1. The US need to be an Oil Exporter, not an Importer. That means we drill the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska, Utah, and everywhere we have oil and natural gas.
2. The US needs to stop using Food to turn into gasoline. Corn is a poor energy source as it takes more energy than we gain from it. It also drives up food prices across the board.
3. We need to get away from the phrase “Oil Addiction”. Oil is the Life’s Blood of our Economy. We might as well say we need to get over our “Oxygen Addiction”. Energy development needs to be fast tracked, and Ken Salazar needs to be fired… and then prosecuted for the theft of funds from people and companies that won and paid for the oil leases at auction.
Tapping into the Strategic Oil Reserve is foolish.
4. The US Tax code need to be rewritten from the bottom up.
5. Government regulation of Private Industry needs to be completely and utterly unmade. Get the government off people’s backs, and the people will be able to move forward. The Free Market will regulate its self. If a product is unsafe, people will not buy it. With the information age as it is… word will get out fast enough.
Great minds think alike. I just had a conversation with my boss this morning, and I touched on all these points, except for the corn.
1. Drill baby…you know the rest.
2. Keep the research for making diesel from switchgrass and algae going just in case, but quit ruining everyone’s motors with that ethanol additive nonsense.
3. Oil is necessary to civilization as we know it and will be for a long time, people need to get used to that fact.
4. The Fair Tax, please.
5. At least dial the regulating agencies back to the state level, where states with foolish policies will see companies vote with their feet.
Great points as always (or often, at a minimum) Ogre.
The “Fair Tax” is no better than the current system – once the IRS gets hold of it, they’ll make it just as much of a mess.
The personal income tax, itself, needs to end. It’s a drop in the bucket, and serves mostly just as a way to get folks to cough up their financial data. Corporations have various legal privileges, and can pay for them. That’s not a “tax the rich” pipe dream – they /will/ pass the cost on to the consumer, but then it will be distributed much the same way that the “Fair Tax” proposals work, but without the IRS sticking their noses in John Q. Citizen’s financial life.
Enacting the Fair Tax would involve eliminating the IRS. It would eliminate income taxes entirely, as well as corporate taxes, payroll taxes, and any other kind of federal tax.
All that would remain is a retail sales tax with a check paid out to citizens to reimburse their taxes up to the poverty level.
That’s very different from what you described.
Who’s going to administer all that? The IRS.
http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_faq_answers#10
Except not. The states would collect the sales tax (as most do already) and would mail the money to the US Treasury.
No one would file tax returns so there would not be a need for the IRS.
I think “oil addiction” is somewhat fair. Oil is a high-density energy source. A small tank of oil products can move a vehicle a long distance, because the fuel contains a lot of energy per pound, and the equipment to extract that energy and convert it to something useful doesn’t weigh all that much.
Power plants, on the other hand, just kind of sit there. It doesn’t matter how heavy they are, or how much their fuel weighs (within reason – it still needs to be transported), because they aren’t mobile.
Americans seem to favor wasting valuable, high-density fuel on things which don’t require those attributes. And I do think that it started largely as a “look what we can do” thing. We need to be more sensible, and save the oil for vehicles and the like, while telling the whiners to get out of the way and let us build some heavy, immobile nuclear plants for electricity. Dams, wood-fired plants, whatever – there are lots of options that use lower density fuels, or heavier energy-extraction methods. Oil is valuable – burning it for electricity is silly.
Develop some nuke plants that can run on de-enriched bomb material. There are a lot of older bombs in the stockpile that can’t be relied-upon, anyway, so might as well turn them into electricity. Since we already paid for the fuel, the costs will go down. And the hippies will have aneurysms with the “hate nuclear power” and “love dismantling nuclear bombs” competitions in their heads.
…the sources I could dig up stated that only 1% of U.S. electricity generation comes from petroleum fired generators/plants.
Totally agree with your idea to reuse “de-enriched bomb material”. I can imagine the wails of liberal anguish now though.
I tend to include natural gas with “oil.” It’s a reasonable vehicle fuel for certain applications. If more of it was available for vehicle and home heating use, prices would drop, and oil prices would have to drop to remain competitive.
We need to start repealing (especially federal) laws en masse. I like John Stossel’s rule: For every law passed, repeal 5.
That should go a long way toward eliminating federal bureaucracies, as well.
It’s too late. One third of all American personal income comes in the form of handouts from the government. People are addicted to government.
There’s no fixing it now.
They need to quit. Cold turkey.
Damn Straight!
The Government that governs best, governs Least!
Let each state tax income at no more then five percent, for all persons and corps, no federal income tax. No government welfare, that is the proper function for private charities and the church. The federal government has two jobs, deliver the mail and protect the borders. Protecting the border includes tariffs and customs duties, which should be the federal governments only income.
Wow, I could have wrote what you just stated.
I could even go further but I’ll let this stand on its own because it is a good “starting point”.
Well spoke George.
Great comments by all here. Well done.
@ Joe,
Decoupling from oil for transportation is good so far as it goes. Make electricity cheap and plentiful enough for EV’s in local use.
However, over the road, trains, trucks, ships, personal vehicles will continue to rely on oil for a very, very long time.
Yes, oil is a high-energy-density fuel, so it works well for transportation. We need to decouple stationary users from oil, because it doesn’t matter how much uranium weighs, when it’s just sitting there, but it matters quite a bit, how much the fuel in your gas tank weighs. Stop burning oil in power plants, and pump prices will come down.
Also, cut the fuel taxes. If Amtrak is unsupportable, then it’s unsupportable; there’s no reason I should subsidize Amtrak with every gallon of diesel I put in my truck. Et cetera.
Sorry to repeat but the sources I could dig up stated that only 1% of U.S. electricity generation comes from petroleum fired generators/plants.
Amen to removing Amtrak subsidies.