TELLING IT LIKE IT IS !

Environmentalists are constantly clamoring for higher gas taxes as the cure-all to their insane global warming theory. Clinton proposed a 26 cent tax on gas. John Kerry said it should be 50 cents. Gore has proposed that gas taxes be raised gradually to match prices in Europe and Japan. But they write off all their gas … what does it cost them?

Consumers though, currently pay about 46 cents per gallon in gasoline taxes. That’s not including taxes paid directly to the government by the oil companies and passed onto consumers. As the inestimable economist John Lott has pointed out, in the past 25 years oil companies have paid more than three times in taxes what they have made in profits.

Barack Hussein Obama’s response to soaring gas prices is to have the oil companies collect even more money from us at the pump, proposing a “windfall profits tax” on oil companies. “Corporate taxes” sound like taxes on rich people, but all they do is force corporations to collect taxes on behalf of the government and guess who it is really costing? That’s right the taxpayer – you!

Democrats have worked hard to ensure that Americans pay as much for gas as Europeans do.  That is part of the socialist doctrine. After a quarter-century of gas tax hikes, a ban on drilling for oil (that should never had happened) and a complete destruction of the nuclear power industry in America, I guess the liberal socialists can declare: Mission accomplished!

In response to skyrocketing gas prices, liberals say, practically in unison, “We can’t drill our way out of this crisis.”  What does that mean? This is like telling a starving man, “You can’t eat your way out of being hungry!”   “You can’t water your way out of drought!”   “You can’t sleep your way out of tiredness!”  “You can’t drink yourself out of dehydration!”

Seriously, what does it mean?  Finding more oil isn’t going to increase the supply of oil?  Will not food stop you from being hungry?

It is the typical Democratic strategy to babble meaningless slogans, as if they have a plan. How do liberals propose we acquire the energy required for the economic activity and production that results in light appearing when they flick a switch? The larger enterprise involved in producing that little miracle seems to elude them.

Liberals complain that – as Barack Hussein Obama put it – there’s “no way that allowing offshore drilling would lower gas prices right now. At best you are looking at five years or more down the road.” Isn’t that why the drilling should have happened five years plus ago? Why didn’t anyone propose drilling back then? Where was Obama during these discussions, then?

You know what we need? We need a group of people paid to anticipate national crises and plan solutions in advance. It would be such an important job, the taxpayers would pay them salaries so they wouldn’t have to worry about making a living and could just sit around anticipating crises. If only we had had such a group – let’s call them “elected representatives” – they could have proposed drilling five years ago!

But of course we do pay people to anticipate national problems and propose solutions. Some of them – we’ll call them Republicans – did anticipate high gas prices and propose solutions. Six years ago President Bush had the foresight to demand that Congress allow drilling in a minuscule portion of the Alaska’s barren, uninhabitable Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). In 2002, Bush, Tom DeLay and the entire Republican Party were screaming from the rooftops: Drill! Drill! Drill! We would be gushing oil now – except the Democrats stopped the drilling.

Drilling on only 0.01 percent of ANWR’s 19 million acres was projected to produce about 10 billion barrels of oil. From all domestic sources combined, we currently produce about 1.8 billion barrels of oil per year. To a layperson like myself, 10 billion barrels seems like a lot of oil.

The other party – plus John McCain – ferociously opposed drilling in ANWR, drilling offshore or drilling anyplace else. I refuse to believe they care about Americans having to pay high gas prices or high taxes. When will they put America and Americans first instead of themselves and their power mongering?

How long are we going to be fueled?