The point I’m trying to make here about all this is that all of this debt that people have taken on, the government, financial institution, banks, all these with high leverages, 30-to-1 debt ratio, I mean it’s absurd to have only one dollar on hand for every 30 dollars you owe, that’s going to come home to roost someday, it elevates the price of houses, it elevates the price of every good and service.

When you go buy a car, you’re really not buying a $35,000 car, you’re buying whatever monthly payment you could afford. When you buy a house, you’re not buying a $250,000 house, you’re buying a mortgage with the monthly rate you can afford, and the house is not yours for 25 or 30 years, depending on the length of the mortgage.

If everything was priced in such a way that you could only buy it if you paid the full price, I guarantee you the price of everything would be lowered. Now, there are exceptions, obviously. People cannot go out and buy houses by writing a check, and most people can’t go out and buy cars.

Debt’s a good thing. I mean it’s using other people’s money for development, to increase the quality of life is fine, but when debt extends to buying debt to buy more debt so that with that debt you can buy more so-called securities, which, the last thing they are these days is secure, this just has a rollover yo-yo effect here that elevates the price of everything, so that when you do break your leg or you do have something catastrophic, you’re out of luck, there’s no way you can pay for it.

But 50 years ago people could.

Forty years ago people could, before the government got involved.

The problem here is not insurance companies. The problem is people who don’t pay and government who makes up for it by taxing everybody else and hospitals who have to raise their prices.

Basically, I’m a pick ’em up by the bootstraps kinda person, and you think you hear me say “let everybody fend for themselves come hell or high water”?

No. Quite the opposite. I think that those in this country who are capable should be left alone to reach whatever height they choose.

If you want to have a life where your income is $20,000 a year, that’s your business and fine. Don’t blame anybody else when you don’t earn $30 or $40 if you’re satisfied with $20.

At the same time, I think that the notion here that people’s lives are improved, their self-love, their self-appreciation is enhanced by their achievements. If you just give capable people things, they’re not going to achieve it, they’re going to come to expect it and they’re going to reach a comfort level at some point that will limit them further in working on their own behalf, but they’re also going to resent the fact that a lot of people have more than they do because they think the system is rigged when it isn’t.

There are plenty of people in our society who are sick, who are, for whatever reason, incapable of helping themselves. We’re a compassionate people, and I and a whole lot of other Americans will go out of our way to help our fellow citizens who literally can’t help themselves.

What bugs a lot of people is to see entirely capable people give up on life and decide to become dependent on whatever their elected official or government can do for them, because we look at that, and I look at the people in government as helping to destroy those people’s lives.

See, I believe we all only get one life. We all only get one chance. And it’s so precious. We’re so busy living our lives, we don’t stop to think how fortunate we are to be alive and what that means. We’re too busy.

We live our lives in the greatest country on earth, a country that offers and has since its interception, more opportunity, more freedom, more prosperity than human beings in history, any human beings in history have ever known. It is simply unnecessary for Americans to check out. It is unnecessary for capable Americans to give up. It is unnecessary for capable Americans to feel down on their luck as Americans because everybody has bad luck.

But if there’s one place on this planet where bad luck can be turned to good fortune with a little action, it’s the United States of America. Be thankful you don’t live in Cuba, be thankful you don’t live in Venezuela, be thankful you don’t live in Russia, be thankful you don’t live in the Middle East.

You live in the best place on earth. Genuine achievement through work is one of the most self-rewarding things. It is where many people really take their identities, from their work, what they accomplish, their passions, their desires, what it is they do and go out and do it, and they make things for other people, they invent things for other people. They perform services for other people. And they try to do it, those that really succeed, to the best of their ability.

Now, I don’t have resentment for those who aren’t trying. I have pity. And I also don’t entirely blame them. Many of them have been told by Democrat liberal politicians for decades that the deck is stacked against them in this country because they’re either black or they’re women or they’re some kind of minority or what have you, and that evil, rich Republicans and white people or whatever other kind of successful people you’re talking about, are preventing them from getting where they want to go. This country will permit anybody to get where he wants to go if that person has stick-to-itiveness, has a little dose of realism and understands it isn’t going to be easy and there’s going to be a lot of unfairness along the way, but there are going to be tremendous rewards, too.

But if you believe in a political philosophy that says your chances are nil, you really don’t have any hope, the country’s best days are behind it, and the only way we can make things fair is to take from those who have unfairly achieved more than others. They’re asking you to be made happy by the suffering of others, not by your own success and good fortune.

I think it’s a crying shame, but it’s reality.

It’s a crying shame we’ve gotten to the point where. For example, you have a car wreck, and you break your leg, and you have to go to the hospital and you have to stay there for a couple days or weeks depending on how bad it is, that you can’t afford it, but there is insurance for it now, the insurance is high priced, as we all know. Most employers, people think, are paying for it, but you have to realize you’re paying for everything you get. You just don’t see a lot of it. You’re paying for your benefits package at work. You just never see it. I’ve long contended that if people were given the full boat of what they’re paid in the form of salary, then you go buy your health care and then you go buy this and whatever the company is providing for you, I guarantee you that happening in mass nationwide, all that competition for services, prices would come down.

We’re going the wrong direction here. We’re talking about nationalizing health care. Obama wants to make sure that everybody’s ensured and that everybody gets coverage, with the illusion that nobody’s going to be paying for it.

You are going to be paying for it and so am I.

But despite this recession, we’ve got more opportunity than 99% of people in the world here.

Our domestic oil companies are huge within the context of the continental United States — well, including Alaska and Hawaii, but in terms of the world, they’re tiny. They’re among the smallest oil companies out there.

“US Senate Republicans have blocked a Democratic plan to tax the windfall profits of the largest oil companies. Democrats on Tuesday failed, 51-43, to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican delaying tactic on the energy package, and bring the bill up for consideration. Democrats said the huge profits enjoyed by the largest US oil companies should be reined in with motorists paying more than $4 a gallon (0.64 per liter for gasoline and oil prices soaring well beyond $100 a barrel.) But Republican critics said higher taxes on oil companies would increase — not lower — gasoline prices.”

Look, Jimmy Carter did this. Jimmy Carter, windfall profits tax on the big oil companies during that four years of malaise, and you know what happened…

Jimmy Carter did his windfall profits tax, and the oil companies said, “Okay, fine, we’ll stop producing as much in the United States. We’ll lower our production so we’re not paying taxes,” and that’s exactly what happened. They cut back production domestically. They went back and produced more in their offshore properties and tracts.

The Democrats know this.

This is not about revenue, it’s not about oil; it’s about punishment. It is about punishing risk takers. It is about class envy. It is about punishing people who then have success after taking a risk.

It’s like the minimum wage. They raised the minimum wage, it’s one of the few achievements that Nancy Pelosi had. And so we got the most recent unemployment report, 5.5%.

And of course, all hell broke loose on Wall Street, and everybody was panicking. Bbut very few people put together the fact that this new increase in the minimum wage rate combined with a flooded job market of both high school students and college graduates is what led to the 5.5% employment number.

Jerry Bowyer was posted a piece at Townhall.com called: “What the Media Didn’t Tell You About Friday’s Unemployment Spike.”

“It wasn’t Bush, it wasn’t greedy corporations, or free trade, or history’s most over-predicted recession. It was not the oil companies, income inequality, or the excesses of cowboy capitalism. None of these things caused the unemployment rate to jump a half a percentage point in one month. Ask yourself a few questions: Why did unemployment surge at a time when unemployment compensation claims are historically low? More to the point, how could unemployment spike this much without a coinciding spike in corporate layoffs?”

If unemployment went up this high, where in the hell were all the people that lost their jobs, is what he’s saying. There weren’t lost jobs and yet unemployment is up a half a point?

“The answer to all of these questions is the same: because very few people lost jobs last month. This huge jump in the size of the unemployed comes from new entrants to the economy — hundreds of thousands of them. In short, well over 600,000 people who were not job seekers in April became job seekers in May. And who starts looking for work at the end of spring? That’s right — students. Hundreds of thousands of students are looking for work right now, and they’re not finding it. Congress is to blame. Last year Congressional Democrats passed the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007, which started a phased hike of the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25.
…
Free market economists warned them that this would increase unemployment — that rapid increases in unemployment compensation hit teens and minorities the hardest.”

You know the percentage of people earning the minimum wage in this country on any given day is well over 50% teenagers. It’s not people who are providing for a family of four or a family of two.

“Rapid increases in unemployment compensation hit teens and minorities the hardest. But the class-warriors are running the people’s house now, and they would hear none of that, so they took to the floor, let loose the dogs of demagoguery, and saddled America’s pizza parlors, municipal swimming pools, house painting businesses and lawn mowing services with a huge cost increase. Now, we see the perfectly logical outcome of wage controls.”

Which is exactly what the minimum wage is. It’s a wage control, and it is an arbitrarily established number that has nothing to do with productivity, experience, qualification.

So it’s a wage control. And the logical outcome of such “rising unemployment among the most economically vulnerable.

Friday’s unemployment spike occurred overwhelmingly among teenagers, and secondarily among African Americans. Just like we said it would. A kid who is at entry level of job skills may be a good deal at 5 bucks an hour, but not at 7.

Our anointed leaders gets to glory in their generosity (with other people’s money) and just so long as very few people in the media know that a demand curve slopes downward (a good bet, there), no one calls them on it. This summer the left will make political lemonade out of a tough student job market. Heck, it may provide a small army of angry unemployed youth to man the campaign, hungry for hope and (loose) change, never once realizing that they’re working to entrench the leftie war on business, which left them jobless this summer in the first place.

The key to understanding this is very simple.

Hardly anybody lost a job in May when the unemployment rate went up half a point, five to five and a half percent. And those who couldn’t find work were the new job market entrants.

What’s all this got to do with price of oil, the windfall profits tax? Because none of this is aimed at actually helping anybody, and it’s typical liberalism, it ends up harming the very people it’s intended to help.

Look at Obama and his predicted, at least he says this is what he wants to do, tax increases. He wants to raise taxes to 39% on people who make $200,000 a year or more. To him that’s rich. Current rate’s 35%.

He wants to take it back to the glory days of the Clinton administration of 39%.

All right, fine and dandy. Well, what’s going to happen here?

Well, how many small business owners, the largest employers collectively in the country, they file their sub-S, Subchapter S corporations, but they file their returns on a personal return, or 1040. So their rate’s going to go from 35 to 39, guess what?

The very people that Obama says, look, I’m going to get even with the rich people for you. I’m going to raise their taxes. I’m going to make things fair. And these people are going to go, yeah, yeah, yeah, you stick it to them. And who gets it stuck to ’em? The guy who loses his job who’s not making $200,000 because his employer has to fire him in order to pay the federal government’s new taxes authored by Obama.

When Congress directs small business, everybody, to raise the minimum wage on a graduated scale up to $7.15, well… small business owners are not going to sit there and say, oh, well, okay, because they don’t have, just like you probably don’t at home, they don’t have an unlimited supply of cash sitting around that they’re not doing anything with. They might have some cash flow, but it’s allocated or it’s there for insurance or what have you.

But if somebody comes along and says, “Look, the four guys you’re paying minimum wage you’ve gotta increase them by X,” one of them is going to lose a job because the business owner is going to do his best not to sit there and lose money, ’cause if he loses money for too long he’s out of business, and then everybody that works there is fired.

This is the incremental loss of basic liberties and freedoms.

All of these well-intentioned people who have convinced way too many Americans that their intentions are honorable and they love people and they’re filled with compassion and yet everything or most everything they try as a remedy to some social problem, not only doesn’t work, it exacerbates the problem.

A year later, NewsBusters has revisited the subject — and guess what? Not only did Gore’s “green renovations” fail to bring energy costs down at his mansion; the former Vice President actually increased his energy use over ten percent! In the last year, Al Gore has used over 200,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity.

That’s enough power to run 232 average American homes for a month.

All the nonsense about “carbon footprints” that Al Gore spouts — all those diatribes urging you to reduce your CO2 output by getting rid of your SUV, changing your lightbulbs or face imminent doom is nothing more than hot air.

Life inside the Gore household is typical do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do liberalism.

With decades of holier-than-thou political posturing, self-promotion, and legions of incompetent journalists acting as his PR army, Al Gore has transformed himself from a run-of-the-mill political hack, to the face of the man-made global warming hoax.

But generations from now, when historians look back, they’ll wonder how a charlatan like Gore pulled off this hoax — and why so many of you fell for it.

Barack Obama and the Democrat Party are out there suggesting that drilling for oil off the coastline of the United States and at ANWR is nothing more than “the failed policies of the past.”

Can I be honest with you and tell you what the failed policies of the past are? In 1988, New York governor Mario Cuomo shut down a nuclear plant. That is a failed policy of the past. In 1996, the delightful, the wonderful, the roguish Bill Clinton vetoed exploration and drilling in ANWR.

That is a failed policy of the past. Both of those are failed policies of the past. Changing from these failed policies of the past would be to un-fail the failures, to dis-fail the failures. Building nuclear plants, opening ANWR — and then we could sue Cuomo and Clinton for malpractice, political malpractice, for gumming up the works.

I’ll tell you something else. How many times have you heard that immigrants made us great? We’ve heard that a lot in the last two years, right?

Well, we hear it all our lives. And nobody disputes that when talking about legal immigration.

But let me tell you what made us greater.

You know what really made us greater? Petroleum. Oil.

I’m not talking about greater as individuals of character. I’m talking about what propelled this country.

It was a number of forces coming together: the establishment of a worldwide Navy, which was not possible without petroleum. Petroleum made us greater. You don’t have to be a Nostradamus; to see that reality will get us off the dime and produce the energy we need.

The only question is sooner or later? Will the left help solve this now or wait until the prices at the polls cause enough voters to throw them out of office, which is entirely possible.

OBAMA: The most optimistic assumptions indicate that offshore drilling might reduce the overall world price of oil by a few cents. So this is not something that’s going to give consumers short-term relief, and it is not a long-term solution to our problems.

The guy is dim-witted! He is just an idiot. He is locked into this position because he’s a leftist, radical Democrat.

Have you ever noticed…? Who is it that really makes things happen in this country? It’s the entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs of all stripes, all sizes, create business of all sizes. They’re a wide range. And who is it that always sets out to punish them and destroy them? Liberals, the American left!

What does Obama want? Barack Obama wants you to suffer. Barack Obama wants higher prices on fuel, right now. Barack Obama wants a windfall profits tax, right now. Barack Obama wants to raise your income taxes, by the way, right now. He wants to raise capital gains taxes, right no right now. He wants to raise Social Security taxes, right now.

Obama wants you to suffer. The Democrat Party wants you in pain. They want you angry, and they are willing to block any remedy to this problem in order to keep you suffering and in pain and ang. Obama wants prices up, he wants your income down, and he wants taxes up.

“The most optimistic assumptions indicate that offshore drilling might reduce the overall world price by a few cents”?

He’s getting that from Chuck Schumer, but Chuck Schumer is contradicting himself. The world’s going nuts here over the fact the Saudis are going to pump an additional 800,000 barrels a day. ANWR would give us a million — and everybody is talking of 30 to 40 dollars a barrel off the market price if we could just add a million barrels.

But nobody is saying cents except the Democrats.

Obama says, “Offshore drilling will only save a few cents; repealing the gas tax, ah, that will only save a few cents; offshore drilling, ah, it will only save a few cents; ANWR, ah, it will only save a few cents.”

Everything is only a few cents. How much does changing your lightbulb save, Obama?

Here’s the Democrat talking point on this. This is Senator Barbara Boxer, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, and Representative Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon.

BOXER: Bet you didn’t know that there are 31 million acres leased in the Gulf of Mexico that the oil companies have not drilled.

MCCASKILL: The oil companies have 68 million acres already under lease they’re not using. So why just give them more acres?

NELSON: We have 68 million acres that can be drilled.

DEFAZIO: Come on, guys! They are not developing what they have now! There’s 20 years’ supply out there! They haven’t developed it!

Well, even if this is true — and it isn’t — could we ask all of you Democrats why? Could it be you? Could it be that there are so many ridiculous, stupid environmental obstacles in their way? Could it be that there are so many taxes weighting upon them put in place by you? Could it be that you are the ones impeding them?

The congressional Democrats are claiming that the oil companies are sitting on millions of acres and are not tapping federal leases they own.

Here are some facts for you on this, and this is from the Institute for Energy Research. Now, the Institute for Energy Research is the energy equivalent of the Heritage Foundation.

The reality is that 97% of federal offshore areas are not leased. “Ninety-seven percent federal offshore areas are not leased. Ninety-four percent of federal onshore areas are not leased. Right now only 15% of the Outer Continental Shelf acreage is even available for leasing. With domestic oil production in the US declining since 2000 to the lowest level since 1947, it is clear that we need to tap more domestic oil.” The oil companies have paid money for the leases they own in addition to an annual fee. So it would make no sense to leave them dormant and not drill for oil or even test to determine what oil capabilities are there, particularly at a time of $130 oil. The companies have every incentive to explore, tap the existing leases that they have.

Nobody is in charge of dropping the price of oil or raising it. Too many market factors really make the price of oil what it is. But theoretically, I assume that, they would be very alarmed if there were much greater supply coming on the market, regardless where it came from because it is going to put downward pressure on the price.

I also think that simply if we did unite and get congressional approval with the president, sign the legislation, yep, we’re going to do this, I do think that it would immediately impact the oil markets in a positive way with a whole lot of confidence because it would mean more supply.

You know, it’s always the lack of supply, of necessity, that causes unease and sometimes panic, it causes disquiet, it causes nervousness. We’re talking about a need here. You know, we’re not talking here about a shortage of paper clips.

We’re talking about a shortage of supply, necessary supply, just to maintain current levels of use and even growth, oil. And that’s going to make a lot of people nervous. If people figure out that the world’s banding together one way or the other to go get more of it, it will have a very positive effect.

Links to series post:

1. OBAMA; the solution to the rising gas prices…

2. Democrats attack failed policies of the past.

3. Simple TRUTH about oil in the U.S.A.

4. Domestic drilling – only to reduce price by a few cents?

McCain went down to talk to Big Oil execs. He gave a speech on energy and conservation. Here is the first of two portions.

MCCAIN: We have proven oil reserves of at least 21 billion barrels in the United States, but a broad federal moratorium stands in the way of energy exploration and production, and I believe it is time for the federal government to lift these restrictions and put our own reserves to use.

All right, all right, all right, drill here, drill now, pay less.

Drill here. Drill now. Pay less.

Folks, this is the issue. It’s not the equivalent of going to the moon, but it is close. This is a goal, a national goal, to become energy independent.

We have the crude. We have the supply. We have it. We just have to go get it. And you don’t get it by sitting around waiting.

You gotta take the first step. In building anything, it takes time. So this is something to rally the people behind. We’ve got the tipping point here, four dollar a gallon gasoline, and it’s going to be great because the Democrats are going to oppose this. They’re going to stand in the way of it. They’re going to be easy to caricature. It will be easy to explain to people. This is not a complicated issue at all. Here’s another McCain qoute.

MCCAIN: He wants a windfall profits tax on oil. To go along with the new taxes he also plans for coal and natural gas. My friends, if the plan sounds familiar, it’s because that was President Jimmy Carter’s big idea, too. And a lot of good it did us.

He’s right about that. It’s accurate, it’s correct, and he’s telling the truth about Obama.

He wants to raise taxes on all these things. The more you tax an activity, the less of that activity you get.

It’s just that simple, proven by years and years and years of human existence.

Here is Obama. This is aboard his campaign plane, he’s trying to paint McCain here as a flip-flopper while he has on his staff the original flip-flopper, John Kerry. Here’s Obama, first of two.

OBAMA: This is yet another reversal by John McCain in terms of his earlier positions, and I think we could set up an interesting debate between John McCain 2000 and John McCain 2008.

Let me help out here, Senator Obama…

If you say no to offshore drilling or drilling in ANWR when oil is at $20 or $30 a barrel, and then you change your mind and say yes to offshore drilling when oil is $140 a barrel, sir, that’s not a flip-flop. That’s just common sense.

It’s like John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist, was asked, “Sir, how come you’ve changed your mind?” He said, “Sir, when the facts change, I change my mind.”

The facts have changed here. Oil is no longer $30 a barrel, it’s $140. It’s now profitable to get the shale oil the president was talking about. This is not a flip-flop.

What we have here, the “No-Drill Democrats“ — are on a crash course not to meet our energy needs. They are in a full-court press to cover their rear ends.

This is almost, not quite, but similar to what’s happening in Iraq. Last year at this time and the year before that, the Democrats were openly embracing defeat, saying our troops couldn’t win, they had no chance, we were fighting an unjust war, we need pull out, we need to lose, and Harry Reid was saying we already have lost.

Now we’ve done a 180 and all of a sudden the news out of Iraq is good, but Democrats don’t dare admit it. Same thing’s happening here with the price of oil, energy independence. They continually are on the wrong side of every major issue facing this country and its growth and its future.

So the Democrats are doing everything they can to cover their rears here, not meet our energy needs. As the law of supply and demand jacks up prices, as more voters realize they’re paying the price for liberal special interests, as the polls swing in favor of more drilling, which they are doing, the last refuge of liberals is always to lie and mislead.

They pop up on television, they smile, they say drilling will not lower prices now.

— Wake up people: Nothing will right now.

DEMOCRAT: There’s not one thing we could do to lower prices right now. ANWR alone won’t make us energy independent for more than six months.

–– Nobody ever said that it would. But I’ll tell you what, just this announcement, just the announcement of this initiative, I’m going to be curious to see what goes on in the speculation market, in the futures market.

I’m going to be interested to see how it affects the overall market.

I’ll guarantee you that if the Democrats ever got wise and went along with this and we lift the executive order that prohibits offshore drilling, you watch what happens to the price of oil, once the world knows that the United States of America is going to go get.

They know it, they resent it, and they fear it, as do the Democrats. Democrats don’t like us being this big. They don’t like us being a superpower. They think it creates victims in the rest of the world; we need to be cut down to size.

This issue fits perfectly.

We could probably have a fairly immediate effect on price just by announcing our intention to start drilling. Democrats are saying that there are drilling leases out there. Is it, what, millions of acres?

Well, the leases are too short-term to allow for EPA rules and test drilling. So then they blame it on Big Oil or Big Speculators or Big Bush or Big Cheney.

They blame it on everything but themselves, and their no-drill, no-refine, no-nuclear-plant policies, and that’s exactly who they are: the no-drill, no-refine, no-nuclear-plant Democrats.

Links to series post:

1. OBAMA; the solution to the rising gas prices…

2. Democrats attack failed policies of the past.

3. Simple TRUTH about oil in the U.S.A.

4. Domestic drilling – only to reduce price by a few cents?