Ask Your Doctor If Sequesterol® Is Right For You

“Graahhrr!!!”
[“Bite the pillow. I’m going to love you now…vigorously”.]

So, here we are in Sequester-land.  It’s not so bad, right?  I mean, all the advance hype about it from some quarters would have led one to believe it would rate on the enjoyment scale somewhere between being boiled alive and being date raped by Godzilla.  The government hasn’t collapsed.  The world continues to turn.  Western civilization hasn’t collapsed in on itself despite the promised Armageddon that would result when the Air Force wouldn’t be able to purchase $10,000 toilet seats for their aircraft.  Barry did close the White House to tours but almost immediately backpedaled on that idiocy when he realized that closing the People’s House to tours claiming budget strictures (and blaming the Secret Service in the process) was laughable when we were also still spending money on his weekend golf outings (think “commandeered Air Force aircraft”).  In fact, spitting in school groups’ faces (the ones who’d planned months in advance and spent a fair amount of money to travel to Washington D.C.) is just one facet of the president’s plan to make the mandatory budget cuts hurt.  Memos have since surfaced at the Interior Department, the Department of Agriculture and at Homeland Security instructing managers to cut back on services visible to the public, presumably to underscore their point that the government can’t possibly function without a daily exponentially increasing amount of tax money.  It seems kind of obvious, after the first week anyway, that the public won’t tolerate this kind of underhanded political gaming and so the forecasted doom and gloom hasn’t appeared and, even when it does, it likely won’t be nearly as apocalyptic as we were all told it would be.  In the meantime, enjoy crapping on the Air Force Gulfstream on the way to your tee off time Barry.  You’d damn well better use that gold plated pooper perch we paid for.

Anyway, something caught my eye today as I was perusing the news.  Barry wants to fund ways to encourage the United States to wean ourselves entirely off foreign petroleum.  Calling it the Energy Security Trust fund, Barry wants to encourage private industry to develop new ways to lower the cost of vehicles that run on electricity, biofuels, natural gas or other non-oil fuel sources.  He proposes drawing $2 billion over 10 years from royalties the government receives from offshore drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf.  Now, those who have read previous post on this blog may recall that I supported not just Barry’s decisive statement about wanting to move America away from a petroleum based energy infrastructure but also Bush’s bold statement during his State of the Union address which is going on…what…12, 13 years ago now?…to move the United States toward a hydrogen based economy.  Both statements turned out to be total politician lies so why does this pronouncement from Barry rate even a comment?  Well, something has changed and that something is that the United States is now nearly off foreign oil or are in a position to be if we decided to do so.  Recent technological leaps and the price of a barrel of crude have made extracting the oil under our own feet a viable activity.  Because of that, the Dakotas these days are booming oil fields and we’re sitting on so much untapped natural gas in this country that some experts suggest that even applying the curve of our ever increasing hunger for energy, we have about 200 years worth of natural gas under our back yards here.  So, Obama’s desire to set up a fund to encourage alternate energy technology sounds great right?  I mean, it’s even revenue neutral (or at least paid for) because it’d come out of the fees the government collects from offshore drilling permits.  Who could be against such a great idea?

All those who remember the Solyndra debacle, for starters.

Cost of White House public tours for one year: $936K
2010 White House state dinner for Mexican president: $970K
You kids wanna see the White House? Go get elected President of Mexico.

Look, as I’ve said before, I’m an American before I’ll accept any other label people like to use to describe their stances on things.  I personally think Obama has been a substandard president and shows the damage that can be done in electing a novice ideologue solely on the basis of race (and yeah, that’s why he’s there folks…unless you think Hope and Change would have worked for a similar white Democrat which we all know it would not have).  But he’s what we have to work with/endure so that’s that.  One of the reasons I dislike him though is that either his naivete about giving public tax dollars to private firms with no strings attached or his bald corruption of giving public tax dollars to private firms with no strings attached who contributed to his campaign as a kickback reward (pick whichever one works for you) is much less effective than simply crafting a tax incentive for such industries.  Why give these firms money we can ill afford to simply give away these days in the midst of Sequesterpalooza when writing a tax refund for successful such firms would be much more likely to, you know, actually produce the results you say you’re after?  The reason why is because Barry is simultaneously locked in an ideological battle with his Republican opponents over how best to form the nation’s financial house such that we don’t end up being Greece or Spain’s bigger idiot bailout brother several years down the road.  Front and center in Barry’s plan to do so is to…raise taxes on corporations.  It’d be kind of hard (even for Barry) to say “raise taxes on corporations” while at the same time saying “give tax breaks to some of them”.  He’s also railed about tax moneys that go to “big petroleum” but it’s those very firms that’d probably be best positioned and knowledgeable about how to create and deploy ways to lower the cost of vehicles that run on alternative energy.

To sum it up: great idea Barry (even if not even a single atom of it is from an original thought) but lousy way to implement it.  Reduce government spending (like maybe demand to know what’s so compelling about lesbians and gay men being fat that the NIH feels compelled to hand out $1.5M in a study to find out), create incentives for private business such that they grow, employ people (maybe even some fat gay ones) and create increased tax revenues…and stand the fuck aside and let America do what it does best: innovate.  Know why we’re nearly energy independent today?  It’s because it now makes good business sense to come up with the new drilling and extraction technologies.  The government had little direct role in encouraging or funding that.  That was nearly all private enterprise doing what it does: serving a need and responding to economic conditions.  Give those companies a tax break for doing the work we want them to do and, by God, they’ll do it.  It’s not like 240 years of history of free enterprise in this country could be mistaken.

My name is Euroranger and I approved this message.