Back To The '70s?

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, April 23, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Oil Shock: When it comes to energy policy, Democrats always talk a good game. But look at their actual record while in control of Congress in the last year and a half. It's been nothing short of disastrous.

Wasn't it two years ago that then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi vowed, if her party took over Congress, to cut energy prices — especially gasoline?
"Democrats have a common-sense plan to help bring down skyrocketing gas prices by cracking down on price-gouging; rolling back the billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies, tax breaks and royalty relief given to big oil and gas companies; and increasing production of alternative fuels," Pelosi wrote back in April 2006, as part of her efforts to convince Americans to elect Democrats.
How's that working for you? As the chart below shows, the cost of energy — measured by the price of West Texas Intermediate crude — is up more than 70%.
Under Pelosi's "common-sense plan," Congress has achieved nothing. Actually, less than nothing, considering that what little has been done has hurt, rather than helped the U.S. to become more self-sufficient. This year alone, we'll spend $431 billion to buy 3.7 billion barrels of imported oil to run our economy. And in so doing, we are enriching some of the world's most unsavory regimes.
Ironically, we have plenty of oil — at least 10 billion barrels in Alaska's National Wildlife Reserve, 30 billion or so offshore and a whopping 1.2 trillion in Rocky Mountain oil-shale. But Democrats' extreme green ideology keeps us from drilling for it.
Clean coal technologies likewise have been put out of bounds. So is the most logical answer to our energy problem — nuclear power plants that can be run safely with spent rods reprocessed. France already does this to meet 80% of its energy needs.
Democrats have focused instead on an insane global warming plan that would cost $1.2 trillion. Subsidies and other breaks for biofuels have helped send food prices soaring.
It would be nice to say they've learned their lesson, but they haven't. Instead, they've gone on a shrill campaign to vilify American oil companies, holding kangaroo hearings in Congress to embarrass CEOs who work hard to bring us more energy.
Just Wednesday, Pelosi sent a letter to President Bush, urging him to look into OPEC price-fixing, to punish "price-gougers" and to end tax breaks for oil companies and use the money to invest in questionable alternative energy schemes.
Excuse us, but that's pretty much the plan congressional Democrats have pursued for a year and a half with zero success. As in the 1970s, this is a human-made crisis — one that has solutions. But it's the Democrats, along with a few equally misguided Republicans, who steadfastly refuse to implement them.
For this reason if for no other, none of them deserves re-election.
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