Business and industry – Page 85

Friday night videos – episode 2

I liked doing the first one so much last week that I’m doing it again this week. This will be a mix of summer reruns (that is, videos which may be a couple weeks old or more) and new stuff.

I’m going to start out with a powerful video which details a man-made natural disaster. You may say there’s no such thing but illegal immigration doesn’t just take its toll on our economy – our ecosystem takes a hit too.

It’s interesting when the desires of two disparate groups intersect as they have in this case – preserving the environment and securing the border. Yet the environmentalists are more likely to scream about building the high wall the narrator deems as a better deterrent.

Another item I’m strongly against is the idea of “card check”. I made mention back on Sunday that card check is coming back in a different guise, but this video from workers at a Dana plant tells about the mistruths and harassment union organizers resorted to in order to get those precious cards signed.

A news organization called the Washington News Observer caught up with former Senator and GOP Presidential candidate Fred Thompson recently, asking his opinion on how the new administration is doing. I tried to make the 4:09 video a little better sized because originally the vertical was out of proportion to horizontal.

WNO did a little better job with another leading conservative voice, Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana. To him, Obama is pretty much an epic fail and I agree.

One epic fail in the making is health care. Last week I had an ad from Americans for Prosperity and this week will make two in a row on health care:

Another WNO piece features Rep. Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan, who’s critical of Obamacare as well.

His state’s been hit hard by the economic downturn, so it may be the canary in the coal mine.

I don’t know if these guys who be eligible for our health care system (Lord knows everyone else will be) but the gang at Move America Forward wanted to remind us that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should stay there. This may qualify as a “classic” video since it was first released back in February.

Last but certainly not least, it’s time for another TEA Party! A sister organization to MAF, the bus trip veterans from Our Country Deserves Better are doing it again. They must own stock in some oil companies in order to use all that diesel.

So another fun week of videos and it cleaned out my inbox for the most part. I’m having such fun doing this I may make it a continuing series – Lord knows I have no shortage of content!

Health care shot over the bow

We’re still over a year from the primary, but issues and the opportunity to make points while building name recognition wait for no one. One recent example is U.S. Senate candidate Eric Wargotz opining on the pace of heath care reform. From his press release:

Dr. Eric Wargotz, a physician and candidate for U.S. Senate (R – Maryland), applauds leaders on Capitol Hill who decided to slow down on health care reform to get it right.

“As a practicing physician, I know we can’t afford Congress to rush and get it wrong. There must be time for an open, honest debate on the merits of the proposed reform. Placing strict deadlines on passage of this legislation was irresponsible and caused it to get seriously off track,” charged Wargotz.

“Now with more time and more thoughtful debate, our leaders may craft legislation that addresses the root causes of skyrocketing health care costs.”

“Real, meaningful health care reform should have three goals – lower costs; improve patient care; and reduce waiting times for critical care,” said Wargotz.

“The current legislation addresses none of these things and in many cases was going to make it much worse.”

Wargotz, outlining the keys to reform, continued. “To accomplish those three goals, reform must include:

Keeping government and insurance companies out of the medical decision making process;

Reforming the health insurance system;

Tackling frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits by capping non-economic damages; and,

Providing incentives in the health care system to attract more people to become health care professionals.”

“Health care makes up 16% of our Gross Domestic Product. Any reform of the system deserves a healthy debate in the marketplace of ideas. The wrong reforms could have devastating results for our economy and more importantly, those who the reforms are supposed to help,” summed Wargotz.

Join the discussion on health care at Dr. Wargotz’s health care web site scheduled to launch next week at www.DrWargotzOnHealthCare.org.

Let’s Make America Healthy & Strong!

It’s a sign of the times that Eric used Facebook to spread this release, as his website is still under development.

Here’s the issue I have with his statement, though. It accepts the premise that something needs to be done and only government can do it. We are ceding the playing field to those who are devoted to simply stopping the latest incursion on freedom and not speaking out about rolling back government’s heavy hand on the market. For example, why can’t reform include sunsetting the ill-advised Medicare Part D prescription drug program?

Let’s look at the Wargotz points one at a time. I certainly agree with keeping government and insurance companies out of the medical decision making process, but it’s also up to those who desire services to be wise consumers. Insurance cannot and should not pay for everything – ideally in my eyes health insurance would be more like auto insurance and cover significant loss, leaving maintenance items to the owner.

Further, the definition of “reform” that Dr. Wargotz speaks to in the second aspect of his solution is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps he means portability or simplification of regulation, which are aspects I’d favor. What I don’t support is the idea of mandatory coverage, which some include as part of reform (witness the Massachusetts solution credited to Mitt Romney.)

On point number three, Eric suggests a good step but one which doesn’t go far enough and may be somewhat misplaced. To me, tort reform also has to include a “loser pays” provision – but I’m not convinced that a federal reform is the way to go. Each state runs its own court system and that battle may be better fought in each state – after all, we have attorneys who scheme to get their suits heard in the states deemed most friendly to plaintiffs so the need for reform is greater in some state capitals than others.

Lastly are “incentives…to attract more people to become health care professionals.” You mean a good salary and benefits in a reasonably stable (if not growing with our aging population) profession aren’t enough? I don’t see the need for any federal program to bring people to the medical profession or, worse, convince them to go into a particular specialty because some bureaucrat deems there’s not enough to go around. To return to the previous point, obstetricians would be more plentiful if the threat of John Edwards channeling the unborn and winning a huge lawsuit (which, in turn, led to astoundingly high malpractice insurance premiums) was lessened or eliminated.

All in all, the candidate for Senate makes some good points; however, there’s much more he can do to make America healthy and strong by moving these ideas along a path which leads to less government and more freedom. Considering his likely general election opponent is currently under the care of our supposedly “broken” system, it may give her a better feel for what’s truly necessary. That prescription isn’t being written by Congress or Washington lobbyists.

Health care summit tomorrow

Note: the Liveblogging box will reappear at 3:45 this afternoon. It didn’t work properly when I attempted to keep that as the lead item under the new Shorebird of the Week.

This will be an interesting event and I'll be there to cover it.

You may have heard the radio ads for this events over the last week or so, but tomorrow Patients First, in conjunction with the Maryland Americans for Prosperity organization, will hold a Health Care Summit at Salisbury University.

This may seem like a simple effort to get more members to join a advocacy group (and it is.) But in this case the stakes are pretty high – your well-being and ability to secure the health care of your choice and your need.

Be there or be square. All right, if you can’t be there I’m in the midst of making arrangements to live blog the event, either here or on my sister blog Red County Wicomico, or both.

Because of that, Shorebird fans will get a special treat as I move my Shorebird of the Week announcement up to noon tomorrow. I don’t think the honoree will mind.

Has the stimulus done its job?

I thought about this when I saw a sign along U.S. 13 a couple weeks back:
Yeah, this stimulus lasted what? A month, maybe? I think it was in the pipeline before the brilliant idea of slapping this sign up was hatched. Oh, that's right - we 'saved' a couple jobs by making them put up inane signs like this.

What struck me as odd is that the particular repaving job lasted, oh, maybe 2 weeks. I’ll grant there’s other work being done along that highway in Maryland but I don’t know if the jobs are connected. Regardless, knowing the amount of time it actually takes to get these jobs underway I’m under the impression that the project would have been done anyway regardless of whether the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed or not.

Supporters of the ARRA tend to use the specious argument which claims “had we done nothing things would have been worse.” I don’t happen to believe that is true but we can’t wave a magic wand and just make the so-called “stimulus” disappear. However, one thing which does seem to be disappearing are a number of jobs as the unemployment rate continues to edge higher.

Like the fate of a canary in a coal mine, the prospects for job growth are alarmingly miserable. A recent Business Week report by Moira Herbst points out that the average workweek is at its shortest – 33 hours – since this data recording began in 1964. The reason for pessimism is that employers tend to demand overtime from existing employees before hiring new ones. In this situation, employers are cutting hours rather than laying off workers, but the loss of income trickles back through the economy and creates still more underemployment or outright job losses.

Last week, the Republicans released a video that reminded Americans that they too had a plan:

The upshot of the GOP plan was that it would have put money back into the economy by allowing those who earn it and invest in their businesses to keep more of it. This differs from the Obama approach which dictated that government knows how to redistribute income best by giving small “tax breaks” to those who normally don’t earn enough to pay taxes in the first place.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the liberal Obama approach is that it will eventually penalize those who create the jobs – small businessmen and entrepreneurs. After all, the money to pay for the “stimulus” has to come from SOMEONE and don’t forget Obama told Joe Wurzelbacher (a.k.a. “Joe the Plumber”) that he was out to “spread the wealth around.” So far he seems to have spread it well to feckless bureaucrats, bloated state budgets, and his biggest supporters at ACORN.

I think that little figure with the shovel on the U.S. 13 resurfacing sign shows it best – Obama and his minions are shoveling something. That something more resembles the waste products from the numerous chicken farms in the area, though.

Don’t count the environmentalists out just yet…

A couple weeks back much hay was made about the Environmental Protection Agency suppressing a study compiled by Dr. Alan Carlin – a study which contradicted the EPA’s assertion that global climate change is man-made and can only be stopped through onerous restrictions on what Americans can drive, consume, and produce. An example of this hullabaloo comes from this post by Robert Romano on the Americans for Limited Government blogsite.

In reading through the report, however, I did find a loophole that may convince the anti-growth forces among the global warming fanatics that, indeed, there is cause for concern. Despite the fact that temperatures as a whole globally have declined over the last decade, there are pockets where temperatures have increased. The study defines it this way:

There appears that there is another major influence on global temperatures – but significantly only for surface temperature measurements. This is the effect of rapidly expanding urbanization worldwide and a number of other factors that appear to be corrupting surface measurements. Because most surface measurements are made in urban areas there is a high risk that the urban heat island will influence the measurements made. The UHI effect is well known and well documented.

In practice, cities do tend to be warmer than the surrounding countryside because of the amount of pavement found in most urban areas. Forested areas tend to be cooler, which is why the planting of trees is encouraged.

What worries me most about this particular conclusion is the opportunity it can provide for those who favor so-called “green” building to point out that even the global warming skeptics acknowledge that standard building and development practices will lead to climate change, even if it’s on a microscopic level. Naturally their proposed solution would lead to higher building costs and less possible suitability for a property’s highest and best use.

Whether knowingly or not, one offshoot of this theory will commence in Maryland this coming October. Senate Bill 666, passed this year, reduces the threshold for cutting forested land without state intervention from 40,000 square feet to 20,000 square feet. (Originally the bill would have required forest conservation plans for grading or subdivision permits on parcels of 20,000 square feet or more, but that was scrapped before passage leaving the current 40,000 square foot threshold in place.) In essence the state is trying to force greenways onto the public, stifling needed economic development. If you take away a forested piece of land, the idea of current law is to replace it somewhere else or, if you cannot do so, you would pay the state 10 cents per square foot of affected area (the fee will triple to 30 cents once SB666 becomes law in October.)

Given the zealousness of the radical environmentalists in Maryland, there’s no need to give them further cause to make development more difficult yet I can see where this study – combined with those upcoming changes in the law – may hand them the wherewithal to do so. For them, every tiny incremental change is a step in their direction and a step away from either being able to do that with your property which you see fit or the enactment of sensible controls locally – the radical green faction prefers tarring all of Maryland with the same broad brush by having Annapolis govern by fiat.

With our economic turmoil the green side needs to take a time out and let the current restrictions run their course. (Needless to say, I think a rollback is in order but I’m not holding my breath on that prospect.) Giving them another chance to scream about global warming doesn’t help the cause of liberty and could prove counterproductive even in the success the Carlin study provides in the ongoing battle against Radical Green.

Fun facts on fuel

A set of commercials I occasionally hear on the airwaves comes from the GEICO gecko discussing “fun facts” about the company. My friend Jane Van Ryan at API sent me their own version of “fun facts” embodied in an Energy IQ quiz. (They even stole my favorite format: 10 questions!)

Now I think I’m a reasonably smart guy, but I only got 6 right! Admittedly I overestimated on some so the brain trust at API must have figured me being the cynic I am and employed a little reverse psychology on me.

But Jane commented in her e-mail to me:

Considering the gravity of some of the energy proposals being debated on Capitol Hill right now, the results (of the survey) are particularly striking.

While the survey revealed that Americans now recognize the United States will need more energy in the coming years, respondents vastly underestimated the amount of oil and natural gas that will be needed to meet that demand. Conversely, respondents overestimated the role that renewable energy sources will play in meeting future demand, the amount of oil the U.S. imports from the Middle East, and oil and natural gas industry earnings.

When you look at how the drive-by media portrays the energy industry, it’s not a surprise that Americans look at it the way they do – in general the news networks portray oil companies and their executives as a robber barons on a scale somewhere between Lucifer and J.R. Ewing from the old Dallas TV series.

On the other hand, alternative energy has been touted as the savior of America when reality dictates otherwise. Remember, even if wind, solar, and geothermal power increased tenfold over the next decade – a dubious proposition at best – the share of BTUs provided by those “preferred” alternative sources would only be about 10 percent. (It’s roughly 1 percent now according to the latest EIA figures – look at page 47 here).

Perhaps one thing helping the idea of “drill here, drill now, pay less” is the mistaken idea Jane points out about where we really get our oil. Although it’s still far too much of a share crossing our borders, the reality is that much of our oil comes from the North American continent and adjacent waters. Between our own sources, Canada, and Mexico, we get a good chunk of black gold. But we could get a lot more if the government would get out of the way instead of trying to create an artificial market on carbon as Waxman-Markey would.

(Just as an aside, do you think succeeding generations will look at Waxman-Markey the same way we look at the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariff from 1930?)

In the coming days it would pay to become an energy expert and the information from API is a useful start.

To conclude one of the GEICO spots, the gecko notes, “…these aren’t fun facts; these are financially sound facts. We’ve been duped!” Sometimes a little trickery is necessary to teach us what we all need to know.

Next up for Frank – health care

There were a lot of people who were anywhere from disappointed to outraged that our recently-elected Congressman, Frank Kratovil, was one of those who voted in favor of the Waxman-Markey “cap and trade” bill, better thought of as the “energy tax”. While 44 mostly “Blue Dog” Democrats (a group Kratovil likes to consider himself a part of) voted “nay”, Frank decided to send a bill that hadn’t even been completely put together yet on to the Senate.

Because Congress is now off on its Fourth of July recess, it’ll be a few days before Kratovil gets back to work with the next big-ticket item on the Obama agenda: his version of health care reform (read: eventual single-payer system like Great Britain or Canada). Understandably, a lot of people aren’t thrilled with the idea of nationalized health care.

In this case, though, my guess is that Kratovil isn’t even going to be one of those on the fence – he’s going to jump lock, stock, and barrel in favor of it. Does the phrase “Universal Health Care Means Universal” ring a bell? If not, let me remind you.

I can already see this three-ring circus being placed into motion. Unfortunately for those who believe in transparency and limited government, neither of those seemed to be the case on cap-and-trade and I wouldn’t be too surprised if we see hundreds of pages added to a House bill regarding health care at oh-dark-hundred the night before the vote, which will likely be set again for a day before Congress recesses. When you’re trying to allocate huge portions of the private-sector economy, speed and stealth are your friends.

Friends, it’s more important than ever that people become aware of what’s happening. What’s quite troubling to me is that news tends to focus on trivial things like the recent passing of a number of celebrities whose names history will little note nor long remember and not on the all-out assault on freedom and liberty being waged by the current Administration and Congress with the consent of the man a bare plurality of First District voters (remember, Kratovil only had 49% of the vote) sent to Washington with the understanding he would act and vote as a moderate-to-conservative Democrat.

A few days ago I was in a conversation with people my age when it was brought up that people who lived through the Great Depression had no idea they were living through such a period – they just knew things were hard economically. We don’t have the benefit of standing 20 years hence and looking back knowing what happened and assigning a name to it. All we know is that economic times are difficult and pretty much everything government’s tried to address it has only served to put America deeper in debt and more beholden to foreign creditors without much to show for it. Someone may be getting wealthy but it’s not the average guy or the family on Main Street.

At what point do we realize that the answers being tried in Washington aren’t the approach we should take? How many will tear themselves away from the unceasing news cycle mourning the death of a so-called “King of Pop” and look at someone who’s amassing the power of a king himself by appointing “czars” to take over major industries?

Once in awhile the news will speak to the unrest in Iran over their recent election or pause to speculate more recent events in the small Central American republic of Honduras, where their President wished to circumvent a constitutional restriction on his time in office (shades of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela). Those who seem to care (expressed, for example, in the TEA Party movement) are derided as kooks or worse.

When caring about my country becomes the sign of being a kook, well, I guess I just happen to have a lot of the nation’s hard-working producers on my side so I’ll take my chances. Hopefully the smooth talk of politicians like Frank Kratovil won’t work its magic the next time they’re on the ballot.

Identity theft tied to illegals: study

Last week I got this from the Center for Immigration Studies. Let me tell their side first and I’ll add to it at the end:

In May of this year, a Supreme Court decision severely impeded the use of identity theft charges as an immigration enforcement tool. In June, several people were arrested after a fraud scheme was uncovered at a Florida driver’s license bureau. In July, a new Utah law targeting illegal aliens and document fraud will take effect. As these examples show, illegal immigration is inherently tied to document fraud and identity theft. As states continue to search for answers, it is apparent that the Federal government has not yet found a working legislative solution to deter these crimes.

A new Backgrounder by the Center for Immigration Studies considers how illegal aliens perpetrate document fraud and identity theft, the effects on the victims of this crime, as well as some proposals to deter it. “Illegal, but Not Undocumented: Identity Theft, Document Fraud and Illegal Employment,” is written by Ronald Mortensen, PhD, a retired career U.S. Foreign Service Officer and former Society for Human Resource Management senior executive.
Continue reading “Identity theft tied to illegals: study”

Kratovil (and Castle) make your utility bills skyrocket in time for the Fourth of July

While I was away this evening Frank Kratovil and Mike Castle made it almost a Delmarva sweep voting in favor of H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markey “cap and trade” energy tax. Only a brave Democrat in VA-2, Glenn Nye, kept it from being three-for-three in the anti-American vote department.

I’m curious to know what was promised to the two of them to get them to vote for a bill that, according to Bill Wilson of the group Americans for Limited Government, would “increase the prices of oil, gasoline, coal, and natural gas across the board, and thereby ‘incentivize’ alternatives like solar, wind, and hybrid vehicles. It won’t work, because the alternatives are inefficient, have a lower yields, and are more expensive.”

Perhaps the devil is in the details, such as the 300-page amendment tucked into the bill early this morning. In any case, I breathlessly await the poor excuses that both of these Congressmen will have when they drag their tails back to their district over the Fourth of July weekend. I know I have hard questions for them.

Panic in Detroit

And in a lot of other places too; that is if the Waxman-Markey “cap and trade” bill (H.R. 2454 – fair warning: the bill is a 1,092 page .pdf file) gets through the House and on to the Senate.

Here’s just some of the reaction. Let me start with the Americans for Limited Government group:

Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today strongly urged Congress to reject legislation “that will deliberately increase the costs of gasoline, oil, and coal at a time when the American people can ill afford it.”

“While the American people are dealing with a brutal recession, soaring unemployment, and about to be hit with massive inflation, Congress in the Waxman-Markey bill is proposing to make energy more expensive to service a radical environmentalist agenda,” said Wilson.

“It is up to the Congress to stop this legislation dead on its tracks, before it causes an economic train wreck that will take decades to overcome,” Wilson added.

(snip)

“This bill was rejected last year, and should again be rejected this year, because it’s an economy-killer. It will cost jobs, it will cost progress, and it will cost prosperity. That is the price,” Wilson said.

Wilson says that what makes the bill even worse is that the science behind cap-and-trade is contrived and misleading. “The whole premise of global ‘warming’ is based upon flawed computer models that predict climate change, and are not based on actual observable data that can be confirmed.”

Wilson pointed to a study from APS Physics, “Climate Sensitivity Revisited”. “The Monckton study proves beyond any doubt that the UN International Panel on Climate Change’s computer models that ‘predict’ climate change greatly overstate the impact of carbon emissions. In other words, ‘man-made’ climate change is not real, and yet Congress is ready to reorganize the entire energy sector around the idea.” (Emphasis mine.)

Joining in the chorus was another pro-freedom group, Americans for Prosperity. AFP Policy Director Phil Kerpen:

The Pelosi/Reid/Obama team has been unable to pass cap-and-trade thus far for one simple reason: it’s an enormous tax. The country is struggling to cope with the current recession but the politicians in power don’t seem to care how this bill will affect your family.

President Obama famously said during the campaign “under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” But he also pledged not to raise taxes “even one dime” on middle class Americans. Well it looks like he may be poised to break that promise.

We must band together and speak out with one voice in opposition to this egregious tax hike that will have virtually no beneficial impact on the environment. In fact, the EPA has even admitted that cap-and-trade could increase carbon emissions, as jobs flee the country and the painful regulations this bill will impose.

It’s time to kill this tax-hiking, job-killing, freedom-stifling legislation once and for all and your representative’s vote will be crucial on this bill.

The e-mail urges us to call our Congressman, which in our case is Frank Kratovil.

One voice I pay attention to on energy issues is that of my friend Jane Van Ryan at the American Petroleum Institute. She passed along this letter that API president Jack Gerard sent to each member of Congress while she weighs in on the Energy Tomorrow blog.

I’m not going to lie to you and say I read the entire bill – heck, most Congressmen haven’t either. But the part which worries me the most is buried fairly deep, as most sinister provisions of a measure are. Section 702 states:

SEC. 702. ECONOMY-WIDE REDUCTION GOALS.

`The goals of the Safe Climate Act are to reduce steadily the quantity of United States greenhouse gas emissions such that–

`(1) in 2012, the quantity of United States greenhouse gas emissions does not exceed 97 percent of the quantity of United States greenhouse gas emissions in 2005;

`(2) in 2020, the quantity of United States greenhouse gas emissions does not exceed 80 percent of the quantity of United States greenhouse gas emissions in 2005;

`(3) in 2030, the quantity of United States greenhouse gas emissions does not exceed 58 percent of the quantity of United States greenhouse gas emissions in 2005; and

`(4) in 2050, the quantity of United States greenhouse gas emissions does not exceed 17 percent of the quantity of United States greenhouse gas emissions in 2005.

To illustrate this better, I need to use an indicator made available by the federal government. (The key pages of this 439 page .pdf are pages 47 and 51.) If you assume, as I do, that greenhouse gas production is roughly equivalent to energy usage (since our sources haven’t changed significantly in the last few decades – we’re still burning fossil fuels for the most part) then in 2005 each person used 340 million BTU of energy. This is a number which has remained remarkably constant over several decades and actually peaked way back in 1978-79.

To achieve the Waxman-Markey numbers on a per-person basis, though, we’d have to retreat to 330 million BTU of energy per person in just two years. Okay, maybe that’s doable, although the last time we came in under that amount was 1987 (under that evil anti-environmental President Reagan).

But in one decade we would have to retreat to 272 million BTU per person to meet the 2020 mandates. Folks, we haven’t seen that level of energy usage since the early 1960’s. And I don’t know about you, but my lifestyle isn’t conducive to that of an era when the Beatles were the “in” thing musically and many of us weren’t born yet. It gets even worse as restrictions become tougher, bringing our per-person usage back to pre-1949 levels by 2030. (The EIA statistics only date back to 1949.)

If you look at page 47, that chart breaks down where energy usage comes from. Just about 7% of our BTUs come from “renewable” sources and the vast majority of those are hydroelectric (think of dams) and biomass (generally burning garbage). Less than 1% comes from the environmentally favored solar, wind, and geothermal power sources.

And it’s this paucity of renewable energy sources that scares me most. The government can work until doomsday building “clean” sources but they would come nowhere near meeting demand. Naturally, they would need jillions of our tax dollars to do so and that’s where the cap-and-trade “energy tax” comes in.

In a nutshell, this artificially-created market creates a “commodity” out of carbon, where those who use it “excessively” can purchase credits from those who have them available, although all these credits originally eminate from the federal government.

Maryland is one of several states who already have a somewhat similar scam ongoing called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. While there is supposedly a small benefit for all of us through the Maryland Strategic Energy Investment Fund (the fund where Maryland’s RGGI auction proceeds are supposed to go) it looks more like a handy means of income redistribution based on target households. Certainly the miniscule savings we may receive is going to be overshadowed by the higher prices we pay for consumer goods once businesses pass on their increased energy costs under Waxman-Markey.

Just to be clear, if someone wants to put up a windmill in their back yard or slap a solar panel on their roof to “save the planet”, be my guest. But don’t expect me to willingly pay higher taxes and increased utility bills just to make some do-gooder politicians feel better and think they’re making a dent in so-called global warming. Until you blot out the sun, you’re barking up the wrong tree when it comes to climate change.

Update, Thursday 10 a.m. : Paul Blumenthal, writing for the Sunlight Foundation Blog, points out that the 1,000-page plus version of the bill I cited from the GPO was mysteriously fertilized overnight and is now significantly larger.

Another budget-busting feature I found was that any jobs created by the bill had to pay the so-called “prevailing wage” in compliance with the Davis-Bacon Act. Look for Section 338.

Update 2, Thursday 2 p.m. : Once again this is a featured national post on the Red County site. They even kept my title this time.

Energy grab bag

Late edit: this made the “National Commentaries” section on the front page of Red County under a different title: “Republicans Push for Alternative to Cap and Tax.”

Most people are aware of the following facts:

Gasoline prices have increased on a fairly constant basis since the first of the year. Back in January we were locally paying $1.60 a gallon or so, now it’s close to a dollar more per gallon. That’s at least a $10 difference every time we fill up – for trucks that can be $20 or more.
Last year the ban on offshore oil exploration was allowed to expire by Congress in the wake of $4 a gallon gasoline.
It’s been over thirty years since a brand new oil refinery or nuclear power plant has been constructed in the United States. Yet energy demand continues to increase. This is key to a point I’ll make later.

Last week House Republicans introduced H.R. 2846; as they put it it’s an act “To increase energy independence and job creation by increasing safe American energy production, encouraging the development of alternative and renewable energy, and promoting greater efficiencies and conservation for a cleaner environment.” They penned it as a sensible alternative to the cap-and-trade energy tax proposed by Democrats.

One of the co-sponsors spearheading the effort used to be my State Representative when I lived in Ohio, so his comments perked my ears up. Rep. Bob Latta recently wrote a piece on the NetRightNation blog explaining the bill’s intentions. I can already see those on my left foaming at the mouth about the aspect of drilling for own own oil (and extracting oil shale) featured prominently in the bill, and to them I say: tough tiddlywinks. Drill, baby, drill!

Less desirable on my end are the provisions placed deep inside the bill extending a number of tax breaks for various behaviors. Unfortunately – and this is probably to make the bill more palatable to “moderate” Republicans – our side once again falls into the trap liberals love to use of using the tax code to bend the market to its liking. It’s driving us farther from my desire to see a consumption-based or flat tax, but that’s a rant for another time.

Along with language resurrecting President Bush’s idea of using closed military bases for oil refineries (as a pilot program) there is an aspect of the bill I’ve advocated for in the past; however, the wrong people are putting up the money. Buried on page 97 is Section 218 of the bill:

The Secretary of Energy shall establish a program to award a prize in the amount of $500,000,000 to the first automobile manufacturer incorporated in the United States to manufacture and sell in the United States 50,000 midsized sedan automobiles which operate on gasoline and can travel 100 miles per gallon.

Great idea – but why can’t we get all these nonprofits who whined about our gas guzzling cars and wanted the supercharged CAFE fuel economy standards we’ll have in the next decade to pony up the money?

I guarantee though that if this does pass someone would get the bright idea to slap a windfall profits tax on Big Oil to pay for the prize!

Secondly, why does the car have to be a midsize sedan? Personally I think a SUV (like a Jeep Liberty or similar car) would be more useful to a family. And if General Motors or Chrysler wins, who gets the money? That sounds like a loan payback to me. Incentives are good, but this one is perhaps misplaced.

I’ve said all along that there’s nothing wrong with alternative energy if it can be harnessed, distributed, and marketed at a reasonable price without a government subsidy. But when it takes billions of taxpayer dollars to make the prices equal, that’s not a truly free market. (On the other hand, that also goes for enabling those who have surplus energy, such as from a solar panel or windmill, to sell that back to the power company at a rate agreeable to both.)

Anyone making a proposal for solving our energy crisis needs to keep one thing in mind, though: conservation does not equal growth. It’s troubling to me that many put their entire stock of eggs in the conservation basket without factoring in that, as society progresses, more energy is needed to maintain a prosperous lifestyle.

Saving energy has its place but ambitious schemes to cut energy usage (usually couched in the phrase “reducing greenhouse gases by X percent”) would be a difficult feat without reverting our lifestyles to those of twenty to thirty years ago. I really dug the 1980’s as a decade (since they were the Reagan years and the music was great) but I really don’t want to cut my energy usage back to what it was at that point since that may well eliminate the usage of my computer, my cel phone, and many other conveniences we all take for granted. Someone had to make all those things and that took energy as well.

The House GOP made a good countermove to the Democrats’ cap-and-trade scheme, but it needs to go a lot farther than just letting us drill for oil in more places. Let’s refine our plan to be the ambitious one to reduce government, not rearrange it like deck chairs on our national Titanic.

Odds and ends no. 20

It’s been a little over a month since my last installment but that e-mail box keeps being stuffed with interesting tidbits which merit a paragraph or two, so we’ll start the week off with those and see where they take us.

A lot of people have made the case that the Republican Party needs to move to the center politically. I don’t happen to agree with them as I think the GOP principles truly inhabit the political center and what’s ran the party into trouble was abandoning those principles – regardless, Patriot Post editor Mark Alexander harkens back to a very successful Republican in his most recent essay, one well worth reading.

While Alexander dosen’t mince too many words in his piece, he has nothing on writer Andrew Breitbart, who throws down the gauntlet against Democrats in an op-ed featured recently in the Washington Times. The opening sentences say it all:

The Democratic Party’s attitude to elections is admirable: Win. And recent history has shown it will do anything to do so.

When, if not now, will Republicans develop such a fighting spirit?

I like the attitude because I have little tolerance for a number of left-wing views (or stealing elections). I’ll host this forum for discussion but we all know in the end I’m right and I’ll be proven so sooner or later.

Speaking of electoral fraud, the people at NetRightNation sent this video on ACORN to 17,000 bloggers. Guess I’m number 17,001 – but the point remains: why is this group getting federal money?

There are folks who do appreciate what’s going on in the halls of Congress, even if the measures they support may not have much of a chance of passage. For example, a group called the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (as they claim, “a non-profit, non-partisan policy institute dedicated exclusively to promoting pluralism, defending democratic values, and fighting the ideologies that drive terrorism”) was pleased about a bipartisan bill attempting to restore missile defense cuts unwisely proposed by the Obama Admistration in the wake of saber rattling by North Korea and electoral unrest in Iran. I happen to agree so the group gets a few pixels.

Perhaps a more successful outcome awaits a bill to audit the Federal Reserve. The conservative watchdog group Americans for Limited Government was pleased about the bill getting to 222 co-sponsors, but wanted more action:

Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today called upon Congressman Ron Paul (TX-CD14) to circulate a discharge petition for HR 1207 at the end of the month if the House Financial Services Committee does not put the legislation on the floor.

“Barney Frank must allow this to come up for a vote. Of the 71 members of the House Financial Services Committee, 36 are cosponsors of the Fed Audit bill, including 7 Democrats, and 35 are not,” Wilson said. “That’s a majority.”

A discharge petition would allow the bill to come directly to the House floor, bypassing the normal committee assignment. Wilson added that not bringing the bill forward would, “thwart the express will of the American people.” My question is what the Fed has to hide? No one else in government is doing much better at managing the economy.

They just like to shift the blame, as this cartoon by William Warren points out.

A cartoon by William Warren. Didn't Obama say unemployment wouldn't exceed 8 percent?

Another neat little group doth protest loudly about nationalized health care. You know it’s coming.

They called the plan the “largest middle-class tax hike ever,” during the last campaign. They said they were against it, they said it would hurt hard working Americans. Now, President Barack Obama and his allies in Congress, like Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid, are looking to a new payroll tax on your health care benefits, taking hundreds or thousands of dollars out of your pocket each and every year to pay for their Health Care “fix”.

Americans for Job Security has created a Health Insurance Tax Calculator so you can see just how much more you would owe to the federal government each year. Check out the calculator and forward it along to your friends and co-workers.

AJS also has a petition at the site…of course, I’m not sure what good it will do since big government isn’t generally known for listening to what the people want. Why do you think I like small government? It will grow their mailing list but what’s the harm in that?

Sort of lost in the news swamp is the impact Big Labor is having on our economy, particularly with “card check” legislation being debated. Obviously unions are all for the passage of the measure, but last month writer Isaac MacMillen pointed out what the Service Employees International Union seems to be best known for: corruption. Meanwhile, the Center for Individual Freedom points out that unions aren’t big on merit raises, but one Congressman is trying to change that:

(California Congressman Tom) McClintock is introducing legislation appropriately entitled the “Rewarding Achievement and Incentivizing Successful Employees” (RAISE) Act, which will amend the National Labor Relations Act and eliminate the de facto pay cap imposed on working Americans through stifling collective-bargaining agreements. Very simply, the RAISE Act would allow employers to reward high-achieving employees with raises, bonuses or other compensation regardless of limitations contained within a collective bargaining agreement.

The bill is H.R. 2732, which of course was assigned to a committee to die.

I’m going to close the post out with a calendar note. Tomorrow night (June 16th) will be another meeting of the local Americans for Prosperity chapter. They’ll meet at 7:00 p.m. at Adam’s Ribs in Fruitland; hopefully they’ll be able to build on some of their recent progress in Somerset County.

All those little items add up to long posts but I have fun putting these together, so I’ll just keep letting my e-mail box fill up and see what nuggets lie within.