The Hill Street Blahg

The Senate Democrats resemble frenzied sharks circling their vulnerable prey as they prepare to go in for the kill. They’re hungry and now they want their cut of the billions of dollars in profits the evil oil companies are now realizing. Today these clueless political hacks will vote on whether or not to consider a windfall profits tax against the five largest U.S. oil companies and rescind $17 billion in tax breaks the companies expect to benefit from over the next decade. Like everything else the Democrats do, their so called “plan” to remedy high oil prices is to punish the already over taxed oil companies and the free market with more taxes and government regulations.

“The oil companies need to know that there is a limit on how much profit they can take in this economy,” said Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, the Senate’s No. 3 Democrat, warning that if energy prices are not reined in “we’re going to find ourselves in a deep recession.”

The Democrat’s anti-energy package would also:

• Make oil and gas price gouging a federal crime, with stiff penalties of up to $5 million during a presidentially declared emergency.
• Authorize the Justice Department to bring charges of price fixing against countries that belong to the OPEC oil cartel.
• Require oil traders to put up more collateral in the energy futures markets to curb speculation.

No where in the Democrat’s purported energy plan are logical solutions mentioned such as tapping into the 19 billion barrels of oil under U.S. public lands, building modern oil refineries, or easing the bureaucratic kabuki dance required to build nuclear power plants. What idiocy this is. Drilling for new oil reserves is the only way out of the current volatile oil dilemma. If we want gasoline prices to come down, we need to become enthusiasts and best friends of the oil companies. We need to encourage them to drill for more oil and that can’t be achieved through legislative punishment. We’ll never achieve energy dependence and realize lower gasoline prices by allowing Liberal Democrats to have free rein with government legislation to further punish an already over regulated and over taxed oil industry. This my friends is not leadership.

Sources:The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Limbaugh Letter