Call the Liberals’ Bluff: Oil Subsidies Should Go
[BigGovernment.com]
Posted Nov 2nd 2011 at 2:01 pm
by Jamie Radtke
On “Meet the Press” Sunday, David Gregory asked Barack Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe, “Should government be playing venture capitalist to try to prop these interest–industries up [referring to Solyndra]?”
Plouffe’s answer: “Well, let’s step back for a minute. We have to win this race, you know, we–if we don’t win the clean energy race in terms of technology, innovation, and jobs, and cede it to other countries, we’re not going to have the century–we need this. It’d be like us ceding the automotive industry race or the Internet and computer race.” [emphasis mine]
What pure balderdash! I am sure that Henry Ford would not be happy to hear that the White House was taking credit for his successes – like inventing the assembly line. The success of the American automotive industry and Internet was not because the government subsidizing Henry Ford or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs; it was because private investors saw the value of their ideas.
David Gregory’s question goes to the heart of our economic train wreck. Where in the Constitution does it state that Congress should be playing the role of venture capitalist and funding one business over another? What authorizes the government to fund one particular business – whether it’s Solyndra or Exxon – with everyone else’s money?
Ethanol producers receive billions in government subsidies. What does it accomplish? It increases the price the farmers pay to feed their livestock, devours huge quantities of the corn supply (more than 40%), and increases the price of corn for American families and families around the world. How crazy is that – a government subsidy that drives up the cost of food?
Obama’s Solyndra Scandal Reeks of the Chicago Way
[BigGovernment.com]
Posted Sep 17th 2011 at 1:27 pm
by Publius
From the invaluable John Kass in The Chicago Tribune:
The Solyndra scandal cost at least a half-billion public dollars. It is plaguing President Barack Obama. And it’s being billed as a Washington story.
But back in Obama’s political hometown, those of us familiar with the Chicago Way can see something else in Solyndra — something that the Washington crowd calls “optics.” In fact, it’s not just a Washington saga — it has all the elements of a Chicago City Hall story, except with more zeros.
The FBI is investigating what happened with Solyndra, a solar panel company that got a $535 million government-backed loan with the help of the Obama White House over the objections of federal budget analysts.
Gore, Reid and More of Stimulus’ Biggest Bust: Obama’s Perfect September Storm
BigGovernment.com
Posted Aug 12th 2011 at 1:45 pm
This WaPo article — “Obama tries to change subject back to green jobs” — is an instant classic of a new, Obama-era genre: cheerleading for expensive schemes which exist solely due to political whimsy and consideration, and are therefore little more than make-work.
The item begins, “After spending weeks talking about topics he probably would have preferred to avoid — debt limits, deficits, a plunging stock market — President Obama will hit the road Thursday to talk about jobs. Specifically, about how his administration is trying to create more of them.”
The green ones. Which schemes failed where the president used to tell us to look but no longer does because the failures were exposed. As his spokesman admits “the White House doesn’t create jobs”.
And his critics say he’s out of ideas! But, hmm. Yes. I suppose that ‘green jobs’ thing went over well last time he led with it. Still, if ending up as a punch-line is victory, what does defeat look like?
More to the point, how much would whatever constitutes defeat cost us? Because WaPo says about this, the Obama administration’s chosen, sterling example of the economy they seek to design (what happened to telling us to look to Spain?), in return for $305 million in cited wealth transfers, “All told, the company has said its advanced battery operations could create 500 new positions.”
That is, this rosy, nice round-numbered scenario of ‘could’ (read: unlikely), produce temporary jobs — that is, they all disappear when the wealth transfer and/or mandates or preferences are burned through — at $610,000 per.
Obama’s Anti-Energy Policy Is Destroying American Jobs
BigGovernment.com
Posted Mar 25th 2011 at 10:05 am
by Robert Bluey
President Obama’s hometown of Chicago is nearly 1,000 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. But like many other communities across the country, it is suffering the consequences of his Administration’s anti-drilling agenda.
Illinois accounted for $376.2 million in shallow-water drilling expenditures over the past three years, according to an analysis by 14 oil and gas companies that spend money on vendors and subcontractors. The bulk of that money—$242.2 million—was spent in the Chicago district represented by Representative Danny Davis (D–IL).
It’s fresh evidence that Obama’s anti-drilling agenda is having a ripple effect across America since last year’s oil spill, claiming jobs not just in Louisiana and Texas but also in communities far removed from the shipyards in the Gulf of Mexico.
The study from the Shallow Water Energy Security Coalition paints a picture of the nationwide economic ramifications. Obama can’t even be blamed for playing politics. Five of the states that benefit most from shallow-water drilling backed him as a candidate in 2008. And Democrats represent many of the congressional districts that stand to lose millions.
The cost in jobs is startling. A new analysis by Louisiana State University professor Joseph Mason projects national job losses at 19,000 from the drilling moratorium, with wage losses at $1.1 billion. About one-third of those jobs are located outside the Gulf region.
High-Speed Rail and the Poverty of Obamanomics
BigGovernment.com
Posted Feb 17th 2011 at 4:37 am
Hard on the heels of his speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in which he jawboned the owners of private businesses to increase hiring in return for federal tax breaks and other subsidies, President Obama has included in his budget request for fiscal year 2012 a proposal to make a $8 billion down payment on a six-year, $53 billion taxpayer-financed “investment” in high-speed rail.
The president’s budget proposal is a bad idea for at least two reasons. First and foremost, the public sector has little or no incentive to spend the taxpayers’ money in ways that maximize the ratio of benefits to costs. What is more important, no public transit system in the country, with the possible exception of New York City’s subway, generates passenger revenues sufficient to cover operating costs, let alone capital costs. All others gush red ink year after year.
Passenger fares on public transit modes typically are set at rates below full cost in order to maximize ridership and to “prove” that transportation via bus or rail is a worthy public service.
It may be reasonable to assume that high-speed rail transportation in the Northeast corridor, linking Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York and Boston, could pay its own way, but that conclusion depends on the relative cost of rail versus air and automobile travel among those same cities.
The Government Bubble: Crisis in Egypt Reveals Positions of Power
BigGovernment.com
Posted Jan 31st 2011 at 2:43 pm
We are navigating through truly uncharted political and economic territory. Members of the financial cognoscenti have freshly alluded to the notion of the ‘government bubble’ as the next blow to the world economic order.
Since 2008 we have seen the housing, financial, and insurance markets hit on a global level, one after the other. At one point, they all burst because they were unsustainable. You don’t have to be a politico to know that the sovereign debt crisis is real. Just look around. As European countries (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain, and Belgium) reshuffle hundreds of billions of dollars to lighten rising government deficit and debt levels, Republican appropriators here at home futilely attempt to get our books in order. Ladies and gentleman, something is afoot.
Global Warming Nuisance Lawsuits Are Based on a Fatal Flaw
BigGovernment.com
Posted Nov 27th 2010 at 10:23 am
In my Big Journalism piece, “How an Enviro-Advocacy Group Propped Up Global Warming in the MSM – A Nov 2 Election Connection” I described how the “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” phrase is a viral accusation against global warming skeptic scientists. The beauty of the phrase is its simplicity and powerful influence, even when people misstate organizations associated with it. Al Gore disciples say global warming is a proven fact, all scientists know this, but a minority received massive energy industry funding to say the science isn’t settled.
The phrase is prominently seen in Gore’s movie, full screen in red letters for six seconds, followed by a slide of a very old cigarette advertisement as a setup for the next slide where Gore quoted a supposedly leaked tobacco industry memo, “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of creating a controversy in the public’s mind.”
Gore didn’t identify the origins of the “reposition” phrase in the movie, so errors occurring when it was repeated it are understandable. I’ve seen offbeat errors where blog writers say the phrase came from “a surgeon general”, that it was “a leaked government memo”, that it is part of “a movement by politicians to reposition global warming”, or that it was “memos circulated by some of today’s oil companies.”
But Gore himself said this, in a 2008 YouTube video, starting at the 29:10 point,
Exxon Mobil has funded 40 different front groups that have all been a part of a strategic persuasion campaign to, in their own words ‘reposition global warming as theory rather than fact’
This is inexplicably contradictory to the book version of his movie – although it takes one additional step to understand why - when he says in reference to:
…a relatively small but extremely well-funded cadre of special interests, including Exxon Mobil and a few other oil, coal, and utilities companies…. One of the internal memos prepared by this group to guide the employees they hired to run their disinformation campaign was discovered by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ross Gelbspan. Here was the group’s stated objective: to “reposition global warming as theory, rather than fact.
As I pointed out in my July American Thinker article, Gelbspan is neither the discoverer nor a Pulitzer winner, and a careful examination of his 1997 book The Heat is On reveals he specifically said the “reposition” phrase came exclusively from the 1991 Information Council on the Environment (ICE) public relations campaign, created by group of utility and coal industries.
Utility and coal, not oil – or oil industry associations.
Left in Limbo: Businesses Affected by Obama’s Drilling Ban Won’t Get BP Claims Money
BigGovernment.com
Posted Aug 12th 2010 at 3:11 pm
by Robert Bluey
As businesses along the Gulf Coast await the expiration of President Obama’s offshore drilling moratorium, they’re faced with a new hardship: Neither BP nor the Gulf Coast Claims Facility appear willing to pay for lost income resulting from the ban.
Last week BP announced it was deferring all moratorium-related claims to Ken Feinberg, the Obama-appointed administrator of the $20 billion claims fund. That news came as a surprise to Feinberg, however. He maintains the moratorium claims are BP’s responsibility.
Why immigration? What About the Oilbama Spill Crisis?
Atlas Shrugs
Pamela Geller
Thursday, July 01, 2010
I am sitting here chuckling. Forgive me, but that has been my recent response when listening to Obama’s speechifying. I am somewhat surprised at my recent response to his outlandish rhetoric, but he makes such a mockery of his very words, of America, capitalism, etc… that he is, invariably, comical. I have come a long way from when I would listen with trepidation and fear for our nation, so under his spell was America. But he is a clown. And folks, if they listen, can’t help but see it.
I listen now to his speech on immigration, lecturing us, yet again, on what America is … as if he had a clue, his contempt for us is so palpable. As if he had any respect for American exceptionalism, individual rights, entrepreneurship, privacy… As if he had a clue as to why legal immigrants come here — to escape tyrants like him.
He is reciting Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus,” which is engraved at the base of the statue of liberty, and he thinks is somehow making history — how can you not bust a gut? He prides himself on being post-American.
I understand why he must ram immigration through now. And why he is taking this on now after destroying the American healthcare system. He has no shot of re-election without an illegal base. It is his only motive, but I digress.
I want to know why the executive in chief has not been holed up in a war room 24 hours/7 days a week for the past 72 days with the finest scientific, oceanographic, energy, etc., minds, to solve the oil crisis.
This is a catastrophe of unfathomable proportions, the decades-long repercussions of which have not yet begun to be understood or calculated. Why isn’t Obama attached at the hip to BP executives and every oil specialist in such matters, working on the “leak” until it is fixed? Why weren’t the best brains in NASA brought in — as opposed to Obama’s redirecting their efforts to “help Muslim countries”?
What about the Gulf? What about those people, those communities? Whole swaths of coastline, entire towns, counties may face evacuation.
Why are the images being hidden from view? Why are folks prohibited from certain areas? Why isn’t there wall-to-wall on-scene coverage, as there was of the Valdez oil spill — which looks lilliputian next to this Obama disaster?
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