Monthly Archives: February 2021

Stop Worrying about Drilling Bans on Federal Land

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The United States actually had the right idea—several of them, in fact—years ago. Today, the Federal government “owns” around 640 million acres of land—28% of the land area of our nation. That’s way too much, and it’s the largest source of leverage the Feds have over oil and natural gas production by our private economy.

There are a couple of things Congress can do to reduce to irrelevance Executive Branch volatility regarding Executive Orders and access to Federal land for mineral extraction; both of them involve reduction of American land that the Federal government presumes to own.

One is to transfer the vast majority of those acres back to the States from which the acres were seized. Examples of this excessive “ownership” include

State Federal Land Acreage Total State Acreage Per Centage of Federal Land
Nevada 59,681,502 70,264,320 84.90%
Utah 34,202,920 52,696,960 64.90%
Idaho 32,621,631 52,933,120 61.60%
Alaska 223,803,098 365,481,600 61.20%
Oregon 32,614,185 61,598,720 52.90%
Wyoming 30,013,219 62,343,040 48.10%
California 45,864,800 100,206,720 45.80%
Arizona 28,064,307 72,688,000 38.60%
Colorado 23,870,652 66,485,760 35.90%
New Mexico 26,981,490 77,766,400 34.70%

Notice that: the Feds “own” over 50% of each of the top five States, and we have get below the top 10 before the Feds possess less than a third of a State.

The Federal government legitimately controls land important for protecting monumental land like the core of Yosemite, land holding military facilities, and the like. The Feds don’t need all those hundreds of millions of acres of land for that, though. Instead, the bulk of the currently possessed land should be restored to the States within whose boundaries the land sits. The States in our federal republic should be the ones managing their domestic affairs of mineral access.

Then there are moves for transfers to individual ownership—moves of those several years ago.

The Bounty-Land Acts of 1776 awarded tracts of land to veterans of the Revolutionary War (assuming, of course, that we won the war, which we did).

The Public Land Act of 1796 authorized the sale of Federal land in 640-acre blocks for $2/acre, or roughly $1,600/acre today (more or less, given the heroic assumptions regarding inflation over so long an interval).

The Preemption Act of 1841 gave squatters living on Federal land first call to buy up to 160 acres at $1.25/acre, or roughly $1,000/acre.

The Homestead Act of 1862 granted outright 160 acres to squatters who had lived on the land for at least five years and improved it (along with a couple of other requirements that amounted to filing intent, proof of improvement, and filing for ownership).

These and similar Acts, or some combination of them, could be modernized and used to transfer vast tracts of Federal lands to private ownership. Once there, the owners could sell/lease their mineral extraction rights to those evil drillers and earn income while the oil and gas companies could extract and continue to provide cheap energy to our nation and export cheap energy to the world.

‘Course all of that, or any of it, will be more likely with a Republican-controlled House and Senate and a Republican President, or veto-proof Republican majorities in each of the House and Senate.

GIGO

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The Garbage Out is easily summarized: the Progressive-Democrats’ $1.9 trillion Wuhan Virus “relief” bill that the House is putting its finishing touch on and then will send to the Senate.

The garbage going in:

  • $350 billion for state and local governments, cities, and counties. Progressive-Democrats also changed the funding formula to ensure most of the dollars go to blue states that shutdown their State economies—to the detriment of neighboring States as well as to their own
  • $86 billion to bail out 185 or so multiemployer pension plans insured by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. Never mind that these so-called plans have been badly underfunded since their inception by both the employers and the unions that created them
  • $129 billion for elementary and secondary schools, whether they reopen for classroom learning or not. Never mind, either, that most of the funds allocated by CARES remains unspent—or that of these new $129 billion isn’t scheduled to be spent until years later

And this garbage:

  • $50 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency
  • $39 billion for child care
  • $30 billion for public transit agencies
  • $19 billion in rental assistance
  • $10 billion in mortgage help
  • $4.5 billion for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance program
  • $3.5 billion for the program formerly known as food stamps
  • $1 billion for Head Start
  • $1.5 billion for Amtrak
  • $4 billion to pay off loans of “socially disadvantaged” farmers and ranchers
  • nearly $1 billion in world food assistance.

Never mind that of these $162.5 billoin, only the FEMA money might have utility. The rest of it is utterly unnecessary for anything other than vote-buying. The “needs” implied here would disappear were the States to reopen their economies and the Federal government to get out of the way so businesses could operate and Americans go back to work.

And this raw sewage:

  • $15 an hour minimum wage

Never mind the business- and job-destroying (to the tune of 1.4 million jobs) nature of such a mandate.

  • an increase to the child tax credit to $3,000 from $2,000 ($99 billion)
  • expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit to certain additional childless adults ($25 billion)

Which wouldn’t be necessary were Government out of the way and our State and national economy reopened.

Even earmarks:

  • $1.5 million for the Seaway International Bridge connecting New York to Canada
  • nearly $500 million for, as the CBO puts it, “grants to fund activities related to the arts, humanities, libraries and museums, and Native American language preservation.”

But this is what the Progressive-Democrats are demanding. Watch Senators Joe Manchin (D, WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D, AZ) vote these up because they’ll vote up the overall $1.9 trillion bill, along nakedly partisan reconciliation, for all their pious sermons about requiring bipartisanship on all bills.

Earmarks

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Leave it to Progressive-Democrats to want to bring this exemplar of spendthrift back. You know what earmarks are:

“member-directed spending,” [that] are provisions discreetly tucked away in large spending vehicles that directly fund a pet project championed by a specific member of Congress for the member’s own constituents.

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D, CT) and Senator Pat Leahy (D, VT)—the respective chairs of the House and Senate Appropriations committees are about to introduce legislation that would restore the business.

In contrast, Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) and Congressman Ted Budd (R, NC) are pushing the Earmark Elimination Act, which would ban earmarks permanently. Citizens Against Government Waste President Tom Schatz told Just the News that

Earmarks are the most corrupt, costly, and inequitable practice in the history of Congress. They led to members, staff, and lobbyists being incarcerated. In a form of legalized bribery, members of Congress vote for tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in appropriations bills in return for a few million dollars in earmarks. Earmarks go to those in power, as shown during the 111th Congress, when the 81 members of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, who constituted 15% of Congress, got 51% of the earmarks and 61% of the money. Restoring earmarks will lead to the same results.

I’m not as adamantly opposed to earmarks as some: they can be useful horsetrading tools, usable to facilitate political tradeoffs to get important legislation passed—or other useless legislation blocked.

The major problem, it seems to me, has been the secretive nature of earmarks. They tended to be negotiated behind closed doors, out of the public’s view, and then buried in one or another appropriations bill. The process needs to be better structured.

In that 111th Congress, the total amount that wound up being spent on earmarks amounted to some 3% of that session’s first year budget. Accordingly, break out those 3% into a separate appropriations bill as a sort of earmark slush fund. Then have every earmark proposal individually debated on the House and Senate floors until the 3% is committed, and where differences occur between the final House and Senate slush fund appropriations bills, let the bills be reconciled via House-Senate joint committees, just as every other bit of legislation is.

Let the horsetrading occur in plain sight of the House and Senate member constituencies. Ordinary Americans can handle the sight of sausage making. Honest.

And they’ll take appropriate action at the next election. ‘Course, that’s what the politicians are afraid of.

A Proposed Response

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Texas State Congressman Matt Shaheen (R, Dist 66 [which includes my county]) has tweeted access to a Request for Comment regarding last week’s snow and cold storm with various utilities’ associated failures to keep supplies of electricity, natural gas, and potable water flowing in major areas of the State.

Kudos to Shaheen for publicizing this RFP.

Below are my inputs.

  1. All, without exception, ERCOT board members and senior executives (C-suite equivalents and their deputies) must reside within Texas. Half of the board members, a separate half of the C-suite, and a separate half of their deputies must reside in separate rural regions of Texas. Within that last, a C-suite executive and his deputy must not reside in the same region.
  2. Each of these board members, senior executives, and their deputies must have demonstrated expertise and empirical experience in energy and potable water supply—e., they must be energy and water engineers. Personnel with legal expertise can serve as board consultants and as assistants to the senior executives’ deputies.
  3. The State government must encourage—but not mandate—all utility providers to amortize their bills that result from the sort of event the storm of 15-19 Feb 21 represents over the succeeding 12 months. Single bills of $9,000-$17,000 (to the extent these numbers aren’t just press hype) shouldn’t occur; they should be spread over the succeeding year.
  4. Exceptionally high single-month bills like those suggested in 3) above should be investigated for their legitimacy—but from the going-in assumption that they are legitimate free-market, high demand/limited supply prices. “Price gouging” is what must be proven.
  5. All utility providers and their suppliers must winterize their systems against worst-case scenarios, with the minimum threshold being a 100-year temperature excursion, sustained for more than “a few” hours. The current winterizing was against only “bad” case scenarios. This winterizing must come solely at the expense of the individual utility, that utility’s customers, and each utility’s supplier(s). The costs should be amortizable over a reasonable period of time, and PUCT should allow the rate increases needed for cost recovery within that amortization schedule for those utilities within its jurisdiction. Other regulators must be required to do the same. The amortization schedules should be those initially proposed by the utilities/suppliers, and the regulators should be spring-loaded to accept them, rejecting a particular schedule only for concrete, measurable cause(s).
  6. Utilities with out-of-state suppliers that can’t or won’t comply with 5) above should be encouraged to find Texas-domiciled suppliers with which to replace them. Failure to find substitutes should not absolve the impacted utility of its responsibilities or liabilities related to energy/water supply so long as they are making concrete, measurable, publicly viewable ongoing efforts to find Texas-domiciled replacements. The Texas government should support the search efforts with its own research facilities, but not with taxpayer funds.
  7. Eliminate energy subsidies—both renewable and hydrocarbon

Some Questions

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…I have.

As the coronavirus raged across Boston over the holiday season, the medical director for the city’s [Boston’s] Public Health Commission was working 5,000 miles away in Hawaii.
Dr Jennifer Lo acknowledged this past week that city officials gave her permission to re-locate her family to Hawaii last November so she could care for her elderly parents. She plans to return to Boston this summer.

Lo is a contractor, not a city employee, and so not subject to the city’s you-gotta-live-here requirement, but that doesn’t mean her Medical Director duties didn’t need to be met in situ. Those are city needs, not phone ’em in tasks.

Thus, I have questions.

Why couldn’t her husband, alone or accompanied by the rest of her family, relocate to Hawaii to care for both sets of elderly parents?

If her parents were in such dire need, how is it that she can return to Boston so soon—and by coincidence, in Boston’s summer weather?

If Lo were serious about her concerns for her ability to honor her city Public Health Commission duties from Hawaii, why didn’t she go ahead and resign instead of merely offering to do so and seeing what the Commission would say? Related, had she precoordinated her offer so she knew what the commission would say?

There may well be serious, legitimizing answers, but they aren’t being articulated.