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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Jonah Goldberg
Too little, too late, too clever and for the wrong reasons.
That's a good way to describe President Obama's decision to allow a little offshore drilling.
Of course, most of the environmentalist base of the
Obama justified his decision to allow drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the southern Atlantic and some coastal regions of northern Alaska on the grounds that it would create jobs and serve as a "bridge" to the carbon-free Brigadoon we've long been promised. The reality is that his decision was entirely political. Aiming to win vital Republican support in the
Back when oil cost
But there's an unintended irony to Obama's decision, one that he probably has not considered since the passage of health-care reform has only reinforced his ideological hubris. The welfare state that Obama is trying to create needs money, desperately. The federal debt is currently around
Obama's arguments for health-care reform were similarly otherworldly. We can give 32 million more people coverage, without preconditions, and save money. It's already clear that this have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too pitch was bogus, as big corporations are announcing that ObamaCare will either cost them millions (if not billions) or force them to drop coverage.
It turns out that there's no free lunch, not on health care and not on energy policy.
And that's the irony. Obama and his Democratic successors will keep trying to squeeze the rich to pay for their schemes. But that won't raise anything close to the revenue they need. They'll try for a value-added tax, which will raise lots of money but also stifle growth. Eventually, if they want to avoid bankruptcy and keep the welfare state afloat, never mind pay for all of these environmental white elephants, they'll need more revenue, and that's where oil comes in.
Environmentalists who estimate that we only have six months' worth of oil in the Arctic or offshore don't know what they're talking about, because nobody knows how much untapped oil we have.
Many of the estimates are 30 years old, and they were made before radical leaps in seismic exploration and drilling technology. We could have tens of trillions of dollars worth of oil and gas under our soil or off our coasts. (
Fossil fuels aren't going anywhere for decades.
Even if we don't drill, other countries certainly will. No country in the world with significant oil or gas resources is abstaining from exploiting them -- except for America. Environmentalists say that makes us a leader; the rest of the world says that makes us a sucker.
Available at Amazon.com:
Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court
The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House
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Obama: The Same Old Drill | Jonah Goldberg - Politics Today
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