What hour are we at? I’m sorry; you never end a sentence with a preposition if you don’t have to. At what hour are we? Is anybody even keeping track? Not that I know of. Hour 40? We don’t know.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
I have been referencing the Democrats’ first 100 hours. There is something they are about to do, and I do want to inform you about it and alert you to it. The Wall Street Journal today has a great editorial. They call it “The OPEC Energy Security Act.” That’s the title of the editorial. By the way, keep in mind that as I read this to you the price of oil is now below $51 a barrel. Gasoline prices at the pump are likely to fall even more. I had a friend that was in Minneapolis last week: $1.99 regular. “The average retail price of a gallon of regular gas fell four cents from Friday to Monday to $2.23 according to the AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. Gas prices are down 4% this year.” There are stocks and inventories of crude. OPEC is concerned about it, but here come the House Democrats to save the day from all this. “House Democrats have finally released the details of their ‘Energy Security Bill,’ which will be voted on this week, and they must be cursing their rotten luck. Just when they want to stick it to Big Oil for alleged price gouging, oil and home heating costs are plunging.
“Never mind; this was a campaign theme amid $3 gasoline, and a detail like $2 gas isn’t about to stop Democrats now. This bill is said to promote America’s energy independence, but the biggest winner may be OPEC. This is a lengthy, complicated bill, but the central idea is simple: Raise taxes on domestic oil producers and then spend the money to subsidize ethanol, solar energy, windmills (so long as they’re not on Cape Cod), and so on. But if you increase the cost of domestic oil production by $10 billion, you are ensuring that U.S. imports of OPEC oil will rise and domestic production will fall.” So while the Democrats are out there talking about we need energy independence, their legislation, the House Democrats, would cause just the opposite. “The bill also includes a ‘Strategic Energy Efficiency and Renewables Reserve’ fund for alternative fuels.
“That sounds a lot like the Carter-era Synthetic Fuels Corporation … The Democrats also insist that the big five oil companies have received sweetheart deals from the government that have ripped off taxpayers. So let’s take a closer look. The most controversial issue involves $6 billion in royalty payments that oil companies are said to owe the government for oil pumped from federal waters. The facts suggest otherwise. These were leases for drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico signed between oil companies and the Clinton Administration’s Interior Department in 1998-99. At that time the world oil price had fallen to as low as $10 a barrel and the contracts were signed without a requirement of royalty payments if the price of oil rose above $35 a barrel.”
They’re trying to pinch this on the Bush administration as a sop to their Big Oil buddies when in fact this original waiver, if you will, dates back to Clinton. But the reality here — that whatever is happening in the market is lowering prices at the pump and for crude — is irrelevant. The Democrats are going to go ahead with this. Now, this is one of the things that’s going to meet severe opposition in the Senate. There are even some Democrats in the Senate who don’t want to get anywhere near punishing Big Oil. If you look at average Democrats’ enemies lists — just look at their enemies lists — Big Pharmaceutical, Big Drug, Big Oil, Big Food, Big Fat, Wal-Mart, you name it. Corporate success stories are their enemies list. Capitalism, essentially, is their enemies list. So they are working on this as part of their first 100 hours. I didn’t want to forget that.