Tag Archive for 'news'

****a post I rescued from the great Google cache *****

More evidence that socialism only works until you run out of other peoples money.

George Will writes about how liberalism and socialist ideas are dragging  California to the verge of collapse. Via the DetNews:

It took years for liberalism’s redistributive itch to create an income tax so steeply progressive that it prompts the flight from the state of wealth-creators: “Between 1990 and 2007,” Voegeli writes, “some 3.4 million more Americans moved from California to one of the other 49 states than moved to California from another state.”

And the state’s income tax — liberalism codified — intensifies the effects of business cycles on the state’s revenue stream: During booms, the stream surges and stimulates government spending; during contractions, revenues dwindle but the new government spending continues. Voegeli says that if California’s spending had grown no faster than population growth and inflation from 1992 to 2006, it would have been $65 billion less in 2006, and per capita government outlays then would have equaled not those of Somalia or Mississippi but of Oregon, which is hardly “a hellish paradigm of Social Darwinism.”

It took years for liberalism’s mania for micromanaging life with entangling regulations to make California’s once-creative economy resemble Gulliver immobilized by the Lilliputians’ many threads. The state, which between 1990 and 2007 lost 26 percent of its factory jobs and 35 percent of its high-tech manufacturing jobs, ranks behind only New York, another of liberalism’s laboratories, in the number of outward-bound moving vans. (emphasis added)

This is something that we understand in Michigan as well. One thing that we, as a nation, need to wrap our heads around is the fact that we need to be a nation that makes things. We need to build cars, refrigerators, washing machines. We also need to be a nation willing to use our natural resources (in sensible ways).

On the other hand, Russia is using their resources as well. They are using them as a hammer. Via Reuters:

Russian oil continues to flow to Belarus and via Belarus to the European Union despite a failure by Moscow and Minsk to clinch a new oil supply deal at talks on Saturday, a Russian Energy Ministry spokeswoman said on Sunday.

“Belarus is holding back the negotiation process. Russia has made unprecedented and very comfortable proposals about duty-free oil supplies…But Belarus is demanding more,” spokeswoman Irina Yesipova told Reuters.

She said she didn’t know if talks would resume on Sunday or next week.

On Saturday, Belarus’ delegation left Moscow, and Minsk accused Russia of ignoring its arguments in a development that will revive fears of supply cuts to Europe, which have already pushed oil prices up.

Russia is working to regain it’s dominance on the world stage and they are more than willing to use oil to do this. They are also working to provide China with large amounts of oil as well.

Russia is also working on gaining power in military affairs as well:

While Russia is using its natural resources for economic growth and power, in the United States, government is using its power against the use of natural resources for economic growth.

New environmental laws being enacted in California are hindering the drilling for oil their state. Via Bakersfield.com:

What worries him most is how much money he (and eventually, the 34-year-old daughter he’s still training) might have to spend to comply with a new law intended to contain and prevent oil spills.

“What they’re going to ask us to do is going to be very difficult financially for a lot of guys. I mean, draining your tanks, electronically surveying them. That’s downtime. That’s a lot of expense. I don’t know,” said McAdams, who owns about 70 oil wells in the state, many of them just north of Bakersfield.

“This I can see could put some people out of business.”

That sentiment is spreading fast among local oil producers, especially the small independents with the least amount of money to spend on facility upgrades.

I thought Liberals were always looking out for the small businessman.

As a side note, if you think “who cares, there is no more oil in the United States, what’s the big deal”:

Giant Oil Discovery In Gulf Of Mexico

A Modest Oil Rush in California

3 to 4.3 Billion Barrels of Technically Recoverable Oil Assessed in North Dakota and Montana’s Bakken Formation—25 Times More Than 1995 Estimate