…of President Joe Biden’s (D) and his Progressive-Democratic Party’s war on our energy production industry.
Their war has contributed heavily to our current strong rise in inflation, since energy underlies everything in our economy from industrial production to transportation (shipping and Americans’ travel to/from work) to food, both its production and Americans’ purchases for our families’ tables.
H/t: ralf
Russia has cut off natural gas deliveries to Poland and Bulgaria as Putin prosecutes his invasion of Ukraine.
European officials denounced the move, which threatens the continent’s energy supply, as blackmail by Russia.
This is war. What did these “European officials” expect when they made the conscious decision to create themselves dependents on the energy good offices of an enemy nation? And how could they not recognize Putin’s Russia as an enemy nation, given his years of rhetoric laying out his plans for and goal of restoring the Russian empire that was the Soviet Union—an empire that includes Eastern European nations, many of which are part of NATO, and one of which has been absorbed into a NATO member nation?
Other large European gas consumers like Germany and Italy haven’t been affected so far.
Of course not. Germany and Italy are much more compliant dependents. Germany in particular has been busily slow-walking, if not outright obstructing, weapons support for Ukraine. Never mind German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’ talk about freeing up arms shipments to Ukraine. All he’s done, despite two such rounds of word-based commitments, is talk. No concrete movement, beyond an insultingly puny shipment of helmets, has followed his chit-chat.
Latvia’s Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš is much more clear-eyed on the matter.
This is part of the war; this is how the war affects us. The Ukrainians are paying with their lives, we are paying with higher energy prices.
But, then, Latvia, along with the rest of Eastern Europe, well remember what it’s like to live under Russian jackboots. Central and Western Europe, safe and secure and rich and fat and soft three and four generations after WWII and with all those Eastern Europe nations as buffers for their comfort, have chosen to not remember.
Now consumer companies are looking to get in on the Federal climate tax credit scam, this effort centering on “clean” energy claims.
More than 40 companies, including consumer brands such as Airbnb Inc, Lyft Inc, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co, and IKEA, are calling on Congress to adopt federal energy legislation to provide additional financial incentives for clean-energy projects such as wind turbine farms and solar installations.
And
They called for federal tax credits for developers and suppliers of major wind, solar, nuclear, and energy-storage projects, as well as for electric vehicles and charging-station tax credits, which could benefit company-run fleets.
Here’s a thought—work with me on this; it’s a concept new to politicians and to the Left generally: eliminate corporate taxes altogether (their customers are the ones paying those taxes anyway in the form of higher prices) and lower individual income tax rates to a single, low flat rate on all income regardless of source. Get our tax code completely out of the social engineering business, and tax credits (along with subsidies, deductions, the rest of the froo-froo) become irrelevant.
Businesses and people then could go about their decision-making based on what’s best for each of them without having to worry about what’s best for them from a Government taxing perspective.
Those decisions, naturally, would include businesses’ and citizens’ own assessment of the importance of such things as climate concerns, instead of having those concerns and their spending choices dictated to them by Know Betters.
Now President Joe Biden (D) is trying to block border enforcement by using his Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service to declare the prostrate milkweed to be an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act. In conjunction with this, he’s moving to declare some acreage along the border between two Texas counties and Mexico as “critical habitat” for the plant.
All of that is a naked move to try to prevent Texas from building a border wall using Texas resources, so that Biden-Harris can continue to flood our nation with illegal aliens (who aren’t required to be vaccinated against the Wuhan Virus, even though legitimate travelers and returnees to our nation are so required. See nearby).
This time, though, the Biden-Harris cynicism, though, can be used against him.
If he truly is concerned about the welfare of the prostrate milkweed, then Biden-Harris must take concrete steps to close those stretches of the border in order to keep the illegal aliens from trampling the plants as they come across.
Tennessee’s General Assembly is considering a bill that would indemnify teachers and all other employees of public schools and local education agencies against civil liability or “adverse job actions” if they refer to a student by pronouns consistent with his biological sex rather than by his preferred gender pronouns. The General Assembly’s Fiscal Review Committee noted that the bill
could violate Title IX and would put at risk the state’s federal funding, which for the current school year is more than $5 billion.
That’s the important aspect of this bill, and it has much broader implications for all State-level legislative actions. The $5 billion might seem like a lot of money for a State, but it pales against the long-term cost outcomes of a State accepting any Federal funds under any guise: the more money a State accepts from the Federal government, the more control over its own internal affairs the State surrenders to the Federal government.
The Feds are acting entirely legitimately when they attach strings to the money they provide the States, or to any non-State entity. Anyone providing money to anyone or anything else naturally gets to specify the manner and purpose for which the money is to be used. It’s the existence of those strings, not what they require, that should give States pause in the decision to accept any of the Federal government’s money.
In the end, States that want to retain control of their own intra-State affairs should reject Federal funds transfers—and join with other States in efforts across the legal spectrum to end Federal transfers of State tax remissions to other States altogether except in the event of an emergency declaration. Nor should any exceptions to the bar be allowed: once carve-outs are begun, in very short order, the bar will be so exception-ridden as to cease to exist in any meaningful form.