pusillanimous Americans, who are responsible for turning the United States into just one more collection of socialistic, government-dependent momma’s boys.

Another insightful quote about democracy comes from 1960s Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, who said, “Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it's something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles.”

But today what passes for participation is often a “me-centered” exercise, where the political class goes to bed with various special interests for their mutual benefit. Historian and economics writer Gary North terms it thusly: "Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote."

Nothing illustrates this better than the current budget battle on Capitol Hill, where most Democrats and more than a few Republicans strongly resist efforts to reduce spending, cut the budget deficit, and begin to pay down the $14 trillion-plus – $14,100,000,000,000 – national debt.

So far, the big spenders in Congress give the clear impression that in a budget of $3.6 trillion – $3,600,000,000,000 – with a budget deficit of $1.3 trillion – $1,258,000,000,000 – they can’t imagine cutting more than a few billion, which is a grain of sand on a beach compared to the entire deficit.

The size of these numbers is part of the reason many Americans either don’t comprehend the problem, or just can’t cope with it; how many of us, or them, can really grasp how many a billion of something is? Or a trillion? All those digits – 13 of them for a trillion – make your head hurt, cause your eyes to glaze over.

So let’s take eight digits off those huge numbers and make them small enough to understand. The budget then becomes $36,000, the deficit is $12,580, and the National Debt is $141,000.

Pretend your friend Joe makes $36,000 a year, but last year he spent $48,580, $12,580 more than he made. And for years on end he’s spent lot’s more than he earned and now owes $141,000.

Joe didn’t have enough money to buy all the stuff he wanted, but bought it anyway, hasn’t paid down any of his debt for several years, and in fact has been adding to it every year. His creditors are beginning to get nervous. And yet, Joe plans to spend more than he makes again this year, adding even more to his debt.

Joe looked over his budget and couldn’t find more than about $60 worth of things he could do without – like one meal at a restaurant for him and the wife, or beer for a couple of months – too little to meaningfully reduce his mounting debt.

He reasons this way: “Well, we shouldn’t have over-spent all those years. But we did, and my wife and kids are used to this lifestyle, and it just wouldn’t be fair to make them cut back. We can stretch it another year or two while we prepare to make cut-backs.”

Do you think Joe is financially irresponsible, and maybe crazy?

This is essentially how Congress and the administration are responding to fiscal conservatives who insist on substantive spending cuts to try to balance the budget and reduce the national debt.

Most of our elected leaders seem unfazed by the reality that we don’t have the money to continue doing all the stuff they want to continue doing, and apparently are immune to the common sense of it all. The country now borrows 40 cents for every dollar it spends. That can’t continue; it has to stop. Now.

Yes, there will be pain. But like the guy who drank too much while his friend paid the tab, he’s the one that will have the hangover.

If we are smart, we will learn the lesson that having the self-discipline and good sense to stick to the plan our Founders gave us is crucial if we’re going to survive.

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Technorati Tags: Culture, Politics, Economics, Government

Punishing the oil and natural gas industry punishes the country

The turmoil in Libya that halted oil shipments from the country for a period has played havoc with oil prices, pushing them above $100 a barrel for the first time since September of 2008 and causing average gasoline prices to edge closer to $4 a gallon.

"Traders are concerned about potential loss of supply," Andy Lebow, oil analyst at MF Global in New York told the Wall Street Journal. "We can ill afford the loss of Libyan production."

The Middle East is less stable today than in many, many years, and this latest crisis adds yet another serious concern to our nation’s domestic hot list. With all of this uncertainty it is especially comforting to know that the White House is on the job. Press Secretary Jay Carney reassured the nation: "When there is unrest in the world, specifically in that region, that can affect oil prices. … We are closely monitoring that situation but I would not speculate on where oil prices could go."

Mr. Carney did not say, but should have said: “We now are beginning to understand why our policies that prevent drilling for our own oil reserves were such a goofy idea.”
Those policies include a ban on all drilling in the Gulf of Mexico following the Deep Water Horizon explosion, even though serious problems on drilling rigs are rare. It was an ill-considered policy that cost Gulf Coast states thousands of jobs at a time when the country was in the throes of the worst recession in decades, as President Barack Obama told us repeatedly. Another dumb policy is the de facto ban on issuing permits on new drilling projects anywhere in the US. These policies have combined to put us months behind in bringing oil from existing wells and finding more oil to replace foreign supplies.

Last week, five months after the Gulf drilling ban was lifted, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management finally allowed the approval of the first and only drilling permit.

Despite the federal government’s own estimates that oil and natural gas will provide over 50 percent of our energy needs for decades, the administration continues to punish the industry and push hard for imposition of cleaner forms of energy.

American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Jack Gerard briefed reporters last week on the industry’s value, telling them the industry can “help bring more American oil and natural gas into America’s homes, businesses and factories accessing domestic resources that are currently off limits, and accessing North American energy resources—which are abundant—could create up to a million new jobs.”

“Producing more of our own energy will help reduce federal and state deficits through the fees, royalties and taxes that our member companies pay for the right to produce on federal lands, offshore and onshore,” he said, noting that the industry pours nearly $100 million a day into federal and state treasuries.

But the industry can only help if government “sets aside antiquated assumptions and disproven myths,” he added.

So far, Mr. Gerard describes the government’s response as underwhelming.

“Instead of recognizing how our industry has and can continue to contribute to meet our nation’s fiscal and economic goals, the president – in his State of the Union address, and in his 2012 budget proposal – called for higher taxes on this industry to pay for new federal spending programs, he continued, and “some in Congress are echoing that call.”

There are three areas of serious concern where the oil industry can really help the country: energy security; job creation; and government revenues. With Middle East stability in question, unemployment still nearly double normal levels and massive national debt and annual budget deficits, the Obama administration foolishly ignores this obvious avenue of relief for all three problems.

You might expect the president, whom we are frequently told is a brilliant man, to avail himself of any and all legitimate methods to give the American people some relief from the rampant unemployment, rising fuel prices and overwhelming debt and deficits, and put his ideological compulsions on hold for a few months. That’s what a good leader would do: wait until things stabilize, then return to the agenda when doing so won’t further cripple the nation.

Blinded by ideology, the administration still aims to convert our energy system to alternative technologies, all the while ignoring obvious barriers to alternative energy, such as:
• technologies like wind and solar are not capable of replacing a significant fraction of what fossil fuels now produce;
• wind power is both undependable and unpopular with the people in whose vicinity the turbines would be installed;
• electric cars are not economical, sensible, desirable or very green;
• hybrid vehicles use less gas but are not environmentally advantageous and do not pay for themselves quickly enough.

Which begs the question: If the president really is as intelligent as we are told he is, why can he not see the logic in letting the oil industry help the country? Or, is he simply wedded to a “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” agenda?

The US didn’t become the world’s strongest nation and the world’s strongest economy because of overactive government agencies like the EPA and the Department of Energy. The US didn’t become the strongest nation and strongest economy because of liberal/socialist/statist influences within its government.

What built the country was a vibrant business sector uninhibited by excessive regulations and red tape, and if the president and his fellow statists in the administration will only unshackle the private sector, as it was when it built America, our problems will begin to abate.

We have an oversized, over-active government and a heavily limited private sector. What we need is heavily limited government and a much freer private sector

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Technorati Tags: Energy, Politics, Economy, Liberalism

The acrimonious battle over public employee unions continues

In Wisconsin, newly elected Governor Scott Walker wants public employees to increase their contributions for health insurance to just 13 percent and start contributing at least something to their pension to help reduce budget over-runs, and to fix it so public employees cannot gain excessive benefits from state legislators paying unions back for their election support.

For trying to follow state law and balance Wisconsin’s budget, Gov. Walker has been labeled a “union buster,” but despite the accusations, the governor does not want to take away collective bargaining from public employees; he only wants to take fringe benefits out of the negotiations, because that’s where the most egregious excesses come from. Fringe benefits equal 47 percent of salaries.

In a desperate but laughable attempt to turn the argument to their favor, union supporters make a lame and plainly false statement: They say the $3.6 billion deficit amassed over two years is actually due to the $137 million in tax cuts the governor gave that haven’t even taken effect yet, not public employee costs.

This controversy has focused much needed attention on public employee labor unions. It is a discussion we need to have, and it is likely to get taxpayers, who bear the weight of public employee salaries and benefits, really worked up when they understand just how good most public sector workers have it, compared to workers in the private sector.

A report by the Cato Institute illustrates the differences between public sector workers as a class and private sector workers as a class. Citing 2009 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics the report shows that public sector workers enjoy total compensation (salaries and benefits combined) nearly half again better than their private sector counterparts, averaging $39.66 an hour for government workers to $27.42 an hour for private sector workers, and one-third higher raw salaries/wages, $26.01 to $19.39 an hour.

Of the nine compensation areas reported, government workers had a significantly better deal than private sector workers in all but two areas. The most glaring difference came in defined-benefit pensions, where government workers had nearly a seven-to-one advantage, and health insurance, where government workers had more than twice as much of their benefits paid for than the employees of the nation’s businesses.

Cato reports that public sector workers also enjoy the following advantages:
• They generally retire earlier than private sector workers with generous pension benefits for life, indexed for inflation.
• Virtually all their plans calculate benefits based on pay in the last one to three years of work; private plans normally use the last five years of pay or career-average pay.
• In several states public workers can “retire” early and then either resume their existing job or take a new job, thus receiving a salary and pension at the same time.

Public sector workers also enjoy far greater job security than workers in the private sector. Consider Reason.com’s report last May showing that when the financial crisis began in December of 2007, U.S. private sector employment was almost 116 million and employment in government at all levels was about 22.4 million. However, by the beginning of 2010, the private sector had lost 7.3 million jobs while government employment rose by 98,000 jobs.

It often goes unmentioned in the mainstream media that the effect of higher compensation of public sector union labor raises costs to government entities, and those costs have consequences. In both business and government, higher costs result in higher prices, both of which make the business or government less competitive. State and local governments are thereby less able to attract new residents and businesses, and retain existing residents and businesses. When businesses leave a state or city, jobs go with them and tax collections go down, putting pressure on budgets and creating deficits.

Case in point: Ohio has the 7th highest taxes among the 50 states. The Tax Foundation found that since 1993 Ohio has seen 231,000 more taxpayers leave the state than move into it, and during the same period, state spending grew from $38 billion to over $60 billion, a 58 percent increase in the face of declining population. The Buckeye State saw job losses totaling 255,000 from December 2008 to December 2009.

Government is parasitic; it exists by confiscating the fruits of the private sector, taking what the people earn through the sweat of their brow. Government therefore has an obligation to be frugal and efficient.

Public sector unions do not fit into that scenario because of the incestuous relationship with elected public servants who readily accede to their excessive demands. In the 2008 election cycle, labor unions threw in $400 million to buy favors from their preferred candidates, and that explains why government employees have it so good. 

Unionized government employees comprise a pressure group whose interests often are at odds with those of the general public whom they exist to serve. They should not have the power to shut down essential public services in a dispute over wages or benefits, like Wisconsin teachers have done with their “sick out” while they protest the potential loss of their golden goose.
 
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Technorati Tags: Unions, Politics, Economy, Liberalism

Common sense is desperately needed in public sector employment

Making the rounds through email a few months ago was something called the “Profound Paragraph,” attributed to the late Dr. Adrian Rogers, who was a Southern Baptist minister and president of the Southern Baptist Convention. The Profound Paragraph was part of a sermon Dr. Rogers delivered in 1984.

It is comprised of five statements: “You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend is the beginning of the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”

So simple; so logical. Unfortunately, we have not just failed to observe these truisms, we have strayed so far from them that we are approaching the beginning of the end of America, as Dr. Rogers describes it in the fourth statement.

We are to the point where nearly half of US workers – 47 percent – paid no federal income tax in 2009 according to the Tax Policy Center. The National Taxpayers Union reports that the top 50 percent of taxpayers paid more than 97 percent of federal income taxes in 2008.

In 2009 there were 37.2 million food stamp recipients, 4.1 million on welfare and 9.1 million receiving unemployment support. In 2010 Medicare rolls had 47.3 million people, and 58 million were on Medicaid.

When you add up all those numbers you come up with 155.7 million, a number that likely overstates how many people actually receive some sort of federal assistance, because some people receive more than one type of assistance. Still, that total is 50.2 percent of the 310.2 million people living in the U.S. last year, and that gives us some idea of how close we are to Dr. Rogers’ scenario.

His Profound Paragraph is a common sense refutation of the idea of redistributing wealth to make everyone more financially equal, and evidence shows convincingly that he is correct; it doesn’t work. But that doesn’t stop the redistributionist statists from trying to defy reality, and that causes enormous problems.

Paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw, politicians who take from Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul. Taking from one group to give to another is the main ingredient in contemporary politics, and that is what’s behind the situation in several states, notably Wisconsin, where over the years greedy politicians traded their state’s future economic security for votes in the next election by giving favors to their constituents, in this case public sector workers who belong to unions.

And now when the bills for this traitorous behavior have put the state near insolvency, public employees have taken to the streets in protest of the governor’s efforts to restore fiscal responsibility.

Wisconsin’s public employees have a sweetheart deal where they pay nothing toward their own pensions and only six percent of their health insurance premiums, a much better deal than most private sector employees have. Gov. Scott Walker advocates limiting public workers’ collective bargaining to wages only, have them pay 5.8 percent of their pension costs, and 12 percent of their health insurance premiums, still a pretty good deal, compared to private sector employees.

Municipal, county, state and federal government workers should not work for slave wages or in bad conditions, of course, but that is not the case. The employees in Wisconsin and in the federal government have better pay and benefits on average than many or most of the people they serve, the ones whose taxes pay their salaries. If fairness is the issue, what’s fair about that? Why should taxpayers fund all or most of the health insurance and pension plans of public employees?

Public employee benefits and work rules are the issue here, not their pay. Gov. Walker believes that in order to protect taxpayers from the rising costs of one-sided union contracts, work rules and benefits would have to be approved by voters. What a concept: Public employee’s fringe benefits would have to be approved by their bosses!

The truth is that in the federal government and many state governments public employees quite often have superior circumstances to their private sector counterparts, and because of the incestuous relationship between vote-seeking politicians and self-serving union leaders, public employee unions crossed the border between acquiring fair wages, benefits and work conditions for their members, and began seeking excessive and costly conditions that are economically destructive and indefensible. That has to end.

Whether or not public employees have a right to collective bargaining is a good subject for discussion, but even if they have such a right, it has been abused, and when you abuse either a right or a privilege, you are apt to lose it.

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Technorati Tags: Government, Politics,Liberalism, Unions

Obama has a good jump shot, but he should have played football

President Barack Obama is generally considered to be a good basketball player, but he might have chosen football, instead, because in the two years as our president he has shown us that he is a world class punter.

After being sworn in the American people were suffering from high unemployment and expecting government to focus on how to help businesses create jobs, he punted on that one, preferring to focus on health care reform, instead.

He energetically advocated for dramatic changes to the health care delivery system and the health insurance industry, but Mr. Obama punted on that one, too, and turned over the responsibility for drafting the legislation to Congress, with disastrous results.

When the 111th Congress failed to pass a budget last year, he again punted, and instead of cajoling the Congress into doing its Constitutional duty, he sat on his hands.

Now the president has punted on his duty to formulate a sensible and responsible federal budget, submitting something that, considering the dire fiscal circumstances we are in, is not a serious effort, and submitting it a week late, to boot.

Facing yet another breech of the legal barrier for the national debt because of continued irresponsible spending levels; a $14 trillion national debt, made larger by deficits of $1.4 trillion in 2009, $1.3 trillion in 2010, and another $1.65 trillion dollar deficit this fiscal year; and after saying that we need to be more fiscally responsible, the president submitted a fiscal 2012 budget of $3.7 trillion with yet another $1.5 trillion deficit to add to the national debt, a budget that spends 40 percent more than the country takes in.

This is what passes for responsible leadership? A budget that is larger than the total debt accumulated by the federal government from 1789 to January 20, 2009? This move was so bad that even The Washington Post panned it.

Mr. Obama repeatedly talked about “winning the future” during the State of the Union speech, but he has already given up on “winning” the future. Instead, he plans to “buy” it, with dollars borrowed from China or whatever country may still be interested in funding our profligacy.

But you heard that the Obama's budget reduces the deficit by $1.1 trillion over 10 years, you say, and that sounds responsible, sort of. True, that there’s still a deficit remaining after that reduction, and it’s also true that it doesn’t address the deficits in future years. But, hey, it’s a start. Sort of.

Even if the plan would reduce the deficit as advertised, it is not nearly aggressive enough. But, alas, this feature is just smoke and mirrors. Mr. Obama is not actually reducing the 2012 deficit by $1.1 trillion; he’s just going to borrow $1.1 trillion less than he would have under earlier projections.

To Mr. Obama, the budget process is a game. What he hopes will happen is that in the absence of a responsible budget proposal from him that attempts to get spending under control, the Republicans will propose spending cuts in an effort to get the nation’s fiscal house in order, and then he and the Democrats can demagogue Republican efforts at fiscal responsibility and use to their advantage to paint Republicans as mean and nasty and don’t care about the people.

When it’s fourth and long, a good punter is a real asset. But when your country is facing financial disaster, punting doesn’t cut it, especially when it’s only second down.

Not only did Mr. Obama fail to make an honest effort to submit a budget that addresses his country’s enormous fiscal problems by reducing spending significantly, but he keeps talking about spending more on some things, like education, which would see a $13 billion increase in spending from the 2010 budget.

He also wants to bring high-speed rail access to 80 percent of Americans within 25 years, and sets aside $148 billion for research and development, including $32 billion for biomedical research, and doubles the amount spent on research on energy efficiency.

To paraphrase Strother Martin’s character the Captain in “Cool Hand Luke,” "What we've got here is...failure of leadership."

The United States has not had a void of competence in the White House this serious since much further back than Jimmy Carter.

BHO – Barack Hoover Obama – is on track to go down as our worst leader.

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Technorati Tags: Government, Politics, Liberalism, Obama

Yet another feel-good concept is revealed to be a really goofy idea

Over the last several decades the nations of Europe were not good role models for self-reliance and good judgment, embracing crazy ideas that led some to financial catastrophe and caused serious problems for others. Today, however, we see that at least on one subject the Europeans finally have seen the light and the error of their ways.

Last Thursday French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared that multiculturalism had failed. And he is not alone; other European leaders like British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Spanish ex-premier Jose Maria Aznar also say that multicultural policies have not successfully integrated immigrants into their countries. And in the land down under, Australia's ex-prime minister John Howard reached the same conclusion.

Many of us, perhaps most, knew multiculturalism was a foolish, politically correct effort doomed to failure. But like other politically correct ideas, it sounded good, and that was reason enough to give it a try. As predicted, it failed miserably in practice for all the reasons we expected.

"My answer is clearly ‘yes, it is a failure,’" Mr.Sarkozy said. "Of course we must all respect differences … [but if] you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community, and if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in France," he said.

"We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him," he declared.

Prime Minister David Cameron says that "under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream. … We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values,” he said.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said last October that attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany have "utterly failed," saying the so-called "multikulti" concept – where people would "live side-by-side" happily – has failed, and immigrants need to try harder to integrate - including learning to speak German.

"I am a passionate believer in multiracialism,” former Australian Prime Minister John Howard said. “I believe that societies are enriched if they draw, as my country has done, from all parts of the world on a non-discriminatory basis and contribute, as the United States has done, to the building of a great society," he said. "But when a nation draws people from other parts of the world, it draws them because of the magnetism of its own culture and its own way of life."

What these leaders witnessed is that rather than becoming good French, English, German, Spanish or Australian citizens the immigrants ignored the cultural traditions and ways of life in the country to which they immigrated in favor of those of the country they left, or of their own personal or religious ideas. Which begs the question: Why go to another country if you like the way you’ve been living where you are, or if the way you want to live is not a good fit in the new country?

The major problem for European countries, which have cultures hundreds or thousands of years old, is the immigration of Muslim populations. Europeans like things as they are, thank you, and see no reason to have new-comers demand that they change what they are comfortable with and what has been proven to work, or to cast off the national culture in favor of something different.

And that makes perfect sense. Consider this on a more personal level: allowing an immigrant family to take up residence in your home. Who would allow such a family to tell their hosts what food to eat, what furniture they should have, what religion to choose, or pressure them to live in a way that is markedly different from what they are accustomed to and what works well for them?

As Muslim populations have moved into Europe and Australia, they have not assimilated into the existing culture, creating the current crisis. Some nations have witnessed radical Muslim activities.

Although Muslim integration problems are just now arising in the US, the more serious and immediate problem for us is the illegal alien influx from south of the border, and like the European problem, it is of our own making. Our crisis was created by the federal government’s disregard for border security and a sappy, feel-good mentality that illegal aliens should gain citizenship without going through the proper process.

Ultimately, successful integration of legal immigrants comes down to the attitude of the immigrant toward integration. We have room for good people from anywhere who want to come here through the legal process and become an American by assimilating into our culture.

There is no room for people who want to come here and demand that Americans adjust to their very different cultural ideals, or come in illegally and expect to be accommodated.

As Europe and Australia have learned, a national culture cannot survive irrational and reckless practices. The United States must get its house in order while there is still time.

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Technorati Tags: Culture, Political Correctness, Multiculturalism, Liberalism

Going Rogue, Part V: Now the EPA is crying over spilled milk

Just when you think it can’t get worse, it does. The Environmental Protection Agency has been the bane of business for years, imposing burdensome regulations in its over-zealous effort to clean up America’s air and water, whether they’re really that dirty or not.

In our last look at this bureaucratic nightmare it was going to regulate dust, believing there was still too much particulate matter in the air, having already addressed the issue of “soot,” which is particulate matter than isn’t dust, and is actually harmful in large amounts.

But dust doesn’t result from burning coal or oil, or even burning wood; it results when the wind blows over bare, dry soil.

Having run out of real environmental boogey men to attack (can we still say “attack” without being accused of inciting violence?) the EPA is now worried about spilled milk.

No, this is not an April fool’s joke; as absurd as it sounds, it is absolutely true that the EPA is worried about spilled milk.

You see, milk contains oil, and oil is almost as big a threat to our survival as coal. This oil is a non-petroleum oil commonly known as “animal fat,” and the EPA is having a cow over the possibility that a large milk spill poses a serious threat to health, and that possibility has driven the EPA to the brink of insanity, which, come to think of it, is more a chip shot than a drive.

The agency thus believes that farmers and milk producers must be held to the same regulations as those for oil drillers and the Exxon Valdez that produce real oil spills. The agency plans to require them to file “emergency management” plans, and build “containment facilities” to hold back what would otherwise be a torrent of spilled milk, and explain how they will train the “first responders” who will clean up the spilled milk. (It isn’t true that the EPA is training a humongous army of cats as first responders.)

But seriously, folks, this is no lapping, er, uh, laughing matter. If some careless farmer or milk producer spilled 1,000 gallons of milk, the surrounding country-side would be awash in as much as 40 gallons of animal fat, and you can imagine the environmental cataclysm that would result if the EPA did not require emergency management plans, containment facilities and first responders to deal with the spilled milk.

Would anyone like to hazard a guess at how much this is going to increase the price of milk and everything that has milk as an ingredient? Obviously, the EPA hasn’t thought about that, and probably doesn’t care.

Clearly, the EPA is out of control.

Four years after Arch Coal went through a rigorous and expensive process to obtain a surface mining permit from the Army Corps of Engineers, the EPA retracted the permit based upon “new water quality standards.” The decision, only the second of its kind in history, cost 220 miners their jobs, and Arch Coal has lost $250 million in future investment. The National Mining Association said the new standards could put at risk the jobs of many of the 27,000 people employed at surface coal mines in Appalachian states. An additional 79 Appalachian coal mine permit applications are now the subject of EPA scrutiny.

Where water quality is concerned, the EPA is again over-reaching. It has set 500 microSiemens (µS) per centimeter as the threshold for water purity; water with greater than 500 µS is contaminated, according to the EPA. But Evian bottled water has 558 µS; Perrier has 712; apple juice has 1,919; and Gatorade has 2,580. By EPA standards, these products are not safe to drink.

So the EPA wants to regulate dust and spilled milk, but it also regulates carbon dioxide, a gas exhaled by humans and animals that many people believe enables trees and vegetables to live. So breathing is also a target (Oops! Make that, “focus.”) of the EPA. Today's higher concentrations of CO2 are the "unambiguous result of human emissions,” the EPA proclaims. Perhaps we should all just go live in caves, or better yet, just die, so the planet can be saved.

However, rumor has it that the EPA has realized that the vast majority of so-called greenhouse gases that supposedly cause global warming – or global cooling, or climate change, or whatever they are calling it now – does not come from selfish Americans burning too many fossil fuels and breathing too much, but from other countries like China and India, and from natural sources, like volcanoes. A double-super-secret source inside the EPA leaked the news that in order to save the planet the agency will shortly ban volcanoes, India and China, the latter of which will certainly help our national debt situation.

Watching the EPA lately is sort of like watching a guy walking and reading a newspaper run into a telephone pole; you want to laugh at his stupidity. But we can’t really laugh at this stuff because it has dire implications for our survival.

Like the crazy uncle living in the attic, Americans are just going to have to ignore the EPA’s goofiness and go on with life.

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Technorati Tags: EPA, Government, Environment, Liberalism

The State of the Union: President Obama hasn’t learned anything

For a long, long time the State of the Union address has been anything but a mechanism for communicating useful information about the state of the nation to the Congress, but despite the overwhelmingly political atmosphere that dominates this annual spectacle, President Barack Obama was able to send an important message.

The president noted in his address that America does “big things,” and who could argue with that? “America is the nation that built the transcontinental railroad, brought electricity to rural communities, constructed the Interstate Highway System,” he said.

“We’re a nation that says, ‘I might not have a lot of money, but I have this great idea for a new company.’ … From the earliest days of our founding, America has been the story of ordinary people who dare to dream. That’s how we win the future,” and “the first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation. None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be or where the new jobs will come from. Thirty years ago, we couldn’t know that something called the Internet would lead to an economic revolution.”

He continued: “What we can do – what America does better than anyone else – is spark the creativity and imagination of our people. We’re the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It is how we make our living.”

That’s all true; America is all of those things. But what followed clearly sent the message that Barack Obama does not understand how the country he was elected to lead was able to achieve such great things.

He believes that the government should “invest” your tax money in research, and that doing so will produce results that research funded by private sources will not, or cannot produce; that without government funded research the “correct” things will not happen.

Now, it is true that government funding was involved in significant advances and discoveries. But is it true that these things would not have been developed without “government investment?” Is the president suggesting that the same innovative energy that caused Edison to produce the best incandescent light bulb exists only because the government invests in research? Well, not in Edison’s case, nor in the case of thousands of other research triumphs.

“Our free enterprise system is what drives innovation,” he correctly noted. “But because it’s not always profitable for companies to invest in basic research, throughout our history, our government has provided cutting-edge scientists and inventors with the support that they need,” and he proceeded to suggest that without government funding the Internet, NASA’s man on the moon project, computer chips and GPS would not exist today.

But the president is mistaken.

The government has not funded scientific research “throughout our history,” and the idea that government must fund scientific research is a big myth, according to Terence Kealey, professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, England, and author of The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, in an article for the Cato Institute in 1997. “The argument is that private companies will not fund science, especially pure science, for fear that their competitors will ‘capture’ the fruits of that investment. Yet, in practice, companies fund pure science very generously,” Professor Kealey wrote. “The more a firm invested in basic science, the more its productivity grew,” he said, citing research conducted by University of Pennsylvania economist Edwin Mansfield.

He went on to explain that “if a company is sited in a country that has low taxes, it simply invests its own money; if it lies in a country with high taxes, it lobbies its government to fund its R&D,” concluding that high taxation interferes in the normal economics of funding scientific research, and that “government funding displaces private research money.”

When government directly funds research, those projects and areas preferred by government receive funding. But government should not determine what or who gets funding; that isn’t what made America great. The funding of science should be economically, not politically, determined.

What Mr. Obama calls “investment” is just “government spending,” and even if its purpose is good and valuable, it is still “government spending.” Our government has amassed a $14 trillion national debt and a budget deficit this year of $1.4 trillion. That is the problem we have to solve, and more spending is obviously not the solution to that problem.

“We need to take responsibility for our deficit and reform our government,” the president declared. But his plan does not reduce the budget deficit; it merely substitutes some deficit spending with other deficit spending.

The fact is that government didn’t build America. The American people built this great nation through a mostly-free-market capitalist system.

In Mr. Obama’s narrow view, the only way to solve any problem is with a government solution. Government has an important role to play, but that role isn’t to make all our decisions for us; it is to assure the individual liberty and the market freedoms that built the nation.

Statists like Barack Obama seem incapable of understanding that.

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Technorati Tags: Obama, Politics, Liberalism, Government

America cannot survive its weak will and compulsive spending

It ought to be obvious that you cannot continue to amass debt beyond your ability to pay it off, but our leaders in Washington have not yet figured this out.

US Treasury data shows the national debt is $13.95 trillion, which has accumulated over many years of spending more than we took in.

We have a statutory debt ceiling of $14.29 trillion, raised to that level less than a year ago. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner informed Congress recently that sometime between March 31 and May 16 the federal government will have spent enough to breach that boundary, and that Congress must once again raise the debt ceiling.

The folks down at the Department for the Creation of Scary Scenarios – whose recent work includes the doomsday prognostications of global catastrophe if the country does not immediately replace fossil fuels with undeveloped technologies – has issued a dire warning that the debt ceiling must not be breached, or the world as we know it will end. This catastrophic scenario reached Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers, who then proclaimed that the impact on the economy would be “catastrophic.”

And if the debt ceiling is ultimately breached, the results would be very serious. But that isn’t forecast to happen until two to four months from now, and the intervening time can be used for more than hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth, or for a thoughtless overreaction to the scare tactics and hastily raising the debt limit.

The U.S. debt ceiling has been raised 11 times since 1996, and it’s time to stop. Starting now we must take steps to prevent having to raise the limit again, or at the very least to substantially delay raising it.

However, rather than limit spending, our government continues to dole out dollars to favored constituencies, and continues borrowing the money to do so. This has been occurring off and on for decades, and instead of doing the right thing, the sensible thing, the responsible thing – which is to control spending – our weak-willed, self-interested big spenders in Congress and the administration want to raise the ceiling yet again, and borrow more money.

And apparently Mr. Goolsbee also favors the free-spending status quo, saying on ABC’s “This Week,” “I don’t see why anybody’s playing chicken with the debt ceiling. If we get to the point where we damage the full faith and credit of the United States, that would be the first default in history caused purely by insanity.”

Speaking of insanity, let’s review a few of the loony things our government does. The Heritage Foundation has produced a long list of things that are improper, inefficient, and/or wasteful, including:

• The Government Accountability Office’s list of wasteful duplication includes 342 economic development programs; 130 programs serving the disabled; 130 programs serving at-risk youth; 90 early childhood development programs; 75 programs funding international education, cultural and training exchange activities; and 72 safe water programs.
• Improper or fraudulent Medicare spending now totals $47 billion annually—12.4 percent of its budget.
• Washington spends $25 billion annually maintaining unused or vacant federal properties.
• The Conservation Reserve program pays farmers $2 billion annually not to farm their land.
• Government auditors examined all federal programs and found that 22 percent of them — costing $123 billion annually — show no positive impact on the populations they serve.

Furthermore, Heritage tells us:

• There were 2.15 million federal employees in 2010 (including 80,000 temporary Census workers) costing taxpayers approximately $447 billion.
• Federal workers earn 30 to 40 percent more on average than their private sector counterparts.
• In 2009 their average wage/salary was $74,403, not including benefits.
• Federal employees owe more than $1 billion in income taxes they failed to pay.

The country is paying too many employees too much money to run dozens of duplicate and wasteful programs, and to operate the government inefficiently.

But despite these disgraceful examples of malfeasance by our public servants, many members of Congress still want to raise the debt ceiling.

Continuing this fiscal irresponsibility is not an option. We have to take tough, drastic action on federal spending now, and given the abundant opportunities listed above – nearly $200 billion specifically enumerated, and who knows how much more – finding ways to save billions isn’t difficult.

A US Senator spoke passionately on this issue just before a vote to raise the debt ceiling a few years ago: “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ … America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.” Those are the words of then-Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), and on this issue, he was right.

So, Congress, your instructions are: Lower spending and lower the debt by doing away with duplication, waste, fraud, and inefficiency, and get federal pay and benefits in line with the private sector. Start doing the job you were elected to do, and don’t punish any American with higher taxes until you first straighten things out. At that point, we won’t need higher taxes to balance the budget.

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Technorati Tags: Economy, Politics, Government, Liberalism

Latest from Bones: Rambling

The shift in the balance of power in Washington provides the opportunity to move forward

The year 2011 begins with control of the federal government divided. Democrats still control the White House and the Senate, albeit with a narrower 51-47 majority, but Republicans now control of the House of Representatives, 242-193.

As the 112th Congress got underway outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was gracious in her final comments, if long-winded and hallucinatory in reviewing her speakership. "Deficit reduction has been a high priority for us. It is our mantra, pay-as-you-go," she declared, not mentioning that during her four-year reign the House added $1 trillion to the federal debt each year.

Such irresponsible spending can’t be sustained, and Republicans must keep their pledge to fix that problem.

The Republican plan to read the United States Constitution aloud to the entire House drew surprisingly harsh criticism from Democrats, one of whom accused Republicans of “worshiping” the founding document and treating it like a “sacred text.”

Others grumbled that the roughly ninety minutes it took to read the document was a terrible waste of time, and still others complained that the version to be read was the amended version, as if reading the original un-amended document was more appropriate than reading the form that lawmakers have sworn to honor, defend and obey.

A cynic might say that given the abysmal performance of Congress, especially over the last four years, House members might benefit from having the governing document read to them. The same cynic might also suggest that for many it is their first exposure to the Constitution.

Evidence of a lack of familiarity with constitutional limits on government authority abounds, but perhaps none is more prominent, or a better example of irresponsible lawmaking than the 2,300-page healthcare reform bill, the passage of which the public strongly opposed, to no avail. The House now must vote to repeal it.

However, supporters of the bill say “don’t waste time trying to repeal the health care bill. The Senate won’t support repeal, and if it did, the president will veto it, and Congress won’t be able to override the veto. Spend time on more important things.”

That is a perspective many agree with, but it is exactly wrong. Republicans must push to repeal health care reform, even if it ultimately fails, for several reasons:
• There is a principle favoring limited, constitutional government involved
• The reform law as passed is disastrous
• Repeal was an important issue for many of them in the election
• Their credibility depends upon it

But also consider that the election changed the balance in the Senate and some Senators who formerly supported the bill and are up for re-election in 2012 may actually have learned something about public sentiment of health care reform last November, and may have changed their mind on this issue, or simply don’t want to lose the next election because of it.

So, Republicans must bring it to a vote in the House, forcing members to take a public position on the issue, and let the chips fall where they may.

“But repealing the law will add $145 billion to the deficit,” supporters claim, and a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report supports that claim. However, the CBO had to use numbers Democrat authors of the bill provided, which is an exercise in voodoo economics.

CBO Director Doug Elmendorf explains that “CBO’s cost estimate noted that the legislation maintains and puts into effect a number of policies [such as arbitrary reductions in the growth rate for Medicare] that might be difficult to sustain over a long period of time.” They also omitted from the scenario they gave the CBO the Medicare “doc fix” cost of about $14 billion in the first year alone, and who knows how much in later years. And the Democrat’s scenario includes 10 years of collecting higher taxes, but only six years of paying the bills.

And if the reform law is such a great thing, why have waivers exempting 222 companies and unions covering 1,507,418 people from insurance provisions in the bill been granted? Why are health insurance premiums rising, not falling? And why are more than 20 different states fighting implementation of the law?

Health care reform imposes a plethora of tax increases, fees and penalties, and according to a July report produced by the Congressional Research Service will create dozens of new federal bureaucracies: “the exact number of new organizations and advisory bodies that will ultimately be created … is currently unknowable.” A description of those the report specifically discussed took 22 of the 42 pages, and includes such things as: “Office of Women’s Health” in five different agencies; the “Negotiated Rulemaking Committee”; the “Personal Care Attendants Workforce Advisory Panel”; and the “Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.”

The public knows reform is big government excess that accomplishes a tiny bit of good, and a great deal of bad. Our elected representatives must now obey the wishes of the majority of Americans: repeal the gargantuan, overreaching reform bill and start over fixing the world’s best health care system by implementing a few sensible improvements, one at a time, in individual pieces of legislation, as the bill’s opponents suggested two years ago.

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Technorati Tags: Government, Politics, Congress, Health