Tag Archives: regulation

Biden’s Attack on Our Oil and Gas Industry

Posted on by
Reply

President Joe Biden’s (D) and his Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate’s hatred of our oil and gas production industry is well known, and he wants to include $6 billion in additional taxes, fees, and fines on those industries in their reconciliation bill.

But those penalties also will explode the cost of a myriad products Americans use, and destroy the availability of too many others—all beyond such petty uses as fuel for our getting to and from work, or heating our homes in winter and cooling them in summer.

Here’s a partial list of those other uses to which our oil and gas production is put. The full list would run to some 6,000 products.

  • asphalt and road oil
  • components for producing chemicals, plastics, and synthetic materials
  • electronics
  • luggage
  • office supplies like ink and pens
  • computer chips
  • paint and paint brushes
  • floor wax
  • safety glasses and regular eye glasses and contacts
  • linoleum
  • caulking
  • roofing
  • curtains
  • electricians tape
  • fertilizer
  • insecticides
  • tires
  • mops
  • rugs and carpets
  • toilet seats
  • pillows (down-filled are much more expensive)
  • upholstery
  • refrigerators
  • dishwasher parts
  • rubbing alcohol
  • aspirin and other medicines
  • heart valves and other medical devices
  • bandages
  • anesthetics
  • surgical masks (never mind their claimed need for Wuhan Virus protection)
  • dentures
  • antiseptics and hand sanitizers
  • antihistamines
  • cortisone
  • artificial limbs
  • clothes
  • hair tinting and dying
  • perfume
  • sunglasses
  • lipstick
  • purses
  • shoes
  • roller skates
  • shampoo
  • deodorant
  • toothpaste and soap
  • balloons
  • tents
  • fishing rods
  • footballs
  • football cleats and helmets
  • golf balls
  • parachutes
  • telephones
  • cameras
  • candles
  • drinking cups

Of course, Progressive-Democrats know all of this. They also know that wind, solar, even nuclear sources will produce none of these.

Intrusive Government

Posted on by
Reply

President Joe Biden (D) wants to make climate change a matter of government regulation in our nation’s financial sector.

Calling climate change a systemic risk to the financial system, the White House will release a report Friday outlining its strategy for new rules that could affect investment disclosures, insurance policies and home loans.

And

[T]he US needs “a road map for measuring, disclosing, managing, and mitigating climate-related financial risk across the economy.”

No. To the extent global warming (let’s stop hiding behind euphemisms) is a risk to our nation’s financial system, it’s a risk best handled by those who are actually expert in handling risk and the impact of risk to us citizens: our financial institutions operating in a free market, and us citizens making our own decisions regarding the risks each of us individually choose to run or not run and the impact of those risks on our individual lives.

Government can only make one-size-fits-all moves, whether nationally or regionally—it cannot tailor its moves down to the level of individual businesses, much less down to the individual.

Gina McCarthy, White House National Climate Advisor, rationalized:

This road map isn’t about protecting our financial system. It’s about protecting people, their paychecks, and their prosperity[.]

Again, no. This “road map” has nothing to do with that. In the first place, we don’t need protection beyond what we can, and should, do for ourselves in a free market. In the second place, it isn’t Government’s role to protect us from the vagaries of free markets; Government’s role is only to provide a stable economic environment in which our free market can operate. Government does that best with minimal regulation, minimal intrusion, into our markets.

Inconsistent, or…?

Posted on by
Reply

Have vaccine proof, will travel.

The Biden administration plans to lift travel restrictions for international travelers…who will need to be fully vaccinated and show proof of vaccination.

No, it’s duplicitous of the Biden-Harris administration. Illegal aliens can stream across the border with or without vaccination, but honest travelers are restricted to proof of vaccination.

Dismissive Disingenuousness

Posted on by
Reply

Recall that some Alaskan-harvested fish, 26 million pounds of them, had been stranded in eastern Canada, just a few hundred yards from American fish-processing plants, because President Joe Biden’s (D) Customs and Border Protection managers threatened $41 million in penalties on fish handlers if those fish moved down a 100 yard railroad line into Maine, as the Jones Act explicitly allows.

Biden’s CBP managers decided that those 100 yards didn’t satisfy the Act (or Biden’s and those managers’ whims) after decades of the ride having been entirely satisfactory.

Federal Judge Sharon Gleason issued a temporary injunction against those and any further CBP penalties, allowing the fish to move.

What’s telling about this incident, though, is this statement that the Biden-Harris administration argued in court [emphasis added]:

…an injunction wasn’t needed, because food supply chains had already begun to adjust. “Within days of CBP issuing notices of penalties in this matter the movement of Russian-origin frozen seafood from the Bayside facility began.”

Maybe this isn’t dismissiveness or disingenuousness. Maybe it’s more of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s collusion with Russia.

Anti-Business Anti-Freedom Left Strikes Again

Posted on by
Reply

Their latest assault comes from left-of-the-west-coast Los Angeles.

The city of Los Angeles will begin requiring most people to provide proof of full COVID-19 vaccination before entering a wide variety of indoor businesses including salons, restaurants, gyms, museums, and theaters.

Alternatively, those with medical conditions that do not allow them to be vaccinated, or those with sincerely held religious beliefs that prevent them from being vaccinated, will be allowed to enter on presentment of a negative Wuhan Virus test done within the prior 72 hours (whose definition of “sincerely held?”). Never mind that the cost of such a test starts at $20 and that the median cost is $127. And you thought the costs at the theater concession counter were high. How’s that blowout or updo at the salon sound now? The testing requirement looks like it’s going to swamp that dinner out you thought you were going to enjoy with the family.

Notice, too, that many—most?—of the businesses in these categories are small businesses, mom-and-pop businesses, low margin businesses.

This isn’t only an assault on American businesses and American business owners, though: it’s also an assault on Americans qua Americans.

It’s a demand that we citizens give up our medical privacy and proclaim to the world what our medical status is, using only the Wuhan Virus situation—which is on the wane—as an initial step to expose all of our medical privacy.

It’s more than that, even. This vaccine mandate, and others like it, are a demand that we citizens give up an essential liberty—a liberty over which we’ve already fought one civil war—our control over our own bodies. It’s an essential liberty that the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party are trying to take away from all of us this time, not just a minority which they held and hold in contempt.