Here is his attempt at ridiculing us simpletons who want to bring down gas prices by tapping more of our own energy resources here at home.
He's imitating a game show to add to the comic effect...
Hello again, everyone! I'm Matt Miller. And welcome to "You Can't Handle the Truth," our weekly quest to see if Americans can face the facts needed to solve our most pressing problemsWhen has higher taxes ever achieved its purpose?
Matt [winking]: You see the dilemma. Today's rendezvous with truth? Gas prices. With Libya in chaos and Mideast jitters sending gas past $3.50 a gallon, we'll take on the most sacred cow in the entire bovine pantheon: the entitlement to cheap gas.
In our pre-show poll, we asked our studio audience if they would support higher gas taxes (and thus even higher prices) to achieve a rare public policy trifecta. First, we'd reduce our dependence on oil. Second, we'd create market incentives to invest in clean energy. And third, we'd raise much-needed revenue to shrink our budget deficit. As a bonus, we might eventually stop sending young Americans to die for oil in the Persian Gulf, too!
Alas, 80 percent of you said "no,"
Taxes go up and so does the debt. Why? Because politicians can't stand the sight of money just laying around. They've got to spend it on pet projects, dubious enterprises, and goodies they hand out to get reelected. Money collected for Social Security goes into the general treasury to pay current bills, so what makes this naive fool think jacked-up gas taxes would go to "green energy?"
Going Green = Higher Energy Costs = More Jobs Lost
It is also a myth that increasing the price of fossil fuels will make green energy more viable. In the microcosm of the United States, sure. Just like if you jacked up the price of every cell phone except the iPhone, you would make the iPhone relatively cheaper, but it would still be expensive! If it were just us in the world, this progressive economic nonsense might work, but we're not.
We compete with other nations on an economic battlefield, and increasing our energy costs would be like shooting ourselves in the face with a cannon. The cost to industry would be crushing. We couldn't compete.
Higher gas taxes take money from working people
What about those of us who have no alternative but to drive to work? What about those of us whose job site is 20, 30 or more miles away? Gas tax takes money from the pockets of working people and bread from our children's mouths, as do most liberal schemes.
Progressive Schemes: The more complex, expensive and unworkable, the better...
Drill here, drill now just doesn't waste enough money or provide opportunities to grow government and lecture everyone, so that holds no attraction to the cognoscenti on the left. Tapping our own cheap and available resources is just common sense, therefore unappealing the the pseudo-intellectual statists on the left.
The real agenda here is to jam us all into crowded city centers and sweaty tenement slums where government trains can herd us to and from work. Of course, our social betters like Al Gore and the Obama's would live in sprawling estates in the country and uncrowded gated communities far from the teeming hordes, as befits their superior status.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it." -- H. L. Mencken
16 comments:
If I may correct your first sentence: SMARMY, smirking smartass.
That is all.
We have about 19 billion barrels reserve, but there are 13 other countries with quite a bit more.
Long term we need consider
1. Fossil fuels are finite
2. It may be wiser to sit on ours for when we really need it.
3. As the finite resource
is depleted, the price will
rise.
4. At some point, alternatives will be necessary
...so IMO, it may be judicious on our part to
start looking at alternative energy to at least be in a competive position when fossil fuel prices everyone out of the market. But that's just me. I guess a politician
has Exxon, BP, the nuclear folk, windmill dudes, battery people, Saudi princes and fed-up voters
to consider....besides just simple logic.
BB's right.
On top of that oil is a globally traded commodity, and so what little we can add to the pool won't do anything to reduce prices at the pump.
I don't know if taxing gas is the answer. I am not a fan of flat taxes in general. But we certainly ought to be doing something.
More drilling is pointless and stupid.
JMJ
Pointless and stupid is sitting on a resource while we lose global economic position and gas and heating bills keep going up.
Other technologies are advancing, but we are stupid to not use what we have while smart people are working on making replacement technologies viable.
agreed Silver but tis all about spreadin wealth and govt control as u know...God bless.
Smirking Smartass? I was leaning towards clueless Jackass.
Comparisons to Europe are usually made by people who never lived in Europe, there is no comparison when you are dealing with countries the size of states. $8 gas is not that big a deal to someone who was born, raised, lives, and works in the town they grew up in with a 8 mile commute.
Our little ole town here (186 sq miles) is the size of Miami (35.7), Boston (48.4), San Francisco (46.7), and Minneapolis (54.9) combined. We've annexed ranches the size of Miami, and the Metropolitan area itself is 2715 square miles.
So when you're willing to live in Philly and commute to Washington DC everyday with gas at $8/gal...we'll talk.
Any idea of the economic impact of $8 gas on the price of goods manufactured in California with plastics made in Delaware, wood from Maine, fasteners from Ohio, Cotton from Texas, and shipped to NYC for sale? How much do you think that $1.25 Avocado is going to cost? Let's just say you're not going to be eating a lot of guacamole.
Cheers!
When have an increase in taxes ever achieved its purpose? Well, when the purpose is to separate Americans from their money, then we have to answer, “Every time politicians raise our taxes.” As for Green Energy, its purpose is to enrich the likes of T. Boone Pickens and Al Gore. Now my question for you is this: did I win anything?
Silver, man, once again, please GOD, what do not not get about hout the oil market???
OIL IS A GLOBALLY TRADED COMMODITY. WE CONSUME AT LEAST THREE TIMES WHAT WE CAN EVEN POSSIBLY PRODUCE. THERE IS NO WAY WE CAN NATIONALIZE THAT RESOURCE AT A LESSER COST THAN MOVING TO SOMETHING ELSE.
Do you get that?
JMJ
So why then would releasing oil from the strategic reserve lower the price?
Your economic understanding is half right. Our producing more of our own will lower the price.
And I'd love to see your analysis that shows moving to something else is cheaper. Ethanol is a huge money waster that is starving people to feed cars, at a much higher cost than a gallon of gas.
Jersey, do you fail to understand that a domestic product and imported product are not necessarily priced the same?
As US production increased, the global price would necessarily go down, if they wished to continue selling oil in the US market.
If OPEC sells oil at $100 a barrel, and I can produce oil at $55 a barrel and sell it at $75... what are you going to buy? My oil or OPECs oil?
Your logic implies that production costs are linked to supply and demand costs, and they are not.
But as the devil's adovocate, I'll grant you your point. Fine...we can't buy oil and I've got a trillion dollars in my wallet.
What suitable substitute do you propose I spend my money on. Not R&D money either... what can I go out right now and buy as an alternative to petroleum?
"Alas, 80 percent of you said "no,""
Well thank heavens the number of stupid liberals was only 20%, there is still hope.
"Gas tax takes money from the pockets of working people and bread from our children's mouths, as do most liberal schemes."
Not most, that's the point of all liberal schemes, to leave you poorer and your children worse off, well that is when they're not trying to have sex with them that is.
The other thing i should add is that if you insist on taking a left turn into stupid lane and jack up the price of gas for you know, all the wind and fart power that's just waiting to power us into the next galaxy according to libtards; this wind and fart power will be just as expensive.
I can hear liberals already crowing that once the wind farm is up and running the price will come down, no it won't morons, there are plenty of countries out there who already took the turn into stupid lane and they ain't selling wind/fart power any cheaper than they were at the beginning. What has changed however is that the amount of money the taxpayer has to cough up to keep these gigantic pieces of sh!t running only increases.
If liberals want an alternative to oil, apart from drilling in your own back yard, they should push for nuclear power, it'll actually reduce your dependence on oil and lower their much hated carbon emissions.
But like i said earlier, that's not the real point of any liberal scheme, nuclear won't impoverish the nation and leave your children poorer, so they'll keep carping about the imaginary hundreds of thousands killed by nuclear power plants and the push towards stupid lane and a further turn into retard cul de sac continues.
"Progressive Schemes: The more complex, expensive and unworkable, the better..." googled 'alternative energy
investment groups and turned up 1.7 million articles. Private monies and presumably smart monies.
BB:
If the federal government totally divorced itself from "green energy," no subsidies, investment incentives, stimulus money, nothing, I wonder how much private money would be in the game?
T Boone Pickpockets sure dropped his big scheme in a hurry once he saw he could not fleece the taxpayers to do it.
I am all for private investment and research. I am not for government distorting markets by picking winners and losers.
Fossile fuels get far more
subsidies than renewables. Taxpayers get fleeced no matter what...
Fossil fuels make up over %90 of the energy industry. By your argument, green schemes are receiving a disproportionate share of government largess.
It's all crony crapitalism, and it should all be stopped and the $100 billion returned to the treasury (Oops! ...returned to China)
Government money is stupid money. Remember $600 dollar toilet seats? Do you think that was the only instance? Do you think government is now free of such financial absurdities?
We've spent trillions on the failed war on poverty. We now have multigenerational poverty, societal dysfunction and over 60% out of wedlock births in these communities the government purported to be helping.
We spend more on education and our kids get dumber, falling further behind the children of other nations
More and bigger government, armed with more taxpayer money, is clearly not the answer.
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