Daily Archives: 27 December 2021

This Isn’t Ignorance

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The Biden-Harris administration wants our oil companies to produce more because energy prices are too damn high. Never mind that it’s Biden-Harris policies that have crippled American oil and natural gas production and driven those prices so much higher.

The Biden administration says that oil companies face no government constraints on drilling more in the short run, even as it presses the companies to shift long term to cleaner forms of energy in response to climate change.

Which is a complete lie.  Then we get this from Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, via her spokesman:

It’s important for the American oil-and-gas industry to address near-term energy demands while also recognizing that they need to begin transitioning their companies.

How, exactly? The Biden-Harris administration has closed off drilling on Federal lands, it has shut down one major pipeline, and it’s threatening to close off two more.

Oh, wait. There’s this from Granholm, just a few months after she laughed uproariously at a question concerning her plan for boosting our energy production:

Please take advantage of the leases that you have, hire workers, get your rig count up[.]

Leaving aside those lease cutoffs she and her boss, Biden-Harris, have inflicted. That’s not a short-term process; those monies can only be committed for the mid- to long-term. Drilling wells on private land, just like they would have done on the closed-off Federal lands, takes time, equipment, money—and pipelines. And there’s high likelihood that “next year,” Biden-Harris and Granholm will punish those producers for producing so much climate “poison.”

Berating, pressuring, our oil and natural gas producers to produce more after having spent the year berating, pressuring them to cut production, and hamstringing them to ensure they produce less isn’t borne of Biden-Harris or Granholm ignorance.

This is outright dishonesty by those Know Betters in the Federal government.

One More Reason

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The last two administrations have dumped $3.5 trillion of supposed Wuhan Virus relief funds into our economy since the virus situation began in early 2020.

Now we’re learning that almost $100 billion of it has been stolen. That doesn’t seem like a large per centage of the total. However, as numbers have a quality all their own, and while those $100 billion are a small per centage of the trillions, they would have had their own use. Fighting the Wuhan Virus’ entry into our nation via our southern border, for instance, by building more of the wall that Biden-Harris has been so desperate to stop. Generating more—many, many more—of the home tests that Biden-Harris has been lying about producing. Plusing up our police forces so as to reduce the rate of crime that Progressive-Democrats like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) insist are no big deal and that other Leftists insist is justified reparations. Plusing up our military. The list goes on.

In the end, this is just one more reason to not use the Federal government to handle, centrally, such handouts. Instead, make block grants to the States.

That won’t stop the graft of this sort, but it at least would divide the money up across the States so that it would be harder to steal, and the governments making the disbursements would be closer to the problem—and to their constituents for accountability.

Better yet would be to tot up the total of all Federal transfers to each State and roll those into block grants—no strings attached—to the States. Then reduce the size of the block grants each subsequent year by 10% of that first year’s block until no more monies are being transferred to the States from Federal coffers.

After all, those monies, the Federal coffers, are the tax monies sent to the Feds by each State’s citizens. Let each State keep those tax funds in the first place, and eliminate the middle man. Each State will use the money more efficiently and more directly for that State’s citizen needs and wants and not for another State’s purposes.

The Federal government should collect, and use, only that which it needs for the only Constitutionally mandated purposes extant: to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States. That general Welfare, too, is enumerated in (and limited to) the purposes delineated in the next 16 clauses of Art I, Sect 8; the last clause being not a spending purpose but an authorization for Congress to make specific laws for specific spending.