Click Cartoon for Larger Size
While engineers and oceanographers struggle to end the Gulf oil leak with pointless measures like "top kill," "junk shots," and "secondary wells," the World's Smartest Man has come up with the real solution: higher taxes.
The president believes that the best way to punish a British petroleum company is to raise taxes on all American petroleum companies...and therefore to raise prices for all consumers.
And he's not stopping there; the president feels that the oil spill is also a reason to go back to pushing for taxes on all carbon, including coal...thereby assuring that American's electricity prices will skyrocket.
The president's theory is that the billions upon billions in new tax revenues will allow the government, in its infinite wisdom and investment acumen, to fund research into "clean energy" sources. And if that happens to damage the economy, impoverish consumers, and cripple American productivity...so be it! In fact, we suspect that might be the deliberate goal.
But in an ass-backward way, the president might be right that tax policy could be the key to our "clean energy" future. But rather than raising taxes on all Americans, he should offer to cut - or better still eliminate - taxes for any companies that develop market-ready clean energy technologies.
Such a plan would create jobs (the CBO estimates that the proposed energy bill would kill millions of jobs), improve the economy, lead to cleaner energy and greater energy independence, reduce the oil money currently flowing to our nation's enemies, and make America stronger.
Which is, of course, why it will never happen.
And, of course, none of us would be skeptical enough to believe that that's what he had in mind all along with the severe mishandling of this convenient leak, now would we?
ReplyDeleteThis clown is like a parent or a spouse that beats you down and tells you how bad you are and all the while you are handing over your paycheck to them. If you don't wise up and get the hell out it will sooner or later become the self fulfilling prophecy of what's going on in the abusers noggin and you become the worthless slug...take Greece or better yet take "Sir" Paul McCartney please.
ReplyDelete"Never happen"
ReplyDeleteSo Sad, so TRUE...
Stilton, I think you are postulating unicorns here when you start talking about "market ready clean energy sources."
ReplyDeleteFirst, I doubt that we could ever agree just what such a thing would really be, that is what qualifies and what does not qualify.
Secondly, the gazillions of dollars spent thus far in the pursuit of "clean energy" has all been in the "development phase," with none yet brought to the "market ready" state. Even if we think this unicorn exists, it evidently takes more money than the Fed has been able to print thus far to get through the development phase before the market ready phase is reached. It is unlikely that any private company, other than perhaps China, Inc., could do this.
Thus tax breaks for the company that captures this unicorn are not necessarily an attractive option for us at all. Giving tax breaks for China would not help us, and US companies simply have no way to get the money, even with all the federal help they have had to date.
Dr. D- Gee, a "unicorn postulator" sounds like someone who should be on some kind of sex offender list.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, you make a very good point and I should clarify what I was trying to say. Coming up with "clean energy" sources is a vast, expensive, and (so far) insurmountably difficult task. And it is appropriate for the government to be funding research in these areas.
But surely there are free enterprise solutions to creating greater efficiency in our current energy use (and anything that reduces energy consumption is by definition cleaner and greener)...and it is those efforts which should be encouraged by freedom from taxes.
By contrast, the government's idea of bringing energy efficiency to our economy is to pay tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to caulk and weatherstrip a single home.
"the government's idea of bringing energy efficiency to our economy is to pay tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to caulk and weatherstrip a single home"
ReplyDeleteJust the kind of cutting edge, earth shattering, market driving genius one can expect from our community organizer in chief... what's next on the agenda? "If it's yellow - let it mellow, if it's brown - flush it down"?
Maroons...
They could have pinched this pipe off mechanically or explosively many weeks ago. This is all BS. I worked with this decades ago and they are very fast closure valves
ReplyDeletehttp://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=4438508